>>> Item number 7834 from WRITERS LOG9302A --- (232 records) ----- <<< Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1993 12:03:11 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: SUB: A Japanese Spirit (vers. B, rev. 1) shoot, blast.. I'm not supposed to be this jittery, am I? well, having done the version I shipped out for you to look at Monday, I got to looking at some of the others, and now I'm not sure. I like this one better, it seems more natural, but... it's also quite a bit harsher on Japan. Maybe I'll give him both, and let him decide which one? No, that's not a good idea. If you don't mind, folks (I'm sorry if I'm swamping you...) Take a look at this one, too - and let me know which one is better? No - just throw away that re-hashed guidebook I sent out yesterday. Too much eye on the market, and too little on your writing. This is better, and I'll go with it. Definitely. Maybe. (Scarlett - you think I've got vapors, maybe?) mike ------------------------------------------ A Japanese Spirit (version b, draft 1) copyright M. Barker 1993 2105 words Ask most Americans in America about Japan, and you'll find mixed impressions of kimonos, car factories, martial arts, electronics wizards, sushi, and some traces of World War 2 or Japan-bashing. One of the overwhelming impressions right now is that of legions of factory workers busily crushing the American economy under their productivity. But very few Americans seem to know why so many Japanese men are willing to work long hours, skip vacations, and act like the now world-famous "salaryman" image. To look at that spirit of Japan, I think the best place to start is back in time. As a Japanese friend recently explained to me, he and his wife were sent by his company to America for studies soon after he was hired from college. It was the late '60's, with Americans worrying about Vietnam, college dropouts, and other concerns. But for my friend, what he and his wife remember is that they could buy oranges. Even though it was winter, they were living in Ohio, and they only had student incomes, they could buy fresh oranges. He still gets tears in his eyes thinking about it, but he looks at me and says, "You don't understand, do you? Here in Japan, then, you would have to be a katcho (manager) to earn enough to buy oranges. Those oranges showed me that America was rich, so rich." He's concerned now when he hears people say that America is poor and Japan is rich, because he doesn't want to give up his memories of buying oranges on a student's income. The only thing I can think of to compare with this is my mother's memories of Great Depression shortages when she was a child. But this man is in the age group that makes up the middle and upper management of most Japanese companies. And these are the memories that drive him to work each day. Another part of this spirit is the young men we've just hired from college. They live in company housing, and stay at work fairly late many evenings to earn extra money or zangyo. They often go drinking together. When I talk to them about what they studied in college, it's a mixed bag of odd specialties, and they are puzzled when I ask whether they want to pursue those things at work. One reassures me, "Oh, no. We'll study what the company teaches us very hard, and then do that." And they sit, waiting for me to tell them what to do, in detail, which they copy down carefully and consult often. Trying to teach them to experiment, to go beyond what I show them, is very hard, and bothers them. An amusing example of this spirit can be seen in the middle-aged man at our office who takes the computer printout and carefully adds and crosschecks the numbers using an abacus (soroban). I've asked him why, and he says he was taught to check the numbers this way, and so he still does. He sees no difference between the times when the numbers were generated by people and the computer generated sheets he now checks, except that he never finds any errors any more. Of course, he adds, some men now use a calculator, but he prefers the abacus. One more place I saw this spirit was in the young man at JAL who was asked to test every one of over 100 machines that had been installed. He carefully drew up a checklist, made copies, and started the testing. Days later, with red eyes, he had finished, finding a number of faults our engineers had missed. He had performed the identical test, in exactly the same way, on each and every machine. After our engineers fixed the faulty machines, he then repeated the tests again. No complaint, no skipping a step, and he seemed perfectly content to repeat the tests as often as needed. I often think of another man at JAL who turned up at my desk one day and announced that he was now responsible for a part of our project. I asked him what he knew about it, and he said he had the specification and notebooks from the person who had been in charge before him. He also admitted that he had bought several books in Japanese over the weekend and was studying those. When I asked him if he needed help with any of it, he said he was responsible for it, so he would study it, and then be able to handle it. He had no hesitation about it, and was sure that studying the books would show him everything he needed to know to do the job. A similar spirit was shown to me at KDD one day when I was invited to meet the new purchasing agent in charge of our project. He sat down with a large grin, and laughingly reminded me that he had been an operator in the computer room recently. He said KDD had given him a three-month training course, and he was now in charge of all negotiations and finances on our project. He showed me the notebooks and papers he had "inherited" in taking over the project, and his notes on all the prices and contract terms that had been arranged. Within a week, he showed us that he knew the prices better than our salesman, as he caught him changing the price list while trying to negotiate a new sale. Yet another part of this spirit I saw in the eyes of the young girl who was shifted into my section when the section was formed. She was quitting. She had worked hard on learning programming, and I thought she was better than several of the men. She asked to talk to me, and assured me that she was not leaving because of my training or the work in the section. She said she had planned to quit, then they offered her work in my section, and she stayed for that. She left because she didn't believe there was any place for a woman to go in a Japanese company. She was not sure what she was going to do, but she didn't see any way to do it within the company. When I talked to another manager about it later, he agreed, saying that there was just no path for her at our company. It was better for her to realize that early, he suggested. I also saw this spirit in a young lady who sat beside us at the taxi stand in the train station. While we waited, a taxi stopped behind us and let off passengers, then pulled away. She watched this, then suddenly turned to us and started talking. "This is the right place to wait for a taxi, isn't it? I don't want to wait in the wrong place." We assured her that this was the right place. She continued to watch, obviously worried. When another taxi pulled up and dropped its passengers, then seemed to start past us, she jumped up. "This isn't the right place, he's not going to come here." We pointed out to her that the taxi pulled past and turned around, then drove to where we were. She thanked us, and repeated that she didn't want to do the wrong thing. Even in eating, there is great concern about using the correct seasoning and eating things the correct way. One of the difficult pieces of advice I am often asked about is the "correct" way to use a knife and fork. Since I am familiar with both European and American customs, I usually try to explain both, which mostly results in confusion and an attempt to copy my usage. I've sometimes wondered what would happen if I tried eating peas with a knife, or some other combination that would be considered poor manners in America. Would someone stop me and tell me that isn't what the book said, or would everyone just try to imitate me? This concern about accidentally doing the wrong thing, and the drive to always do the correct thing, pressures the Japanese spirit into detailed planning and practices which seem overly strict to Americans. But when each step is known, timed, repeated and simple, it is hard to make a mistake. I suppose another place that this spirit shows up is in the amateur baseball players who practice near our house on weekends. I am always surprised that even for their practice, they wear complete baseball uniforms. And watching them practice is enlightening, as they put a man on second, then repeatedly practice one play ten and twenty times. Then they move to another play or situation, and practice that several times. And again, and again, most of the day. Actually, the importance of wearing the proper uniforms turns up many places in Japan. One man went on a weekend hiking trip with a group, and he complained loudly about the price. When I asked him just what was so expensive, he explained that he had to buy a hiking outfit, and that made up over half the cost. He didn't expect to take up the hobby, especially, but even to try it once, he had to buy the right clothes. In golf, tennis, volleyball, even when relaxing at a hot springs resort, having the correct outfit is a key part of the event, at least for most of the Japanese I know. The idea of wearing everyday casual clothes somehow reduces your seriousness about performing correctly, almost as much as failing to study one or more of the guidebooks to your sport or hobby would. And in trains, coffee shops, after lunch, you can see people busily preparing to relax correctly. One of my hobbies is sketching, but there is a problem. If I happen to be noticed in public, sketching in my small pocket pad, people often ask me what I'm doing. When I explain, they usually look at me, and at my pad, and at my clothes, then wander away, looking back frequently. Sometimes they follow me around, trying to see what I'm really doing. I've watched, and a properly equipped sketcher, with large art pad and clothes suited to the role, is identified at a glance and left alone. Aside from being a gaijin, I'm not dressed properly, and I don't have the requisite equipment, so I can't be sketching, even when they've seen the picture I'm working on. I wonder sometimes what they imagine I'm doing. Of course, I'll always remember our neighbor in Tokyo. One morning I happened to be in front of our apartments early, and saw him come out of his house to pick up the newspaper. He nodded hello, got the newspaper, and went back inside. He was nicely dressed, white shirt, tie, suit coat, and his long underwear. No suit pants. When I mentioned this to my wife, she explained that many older Japanese men get dressed all except for their suit pants in the morning. This lets them sit on tatami floors and other spots without damaging the crease or wrinkling their pressed suit pants. They put those on just before they leave for the office. I later saw the neighbor several times in the same semi-dressed situation, and he was always quite cordial about saying good morning while he fetched his morning paper. Several men since have told me that they do this, and at least one says that when he was tired one morning, he made it all the way to the train platform before he realized he had forgotten to don his trousers. When I think of a society that was practically without resources at the end of World War 2, only 45 years ago, and has become one of the leading economic powers since then, and the kind of shortages that lead my friend to remember with fondness buying oranges on a student's income, then the seeming harshness of this work spirit makes more sense. There is talk of change, of longer vacations and less work, but the specters of past shortages still haunt this spirit of Japan, and push it to attempt a kind of perfection. Of course, this spirit sometimes is too tired to remember its trousers, but that's just part of the price to be paid for being able to buy oranges. ------------------------------------------