I worked with a group of Japanese scientists and PHD’s in a nano tech lab.
Every Friday night, they would take over Friday’s bar and grill and stay until last call.
They drank all hard liquor. I never saw any of them order food.
It was an unspoken internal rule to just be there or you had some explaining to do on
Monday and could lose your position and get sent back to Japan if you didn’t have a good reason not to go.
It’s revolting. And what’s even worse is that all these people are also expected to be married, too. If they’re not, well, their careers will be stuck in the mud for THAT reason. So their poor spouse will be utterly miserable, either working as a stay-at-home butler to facilitate the saleryman/office-lady’s career, or else staying at home in a different city, while the office worker is in a different prefecture, or on the other side of the globe.
All the bosses know they’re ruining all these people’s marriages (not least because their own marriages are hovering around near-homicide levels of dysfunction), but it’s very important that everybody HAS an unhappy marriage, otherwise it’s out of the ordinary, and being “normal” is the only real thing that counts in that culture.
It’s genuinely surprising that they manage to continue, as a modern nation.
But of course, just to put the crowning punchline on the joke, their corporate culture is STILL less fucking insane than Western corporate culture, because at LEAST their executives are paid far less, compared to the average worker’s salary. I guess the whole concept of treating your employees as your personal drinking-buddy-slaves is compensation for a much less ludicrous pay package, once you reach the top end of the corporate structure.
EDIT: also add in blatant and shocking levels of sexism, racism, and homophobia that also run entirely rampant through Japanese (and Korean) corporate culture.
I worked with a group of Japanese scientists and PHD’s in a nano tech lab. Every Friday night, they would take over Friday’s bar and grill and stay until last call. They drank all hard liquor. I never saw any of them order food. It was an unspoken internal rule to just be there or you had some explaining to do on Monday and could lose your position and get sent back to Japan if you didn’t have a good reason not to go.
It’s revolting. And what’s even worse is that all these people are also expected to be married, too. If they’re not, well, their careers will be stuck in the mud for THAT reason. So their poor spouse will be utterly miserable, either working as a stay-at-home butler to facilitate the saleryman/office-lady’s career, or else staying at home in a different city, while the office worker is in a different prefecture, or on the other side of the globe.
All the bosses know they’re ruining all these people’s marriages (not least because their own marriages are hovering around near-homicide levels of dysfunction), but it’s very important that everybody HAS an unhappy marriage, otherwise it’s out of the ordinary, and being “normal” is the only real thing that counts in that culture.
It’s genuinely surprising that they manage to continue, as a modern nation.
But of course, just to put the crowning punchline on the joke, their corporate culture is STILL less fucking insane than Western corporate culture, because at LEAST their executives are paid far less, compared to the average worker’s salary. I guess the whole concept of treating your employees as your personal drinking-buddy-slaves is compensation for a much less ludicrous pay package, once you reach the top end of the corporate structure.
EDIT: also add in blatant and shocking levels of sexism, racism, and homophobia that also run entirely rampant through Japanese (and Korean) corporate culture.