I saw this several times in my first post-college engineering job in America; it's not unique to Japan. I didn't notice the guy in the cubicle had left the com

I saw this several times in my first post-college engineering job in America; it's not unique to Japan. I didn't notice the guy in the cubicle had left the company for about a week, and there were other people who "mysteriously" vanished. It's a company culture thing: this (small) company just didn't bother telling anyone what was going on with other employees. At the big companies I've worked at, this would be unheard of: they always had nice going-away parties etc. They even had going-away parties when people transferred to another department.