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There seems to be a pattern lately of it raining here in Tokyo one day every week. Well, this week, it was today that it rained. Unfortunately, today is also the day I had to be out the most since I have class from 9:00 to 6:00. I actually have four umbrellas since my family bought them when they visited over my break. Unfortunately though, they are all small umbrellas so when I use them, they don’t fully protect me from the rain.

There are also other times that the rain is troublesome that one doesn’t normally think about. For example, in the morning on the crowded rains. Everyone’s umbrellas are still wet since everyone was just outside rushing to the station, so in the train when everyone is pressed up against everyone else, the wet umbrellas are also pressed up against everyone getting everyone’s clothes wet.

Though there is one good thing here. Every store has a place where you can put your umbrella and they also offer disposable plastic bags made for umbrellas so that your umbrella doesn’t get you or the floor wet. I’m not sure if they do this sort of thing in the United States. If they do, it’s not nearly as widely done as it is in Tokyo. They even had these bags in the buildings at Keio University!

Well, today in my economic class, we watched a video produced by the BBC in the 1990s about the Japanese salaryman and life in large corporations. Although things have changed a bit since that time, there are some policies still in place today. For example, in America, you usually apply for a position within a company. This is not so in Japan. In Japan, you apply to the company and then the company places you in a position. As a result, situations often occur where people are placed in positions that they did not study for at all in university.

For example, my teacher in class today mentioned something about a past student who was an economics major at Keio University who applied to a private train company. His position chosen by the company is to be the train driver. So, now he drives trains which is apparently a high stress job that he is not too happy with. Other cases include people getting placed into accounting positions despite never having taken an accounting course or people getting placed into computing positions despite having little experience in computers.

Since one cannot choose one’s position, people are often initially unhappy with their chosen spot. In the video, they followed one university graduate who studied English extensively and wanted to work in the export department of Fuji Film. He even put this as his top choice for desired department on his form but ultimately, the company decided to put him in sales, a position he wasn’t too happy about. The video followed up with him a few months later and learned that he was working from roughly before 9am to past 12 midnight everyday. Because he had to work so late, he had to take a taxi home every night because he worked past the last train, lol. Also, in Japan, the work week often includes Saturday, so the newly made salaryman in the video had to work six days per week and occasionally had to work Sunday, as well.

According to the video, most Japanese salarymen, on average, spent only 5 waking hours with their families every week. I know from Japanese friends I’ve talked to that this is fairly true because they tell me that they don’t really know their fathers since they were never around when they were growing up. In any case, I think this fact is changing in Japan and workers are being encouraged to go home earlier from work or take more vacations. Apparently in the 1990s, Japanese salarymen received only national holidays for vacation and even then, they were only encouraged to take off from work for half of those days. Since there are 15 national holiday vacation days, salarymen would often take only 8 days off per year.

The video suggested that this amount of time spent at work was the result of work being considered one’s life in Japanese culture. Interestingly enough, when mangagers initially tried to get employees to go home earlier, they would often not go, assumedly because they didn’t know what to do with the extra time with their families. Large companies actually provided courses for its workers as they approached retirement that helped them reconnect with their wives and families. The video showed one class where the company actually contacted the wives of each of the workers and asked them to write a letter to their husbands about the future and life after retirement. One letter they showed the worker reading had the wife saying that it was somewhat embarrassing to talk about these things because despite being married for many years, they had never actually talked about the future or life together.

While I think practices are changing these days due to American business influence after the collapse of the bubble and stagnation of the economy, I think many of these old practices still exist in some form. I often see large numbers of salarymen coming home late at night and when I board the train on Saturdays to go to class, I still see many salarymen going to work. I’ll discuss the old system of companies in relation to the newer American system in a later post.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.