A salaryman (transliterated from the Japanese which is itself borrowed from English), more formally a “full-time company employee” (正社員), is the local equivalent of a W-2 employee in America. This is roughly 1/3rd of the labor force in Japan, but it has outsized societal impact.

Traditionally, salarymen (and they are, by the way, mostly men) are hired into a particular company late in university and stay at that company or its affiliates until they retire.

There are other workers at Japanese companies — contract employees, who can be (and are) let go at will, or young ladies on the “pink collar” track who are encouraged tacitly or explicitly to quit to get married or raise children — but the salaryman/employer relationship is the beating heart of the high-productivity Japanese private sector. (The Japanese economy is roughly 1/3rd the public sector, 1/3rd low-productivity firms like restaurants or traditional craftsmen, and 1/3rd high-productivity household-name megacorps. Salarymen are mostly present in the last one, which happens to dovetail with your professional interests.)

The salaryman/employer relationship is best characterized as “You swear yourself to us, body and soul, and in return we will isolate you from all risks.”

The employee hereby promises the company: Your first obligation, in all things, will be to your company. You will work incredibly hard (90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment) on their behalf. The company can ask you to head to a foreign office for three years without your wife and child beginning tomorrow, and you will be expected to say “Sure thing, when does my flight leave?” or accept that your career advancement is functionally over.

The company will mold you to their exacting specifications to do whatever form of service they require. You will happily comply, in this as in all things. For example, if your company needs a Java-speaking systems engineer and you have a degree in Art History, this is not a problem because you can be fixed. Sure it might take ten years and only work on a quarter of the new hires but that’s why we employ you for 45 years and hire a hundred at once! (What of the Art History majors who don’t successfully learn how to edit XML files or architect web applications? Well, they’ll be promoted in lockstep with the rest of their cohort, but tasks which actually require programming with magically route around them, and they’ll end up doing things like leading 6 hour planning meetings and producing spreadsheets. Lots and lots of spreadsheets.)

The company hereby promises the employee: Your company will provide structure and purpose for your life. You will be clothed in the company colors, literally and figuratively. You will be respected, inside and outside the company, as befits an employee of ours. You will be provided with benefits perfectly calibrated to allow you and your family to lead a middle-class Japanese life. Your children will go to as good schools as they test into. Your wife will be able to afford an annual trip to Hawaii with her girlfriends.

You probably won’t attend that trip because, as a salaryman, you wouldn’t want to leave your coworkers in the lurch by taking extended vacations. Your company officially allows you between 12 and 18 combined vacation/sick days a year, but salarymen generally try to hold themselves to about 5, taken in single-day increments. Your company loves you and wants you to be happy, though, so they’ll suggest two days for your honeymoon, two if a parent passes away, and one if your wife passes away. You can take that Saturday off, too, because the company is generous. There, that’s like four full days — five, if you time it with a public holiday.

There exist companies which don’t require their salarymen to work Saturdays. That is considered almost decadent for salarymen — the more typical schedules are either “2 Saturdays a month off” or “every Sunday off!” Even if you’re not required to work Saturdays, if one’s projects or the company’s situation requires you to work Saturdays, you work Saturdays. See also, Sundays.

Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake rather than because it actually accomplishes more productive work. Depending on one’s company, this overtime may be compensated or “service overtime” — “service” in Japanese means “thrown in for free in the hopes of gaining one’s further custom”, so your favorite restaurant might throw in a “service” desert once in a while or you might do 8 hours of “service” overtime six nights a week for 15 years.

At those companies which actually pay for overtime (not uncommon, even for professional salaried employees, even for those who would characteristically be exempt in the US), there are generally multiple rates. I got time and a quarter between 6:30 and 9:30 AM, time and a half until midnight, and time and three quarters after 1:00 AM. That last bracket was there for a reason.

It is highly unlikely that anyone will ever tell you “We need you here until 3 AM. Yeah, sorry, tell you what, take off early at 9 PM tomorrow.” The company is just steeped in an environment which will make this decision seem like the most natural thing in the world to you. To leave early would let your team down. To make a habit of it would cause people to question your commitment to the company and to the important work that the company does. It will become so natural to work salaryman hours that you’ll teach their necessity to junior employees who you mentor, probably without you even realizing you’re doing it.

Don’t have a wife? You might quite reasonably think “I don’t have time to even think about that.” Don’t worry — the company will fix your social calendar for you. It is socially mandatory that your boss, in fulfillment of his duties to you, sees that you are set up with a young lady appropriate to your station. He is likely to attempt to do this first by matching you with a young lady in your office. There are, at all times, a number of unattached young ladies in your office. Most of them choose to quit right about when they get married or have children.

You might imagine that you heard a supervisor tell a young lady in the office “Hey, you’re 30 and aging out of the marriage market, plus I hear you’re dating someone who is not one of my employees, so you might want to think about moving on soon.”, but that would be radioactively illegal, since Japanese employment discrimination laws are approximately equivalent to those in the US. A first-rate Japanese company would certainly never do anything illegal, and a proper Japanese salaryman would never bring his company into disrepute by saying obviously untrue things like the company is systematically engaged in illegal practices. So your ears must be deceiving you. Pesky ears.

The company is your public life. Have an issue with your landlord? The company will handle it, in those cases where the company is not your landlord. (“So let me get this straight: we’re going to pay our employees, and then they’re going to immediately hand 25% of their salary over to an apartment? Doesn’t this suggest an obvious inefficiency? We could just buy a building and house dozens of employees there — lower transaction costs plus economies of scale.” Many Japanese companies have done this math already, and company dorms are quite common, particularly for young, single employees.)

Need to file paperwork with City Hall? Someone from HR can do it for you. Salarymen don’t file tax returns — the National Tax Agency and HR work out 100% of the paperwork on their behalves. Insurance? Handled. Pension? You’re sorted. Immigration, for those very rare salarymen who are also foreigners? Your CEO has written a letter to the Minister of Justice for inclusion with the paperwork that HR has put together, and you won’t even have to carry it into the office.

The company is your private life. All friends you’ve made since your school days almost by definition work for your company, because you spend substantially every waking hour officially at work or at quote leisure unquote with people from work. When you get off work rather early, like 7:30 PM, you’ll be strongly encouraged to go out to dinner and/or drinks with bosses, coworkers, and/or business acquaintances. (The company is buying, either directly via an expense account or indirectly via a “The most senior person pays and their salary has been precisely calibrated to accommodate this” cultural norm.) Like karaoke and golf? Wonderful, you’ll have an excellent time with the other salarymen, who have either perfected the skill of liking karaoke and golf or seeming to like karaoke and golf when invited out by colleagues.

We’ve mentioned that your company considers it its responsibility to see you appropriately married. That is not the sole way in which the company may try to arrange companionship, but let’s table that issue for the moment. When you get married, your boss will give the longest speech at your wedding, praising your diligence on that last project and bright future with the firm. Perhaps eight or so coworkers will show up. They’ll also take up a collection for you if a parent should pass away, come visit if you’re hospitalized, and offer to intercede if you should have trouble with your wife or children. You are, after all, one of the family.

Lifetime employment is somewhat on the outs in the last 20 years or so, but it is still a reasonably achievable thing in 2014, and an expectation that many Japanese folks quite literally structure their entire lives around. An offer of employment as a salaryman, while theoretically instantiated as a e.g. three year employment contract with “renewal upon mutual agreement”, is (practically speaking) a promise that one will be promoted on a defined schedule for one’s entire working career.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4764781&forum_id=2#41935646)

Lifetime employment is somewhat on the outs in the last 20 years or so, but it is still a reasonably achievable thing in 2014, and an expectation that many Japanese folks quite literally structure their entire lives around. An offer of employment as a salaryman, while theoretically instantiated as a e.g. three year employment contract with “renewal upon mutual agreement”, is (practically speaking) a promise that one will be promoted on a defined schedule for one’s entire working career."

sounds 180

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4764781&forum_id=2#41935679)

That famous Asian IQ is clearly on display.

I RIKEA SARARYMAN

I RIKEA SHEE MY PAMIREE ON SUNDAY

HARR HARR I A WHITEUH SUPLEMACISTUH HARR HARR

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4764781&forum_id=2#41936021)

Tokyo attorney Shinji Nakagawa, 32, took his own life last year when his client insisted on settling his case rather than risking a lengthy court battle. Humiliated by his client's lack of confidence in his abilities, Nakagawa disemboweled himself with a sword before jumping in front of an approaching train.

"Japanese attorneys take their cases very seriously. To lose a case is to lose everything. It is very hard for Americans to understand this," said Makato Harayama.

http://yahoonews.com/japanese-lawyers-choose-death-before-dishonor-4687965431-htm

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4764781&forum_id=2#41936344)

> The Personal Touch

Doing business with Japanese companies frequently resembles It’s A Wonderful Life. “Customer relationships” are not an empty phrase — many business relationships where one is approximately equivalent to a row in the database in the United States are, instead, expected to be relationships between two actual people.

This is occasionally exasperating, as a software person who doesn’t want to have to take someone drinking to sell a single SaaS account, but it is occasionally quite charming. *Moving to Japan, particularly small-town Japan, was like visiting an old America that I had heard stories about but had never gotten the opportunity to experience.*

For example, when I first came to Japan, I had no computer. I also had no money, because the plane ticket and setting up my household ate all of my savings. In America, this isn’t a barrier to getting a computer, because Dell will do a quick FICO score on you and then happily extend you $2,000 of trade credit.

Dell Japan, on the other hand, set me up with two phone calls with actual human underwriters at two Japanese financial institutions. Both had me fill out rather extensive forms (100+ questions — seriously). The first said “In view of your length of tenure at your employer and length of residence at your apartment, we don’t feel that your situation is stable enough to extend you credit.” The second said “Look, umm, officially, I am supposed to just tell you that we decline your business and wish you luck. Unofficially, the bank doesn’t extend foreigners credit, as a matter of policy. You’ll find that is quite common in Japan. I know, it is lamentable, but I figure that you’d be able to save yourself some time if you knew.”

So I gave up for a while, but mentioned to a coworker later that week that I really wanted a computer to be able to Skype home. He said “Come with me” and we left, in the middle of the work day, to visit a bank. It is a smaller regional bank in Gifu. I’ll elide naming it to avoid the following story being personally identifiable, but suffice it to say it is a very conservative institution.

My coworker got a credit card application and asked me to fill it in. I did so, but told him “Look, two Tokyo banks, which are presumably about as cosmopolitan as Japanese financial institutions get, just shot me down. One of them explicitly did so because I’m a foreigner. The chance of this middle-of-nowhere bank accepting a credit application is zero.”

“Don’t worry, I know the manager. Hey, Taro!”

Taro and my coworker had gone to school together.

“Patrick here just started working with us. He wants to buy a computer to call his parents, diligent son that he is, and needs a credit card to do it. Here’s his application. Make sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, OK?”

Some weeks passed, and I assumed that I had been denied. Then there was a knock on my door early one Saturday morning.

It was bank manager Taro and an older gentleman who introduced himself as the Vice President for Risk Management of the bank. He promptly took over the conversation.

“You have to understand that we’re not one of those banks. We’re not some magical pot of money. Every yen we have is a farmer depositing against a bad harvest or a retiree’s pension, carefully husbanded over a lifetime. That is a sacred trust. We cannot lose their money. The bank has to be appropriately careful about who we lend that money to. Taro here tells me your trustworthy, so that is good. Even trustworthy young men sometimes make poor decisions. I need to know you won’t, so before I give this credit card, I have three questions for you.”

“Will you ever use this credit card to gamble?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Will you ever use this credit card to buy alcohol?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Will you ever give this credit card to a woman who is not your wife?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Think darn hard before giving it to your wife, too. OK, you pass muster. Sign here.”

That was the first of a dozen stories which you wouldn’t believe actually happened about that bank. Taro correctly intuited when I started dating a young lady, and when we broke up, solely based on on my spending habits. He considered that part and parcel with looking out for my financial interests.

Taro stopped me from doing a wire transfer back to Bank of America to pay my student loans during the Lehman shock because Wachovia had gone into FDIC receivership that morning. I told Taro that I didn’t have an account at Wachovia. Taro said that he was aware of that, but that I used Lloyds’ remittance service to send wires, and Lloyds’ intermediary bank in the US was Wachovia, which might or might not be safe to have money in at the moment. I asked Taro how in God’s name does a banker in Ogaki, Japan happen to know what intermediary banks Lloyds uses in North America off the top of his head, and Taro said, and I quote, “There exists a customer of the bank who habitually makes USD wire transfers using Lloyds and, accordingly, it is my business to know this.”

Taro called me on March 12th, the day after the Touhoku earthquake, to say that he was concerned about my balance in the circumstances (I had cleared out my account to pay a tax assessment minutes before the quake) and, if I needed it, to come down to the bank and, quote, we’ll take care of you and worry about the numbers some other time, endquote.

Taro eventually retired from his position, and as part of making his rounds, gave me a warm introduction to the new bank manager. He made it a point to invite me out for coffee, so that he’d be able to put a face to Taro’s copious handwritten notes about my character. Some years after that, a new manager transferred in. I popped by with a congratulations-on-the-new-job gift, mildly surprising the staff, but it felt appropriate.

When I moved to Tokyo, I went to the regional bank’s sole Tokyo office, which exists to serve their large megacorp customers. They were quite shocked that I had an account with the bank (“Mister! Citibank is down the street! If you use our ATMs you’ll get charged extra!”), and even more shocked when I told them that I run a multinational software company through it. “Wouldn’t you get better services with Citibank or Mitsubishi?” The thought of switching never crossed my mind. Indeed, I can’t imagine anything that would convince me to switch. They don’t make numbers big enough to compensate for how much I trust my bank.

Was I a particularly large account to the bank? Nope. It’s the same passbook savings account a 17 year old gets to deposit their first wages into. For 8+ of my ten years in Japan, my balance there was below $2,000.

The bank is one anecdote, but I could tell you about the hair stylist who drops me a handwritten postcard after every appointment, the restaurant that I went to weekly that tried to cater my wedding for free, the glasses shop which invited me to come back for a (free) frame re-bending and cup of coffee any time I was in the neighborhood, etc etc.

Japanese customers, in both B2C and B2B relationships, expect a level of personalized, attentive service which is qualitatively different than that in the United States. Anomalously good sales reps in the US are frequently operating at table stakes or below in Japan.

On the plus side, after you’ve actually won the business and demonstrated capability to serve customers to these standards, Japanese customers are very loyal.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4764781&forum_id=2#41936647)

My crypto habit alone got me flagged for AML concerns by my mega US bank

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4764781&forum_id=2#41937162)