Japanese Attitude toward Foreign Workers in Japan

This day has been quite unproductive. I have been sleeping until 10am (got up at 5:30am as usual but went back to bed because it is simply too cold...), reading the news, and tracing my thoughts on bar-hopping and clubbing in a blog post...all this when I instead could have done finished many more job-related tasks that I am now pushing back to tomorrow and the days after. It is true that I practically spent half of the three-day weekend on work, frantically typing away to create documents and send emails, but it seems that the "invisible hand" that push me down to the desk is still not loosening a single bit.

I do tell people that I am feeling this way, and all I am getting is "do not let your workaholic self take away your freedom." While I have made it clear that I am not going to lose myself just because I am now living in a country where social nonconformity is only understood as "craziness," I am starting to think that the Japanese managers, from the top-down, are systematically (and quite effectively) shaming the foreigners into following the strict corporate culture of this country.

For me to keep criticizing the Japanese in such a fashion, however, is not interesting anymore. Whenever the foreigners live in Japan for extended period of time, they should come to realize that the Japanese are not open-minded about accepting foreign ways of doing things. Yet, perhaps it is also important to see this from the Japanese point of view. Aren't we, all the foreigners (with exception of Koreans and maybe the Chinese who get the same kind of crap back home) being completely arrogant and inconsiderate when we expect the Japanese to change their corporate culture to suit us?

In fact, many of us foreigners (including myself) have been so critical of the Japanese that we have simply noted, more or less, that the Japanese corporate culture is the WRONG way of doing global business and that they absolutely DO need to change it if they ever have the chance of succeeding abroad. Yes, it is true that the "global-ness" of the new grads are not respected and it is also true that Japanese service companies have not really succeeded outside Japan, but can those be fully blamed on the Japanese's refusal to change?

Let's try to perceive the same situation from the Japanese side. To them, we the foreigners (especially the English native speakers) are simply arrogant for not trying to adopt to the local conditions in Japan (reminds of what I felt myself when I took a group of Americans to China for a volunteer trip back in college), and that there should be a mutual agreement for change before proceeding (i.e. both sides should change toward the other until hitting some meeting point in the middle)

And at least in the workplace, the Japanese seems to be quietly prodding along with such a plan. Gone are the days when I am often reminded that I should not stay beyond 6:30pm at the workplace and that I should not work on the weekends because it represents low efficiency. Instead, they are now replaced with praises of my showing up at 6:30am and that I am having "full and busy" days. At the same time, it is not uncommon these days for me to be told that I should speak and write Japanese as often as possible.

The Japanese are absolutely scared that the foreigners are using "the need for Japan's globalization" and more basically, speaking English, as a segway for the foreigners to push their home cultures in Japan. In fact, the absolute "I don't give a damn" nonchalance with which most employees, especially those on the bottom in the sales departments, are approaching the subject of studying English (one guy told me over lunch, "yeah, it would be nice if I can speak English, but you know, all my clients are Japanese, so who cares?"), is the ultimate display of hatred toward the foreigners.

In a country where outward emotional displays only exist when people are drunk, a polite word of caution or expression of opinion as such can mean so much. Well, it is a good thing I am becoming more and more able to read into those things (or is it? becoming Japanese in mentality is possibly the last thing I want to do), so I can tell when a polite "you might want to" means I cannot say "no" to that even it means throwing away my weekend. See, Japan? I really do care about how you think!