Bet you were wondering when I was going to sell-out and use that as a title. Because I have a lot to say, this first post will focus on the work world in general, while my next post will focus on the specifics of what I have been doing.
While I have just now only completed my first week of work in Japan, my recent home-stay in Kyoto could not seem farther away. I arrived at Columbia Music Entertainment (CME) on Monday morning at 10 AM and met up with one of my 10 bosses, Okuno-san, the head of personnel. We took an elevator ride to the 10th floor and sat in a small meeting room with clear glass walls. It was evidently the 10:15 AM feeding show in the Gaijin pen, judging from how many Japanese people stopped dead in their tracks to stare at me. I smiled and waved as I signed release documents with my feet.
I soon received a magnetized keycard that was to let me into the building and all of the offices, but promptly discovered that it didn’t work when I was locked outside of the building, madly swiping my card like the world’s worst secret agent. My chipper Japanese helpers on the 10th floor would later reactivate my keycard and apologize profusely. I also received a Dell Inspiron laptop (running a Japanese OS of course) to do any and all of my work on.
The hanko name stamp that was created for forming my bank account (an account that currently only has 16 Yen in it) was an instant hit at Columbia. I had to use it in the glass walled room with Okuno-san to verify tons of pieces of paperwork. After word got around, Japanese coworkers of all shapes and sizes requested to see it - laughing, studying, and staring at the characters on my stamp as though it featured markings from an alien spacecraft.
Okuno-san gave me a repeat of the same company history lecture that he gave me when I visited several months ago. Founded in 1910, CME is the oldest recording company in Japan and responsible for fostering the nation’s domestic recording industry. CME is NOT affiliated with Sony Music Entertainment. Ironically, Sony owns the rights to the name Columbia Records in every country except their home turf of Japan. Today, CME has divisions that specialize in JPop, jazz, classical, anime and film music, enka or country music, and children’s music. Currently, enka is the most profitable division followed by anime. CME also does a fair amount of distributing DVD box sets of American and British music and releasing independent foreign films on DVD within Japan as well. Their latest film is a piece of Mongolian origin called “Heaven Land.”
Regarding my internship, I will be spending two weeks in the enka division, two weeks in the anime / film division, two weeks in the studio / production division, and finish up with two weeks in the marketing division, before giving some sort of hour-long presentation to the upper management of the company in Japanese.
I am not too worried about this presentation as I have already met the president and all the upper management of the company and they know me by name (I guess it is not that hard to spot the one white person in the company). The president is a visible figure who walks around and pops into the different offices to say hello. He is fluent in English, but the two of us only ever speak Japanese. He told me that he has a son my age who will be traveling to do a study abroad and internship program in New York next year. He told me, however, that his son refuses to speak and study English, and that when he tells his American host family that his father is the president of Columbia Music Entertainment, it will “bring shame to the company.”
Okuno-san and I ate lunch at a nearby fish restaurant – he treated. In fact, I didn’t pay for a single meal this past week while at work. Japanese people are usually afraid that you won’t like their food, so they are always put at ease when I tell them (and make good on the fact) that I will eat anything they give me. So as to gauge whether or not they will be dining opposite someone who will soon create a scooping motion with their three extended fingers while silently mouthing the word “F-O-R-K,” there is always a series of questions from your Japanese colleague as you approach the dining establishment. I always answer yes to all these questions, so I don’t know where the conversation goes if you take the blue pill.
1) Do you like Japanese food?
2) How about raw fish? Is that okay?
3) How about umeboshi (pickled plum)? You won’t eat that!
4) How about natto (fermented soybeans)? You couldn’t possibly like that!
Umeboshi and natto represent what Japanese people believe to be the most trying items for the Western palette. While eating, Okuno-san drew a large square on his napkin to represent the state of California and then created a series of subsequent smaller squares inside the bigger square to represent regions within the state. I stared at the baffling diagram and pointed to a northern square when asked and told him that that was Stanford University. He nodded energetically, pointing to his squares, saying, “Right! Right! knew it was there!”
As we entered the building after lunch, it was time for me to sit at my desk. My desk is located on the eighth floor which houses the enka and anime divisions. I received the vacated desk of Honda-san who was forcibly removed by Okuno-san. I started apologizing to Honda-san as Okuno-san busied himself by scooping up the older man’s belongings and putting them in a cardboard box. Honda-san grumbled as he moved to the other side of the room.
More musical chairs were in order when Boui-san (pronounced “boy” in Japanese – a fact that led her coworkers to turn to me and chant in English “notta girl, notta girl”) moved to the desk across from me. And then, the main event, a white boy with his shiny silver Dell Inspiron laptop takes his seat at the now empty desk and the circle is complete. I’m sure this is the most excitement the office has seen since the compact disk was introduced.
The Japanese work in a pyramid-style team structure. Each division has a bucho or section leader who is responsible for overseeing all the employees underneath him within the division (around 20 people in the enka division). Each bucho is in turn responsible to a kacho or greater division leader. The kacho are responsible to the management, and the management is responsible to the shacho or president. There you have it, a simple pyramid.
Work in Japan is being in an environment that best facilitates the group or team structure. My enka division contains two giant tables that run the length of the 150 foot room. Everyone has a place on the table, with neighbors on each side. There are no cubicles, no walls, and no privacy. You hear your neighbor when they talk on the phone or hum along to the new album they are listening too. The Bucho sits in a floating island table in between the two larger tables and his right hand man (the next highest in command within the section) sits next to him. My current boss is Bucho Shimura-san of the enka division, a short and stout man in his late 50s with glasses and a habit for chain smoking all hours of the day. He waves his hand at me when he wants me to come to his desk and speaks with a heavy Tokyo accent that uses “saaaaaa” every other word. “Saaaaaaaa, Ben, OK saaaaaaaaaaa, I’m gonna need you to saaaaaaaaaaa type this into the saaaaaaaaa computer for me saaaaaaaaaa.”
And now for a few observations about the Japanese workplace:
1) How much do YOU actually work?! In case you don’t know, Japanese people routinely work overtime. This is a characteristic of business in Japan. In many cases this includes coming to work at nine in the morning and leaving at 10 PM at night or later. Indeed, during my first two days at work, I was working live music events and didn’t get home till past midnight. Oftentimes there is an unspoken cultural-based sense of obligation that one must not leave the office until the Bucho has gone home for the day.
What one finds despite these insane hours, however, is that Japanese productivity, while very high by world standards, is not that much more efficient than American productivity or Korean productivity for that matter. This is due to the fact that Japanese people do not really work 100% of the time they are in the office. I would best describe the atmosphere of my office as a permanent sleepover. People walk around, visit friends on other floors, gossip at the coffee machines, and crowd around someone’s desk to watch a funny internet video off of YouTube. When your body gets tired, why not stand up and do calisthenics in place. If you are bored, whip out a personal MP3 player or game machine to pass the time. This is the type of office I commute to everyday.
2) These people are your family! Many Japanese businessmen will see their company team members more than they will see their actual family. A colleague of mine that I was privileged to drink beer with after the NHK TV show filming I attended told me in English (he was practicing English at the time due to his lowered inhibitions from massive alcohol intake), “My job is devil.” He held his fingers up against his head to create pointy devil horns. When I asked him why he felt this way in Japanese, he told me that he has a wife and two kids (ages 7 and 10), but never gets a chance to see them. He told me that there is only one night a week where he gets home before 11 PM at night. He went as far as to suggest that we should go drinking again on that night. I told him he should go home and be with his family. A Japanese businessman wakes up, goes to work, goes home, sleeps, and does the whole process over and over again.
3) If you don’t have any real job, chances are that nobody else does either! Spending nine hours in front of a desk with nothing to do can get boring. There are only so many times you can check your gmail account or rearrange the Hello Kitty writing utensils in your desk drawer. At first I busied myself with listening to CDs and watching music videos. One of the bonuses about working in a recording company is that they have boxes and boxes of free CDs. Thusly, I have now listened to a full CD from every single enka (country) singer that is on my company’s label. I have also watched several music DVDs as well.
I emailed Shimura Bucho in the middle of the week and politely asked him to put me to work. Nobody in the office seemed to have any problem with the fact that I had nothing to do up till then. As a result of my email, the following day had me hole-punching and stamping budget documents. If this were all I did on a daily basis, I would be pretty upset. Luckily for me however, my job has a whole different side once the sun goes down. You will have to wait for the next post to hear about this!
4) Everyone wants to pet the gaijin dog! Being the first and only internship student that CME has ever had, in addition to being the only white person in the 12 floor office building, I am a visible misshapen peg. I am blessed with the fact that everyone speaks to me and that I function completely in Japanese at work (actually, no one in my current enka department speaks English). I am also blessed with the fact that as the new gaijin pet dog, I have tons of people who want to rub my belly. My dog bones and chew toys come in the form of all expenses paid lunches and dinners nearly everyday, any and all free CDs and merchandise I want, and the opportunity to interact in the entertainment industry on a level that most people never see.
Many coworkers will make time to come and visit my desk everyday, just for the chance to talk to me in Japanese and get to know me. My movie producer friend from Ban-Dai Entertainment brought me a bag stuffed full of limited edition Playstation 2 games, DVD movies, and soundtracks all because I told her I like giant robots that fight each other. I tried to humbly refuse the gift as best I could, but she insisted, saying, “I have tons of this stuff and don’t have any need for it.”
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I have so far found my Japanese work environment to be extremely friendly and welcoming, especially given the fact that I am a complete outsider and that the company doesn’t really gain anything tangible from me being there other than cultural exchange. Rather, I am the one with unlimited gains as I get the opportunity to learn, experience, and operate within a Japanese entertainment business environment. I look forward to coming to work at CME everyday (though I hate riding the packed morning train) and I can’t wait to tell you all about the real fun I have been up to next!
Stay tuned!
B.E.W.
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