Managing for Creativity in Japan » Playfulness

Advantages to being Non-Japanese

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:00:02 +0000

“There are advantages to not being Japanese though. You can start jumping up and down and yelling ‘come on!’ but you could not do that if you were a Japanese person. There would be too many rules and obligations. Being a foreigner means that I can break those rules. I’ve been in brainstorming sessions with Japanese people sitting there silently and me thinking that the whole thing is rubbish. In order to liven things up a bit I have been able to say ‘come on, we can do this’ and start getting excited and acting like a cheerleader. And you know what? You start to get results. Maybe they feel that they can talk because it’s not a formal Japanese room.
We’ve done workshops in Japanese with foreigners in the room who spoke fluent Japanese and it’s learning the devices that people need to use – the icebreakers etcetera to get things moving. It’s having that cultural knowledge that the ‘brainstorm’ in the classic sense of the word does not work in Japan. You need to understand what works and what doesn’t work, and how you get the same results but in a different format. I don’t think that a Japanese person would put themselves in the same positions that I do. Sometimes I have seen moderators here, when we have used them to facilitate conversations and I have wanted to go over and shake them and tell them that we’re not getting what we need…that’s a bit frustrating….”

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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail

Ease

Chris Berthelsen — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:00:54 +0000

….there is not that sense of ease in a normal Japanese company. (C: And that’s something that you can offer them?) Yeah, but at the same time we do work really really hard. I’m not sure about whether they would work this hard in a Japanese company. They would probably work longer hours but not do so much. I am trying to reduce the hours, but long hours are inevitable in this business because we are dealing with multiple time zones and we can’t call people in the middle of the night – that’s one of the limitations with being located in Japan, I guess.

Process Focused Behaviour

Chris Berthelsen — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:00:33 +0000

“One thing I have noticed is that while people always talk about how polite the Japanese are I don’t really think that it is politeness. Actually I think that it is formality. It is a process driven way of doing things. There’s a way to drink tea, there’s a way to place your chopsticks on the table, there is so much process in how to do things that the casual observer says ‘how polite’ – but it’s not politeness it’s form. If I was ever to write a paper on human behaviour that would be my particular area of interest. I think that part of the reason behind this might have to do with the fact that so much of the population lives on a very small amount of land, and to keep people from killing each other I think that a lot of these ways of interacting and acting were developed over time (I think if you took the 35 million French that there are and squeezed them all into Kanto/Kansai we would be pulling each other into the streets). Maybe this started in the Edo period where suddenly there was no more war. If you become very process focused then you avoid a lot of aggressive and anti-social behavior.”

On Being Creative

Chris Berthelsen — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:00:35 +0000

“In terms of being creative it’s a bit of a paradox. You come here and it is definitely the most creative place in Asia but that doesn’t mean that it’s creative. People think that it’s creative and crazy but it’s not. It’s not creative. If it was a creative place then brainstorms would be a dream…but they’re not. The problem is that people have an image of Japan as a creative place and then they go to Harajuku and see 200 people dressed up in fancy costumes and think it’s creative. No it’s not. Two-hundred people in a population of 130 million people does not make a creative society. It’s a very small pocket. So you do have creativity but it is very limited, very controlled. It’s not the same sort of “I want to be individual and spontaneous” creativity you might see somewhere else. So whenever I go back to Sydney (and I’m not nationalistic at all) I look at places there and am amazed at how creative it is. People strive to be different, they strive to be an individual, they strive to come up with something that no one else has. Here, people don’t do that. They look at a magazine to study how they can be different…different with another 50 people how are different in the same way. That’s a big difference.
When you go to a cafe it’s a study in creativity. You walk in and think “this is so cute and cool”. Yes, it is but that’s only because the owner has literally, fastidiously made it creative looking. That’s why it stands out against the greyness and the hum-drum of Tokyo. It’s a very ugly city – I mean we’re sitting here looking at a view of the expressway. There are no redeeming features about this and that’s why you go to Yoyogi park and there are a million people throwing frisbees there. It’s the one place where you can have a bit of fun…but then there are a million other people having fun there along with you. You’ve got your one metre square patch and that’s not even a park anymore is it? It’s the equivalent of a carpark for people – they get in there and then they can’t move for fear of losing their space. They can’t throw their frisbee too far because it might hit someone on the head. It’s a funny place.”

****************************************************
This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail