When I first went and talked to people here they all told me that if I couldn’t speak Japanese I wouldn’t get a job. I asked them if they spoke Japanese and they would always say no. So, I thought that they were either lying to me or they were trying to hold on to their own jobs and were afraid of competition. I found that a lot of people were incredibly threatened by me when I first came. I had never experienced that before because I had always felt that if I was good enough for the job then I should get that job, but here there is only a certain amount of jobs going for gaijin and people really want to hold onto what they have got and they get really nasty. My advice for people when they come in is to be wary of that, first of all.
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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
Because I don’t speak Japanese I was treated pretty rough – everyone was fascinated with me but not fascinated enough to employ me. I think one reason for this was that they couldn’t pinpoint me. They couldn’t say “well you’re a computer engineer” or “OK you’re a this or a that”. What I do is very creative and therefore hard to summarize in a couple of words.
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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
“One major obstacle is that you have to speak the language. If you can’t speak Japanese you better be really good at what you do. You need good personal introductions. You need to prove yourself quite quickly. You need to be there. Also, I think that foreign companies are still viewed with suspicion. There is still a sense of ‘what can someone as a foreigner tell me about Japan?’ I think that is a problem. As a foreigner myself, if another foreigner came up to me and said ‘I’m a marketing consultant, I can do this that and the other’ I would say ‘Well what do you know about Japan?…are you Japanese? ‘no’ Well do you speak Japanese ‘no’….well then what are you basing this insight on?
I don’t speak fluent Japanese but you need to at the very least be able to navigate around an office and understand how protocol and meetings work. At least play the game. You can’t not speak the language and not play the game either. You have to know what you’re doing, for example, turning up for meetings. You might think that the meeting is pointless and that you don’t need to go along but you do…they want to see your face. That’s important. In the West you might get away with not turning up to meetings…you really do have to play the game here.”
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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
“One of the benefits would be that our Japanese staff has the ability to make relationships like no foreigner could, even with all the entertaining and the best Japanese language skills. It’s very difficult for a foreigner to get under the skin of a Japanese person. I would expect (and I think we have achieved) better relationships Japanese to Japanese – that’s what they can do – and as I say, once we have the relationships the business will follow.”
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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
