4 ms·

One of the disappointing/hilarious attitudes you see among forigners in Japan: they really love the high quality service they recieve when they are a customer,

by hsn915 5y ago

One of the disappointing/hilarious attitudes you see among forigners in Japan: they really love the high quality service they recieve when they are a customer, but they also really hate the work culture. I'm like, yea, the two are closely connected: the reason you get a high quality service is because of the work culture. You just like receiving the benefits without paying the costs. I'm ok if you say you can't see yourself workign like that or you're not used to it or whatever. But that's not what I see. What I see is foreginers disparaging the work culture and judging it as morally inferior.

numair 5y ago
100%. I have a friend who calls it the “country club phenomenon” — many foreigners come to Japan to relax, enjoy the “incredible level of service” in Japan, and opt-out of the work culture (which is a combination of both time and effort — there’s more to it than the infamous presenteeism). The so-called “expats” posted here by foreign employers are particularly infamous for this sort of thing, just as it is in so many other non-Western countries.
ryan_lane 5y ago
The level of service you get, for the most part, is only true in the service industry. The people complaining about the working culture are usually in education, recruiting, or tech (because those are predominately the jobs you can get easily as a foreigner without really strong Japanese skills). The working culture in Japanese white-collar jobs is legitimately bad. Japanese people agree, the government agrees, and there's been a trend working on fixing it. The major issues are excessive overtime, and unpaid overtime. The latter is technically illegal, but most companies avoid this by making most employees "supervisors". The government now requires companies to track overtime, and will publicly shame companies that have workers that work >45 hours of overtime a month. The legal cap is 100 hours a month. The overtime work culture doesn't improve anything. For the most part, people aren't actually working most of that time, and almost everyone is burned out. Productivity is very, very low. I think a lot of folks also complain about the senpai/kohai aspect of working in Japan, but to be honest, I haven't experienced this, since most tech companies here don't follow that quite as much as you'd expect, since there's so many foreigners. This is maybe what you're trying to touch on in the quality of service. It's built on the idea of long-time mentorship, but you'd be surprised in that it probably doesn't work the way you assume. It's more of a hazing approach than anything else. The closest analogue that I can think of is the stereotype of interns in the fashion or journalism, where you'd assume they'd be getting training, and tasks related to their career, but instead they're the more senior people's "bitch". They clean toilets, fetch coffee, etc. After working for a year or so, they're given some basic tasks. Again, this isn't a healthy culture and doesn't lead to Japanese companies being actually better than companies in other cultures. Ultimately, people think that Japanese companies work well, but really most Japanese companies simply can't fail, and it's extremely difficult to compete with them. This is because there's really only a couple handfuls of massive companies, pretending they're thousands of small companies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu. Startups are owned by these companies, and they prop up the new businesses by self-dealing. Western work culture is bad in different ways, but Japanese work culture is pretty universally known to be awful, and folks living here mostly put up with it because the rest of the culture makes up for it.

by hsn915 5y ago

numair 5y ago

100%. I have a friend who calls it the “country club phenomenon” — many foreigners come to Japan to relax, enjoy the “incredible level of service” in Japan, and opt-out of the work culture (which is a combination of both time and effort — there’s more to it than the infamous presenteeism). The so-called “expats” posted here by foreign employers are particularly infamous for this sort of thing, just as it is in so many other non-Western countries.

ryan_lane 5y ago

The level of service you get, for the most part, is only true in the service industry. The people complaining about the working culture are usually in education, recruiting, or tech (because those are predominately the jobs you can get easily as a foreigner without really strong Japanese skills). The working culture in Japanese white-collar jobs is legitimately bad. Japanese people agree, the government agrees, and there's been a trend working on fixing it. The major issues are excessive overtime, and unpaid overtime. The latter is technically illegal, but most companies avoid this by making most employees "supervisors". The government now requires companies to track overtime, and will publicly shame companies that have workers that work >45 hours of overtime a month. The legal cap is 100 hours a month. The overtime work culture doesn't improve anything. For the most part, people aren't actually working most of that time, and almost everyone is burned out. Productivity is very, very low. I think a lot of folks also complain about the senpai/kohai aspect of working in Japan, but to be honest, I haven't experienced this, since most tech companies here don't follow that quite as much as you'd expect, since there's so many foreigners. This is maybe what you're trying to touch on in the quality of service. It's built on the idea of long-time mentorship, but you'd be surprised in that it probably doesn't work the way you assume. It's more of a hazing approach than anything else. The closest analogue that I can think of is the stereotype of interns in the fashion or journalism, where you'd assume they'd be getting training, and tasks related to their career, but instead they're the more senior people's "bitch". They clean toilets, fetch coffee, etc. After working for a year or so, they're given some basic tasks. Again, this isn't a healthy culture and doesn't lead to Japanese companies being actually better than companies in other cultures. Ultimately, people think that Japanese companies work well, but really most Japanese companies simply can't fail, and it's extremely difficult to compete with them. This is because there's really only a couple handfuls of massive companies, pretending they're thousands of small companies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu. Startups are owned by these companies, and they prop up the new businesses by self-dealing. Western work culture is bad in different ways, but Japanese work culture is pretty universally known to be awful, and folks living here mostly put up with it because the rest of the culture makes up for it.