The questions asked also differed from what would typically be asked in an employment interview in the US. What were the young woman’s religious beliefs? Did she have a boyfriend? If not, why not? If she had a boyfriend before but not now, was it she who left him or did he dump her? How much money did she have in her bank account? Was she planning on having children any time soon? Generally these types of questions are considered bad form in an American employment interview or are possibly actually illegal.
The hardest part of the interview for the first candidate came when she was suddenly told to start talking in English to the gaijin. The girl looked around the table at five unsmiling faces and at one face trying hard to look friendly. She hesitated briefly, and then she burst into tears. The situation did seem unfair to her, though when hiring a secretary for a company that mainly does business with non-Japanese people, you probably do not want to hire someone who breaks down and cries when asked to speak English with a foreigner.
This first candidate was not hired. I asked Suzuki if we could do the subsequent interviews with fewer people present. I thought that if we were going to make the candidates talk about their sex lives, their religion, and how much money they had in the bank, it might be better with a smaller group. Suzuki seemed puzzled by the request but agreed.
The next candidate arrived with a representative from her agency and her mother. This time the Tokuma side was represented by Suzuki and myself and one other person. The questions were as before (the mother looked uncomfortable), but the English part of the interview was between only the girl and myself. We ended up hiring her. However, as it turned out she did have an unfortunate tendency to burst into tears from time to time, and eventually we had to replace her. She ended up marrying someone in the office next door.
Our beginning staff of four people spent the first few weeks in the office just setting things up. I immediately discovered that there are two major things about working in a Japanese company that set it apart from working in an American company: frequent and pointless internal meetings and aisatsu.
We don’t really have aisatsu in the USA. It can be roughly translated, depending on the context, as greetings. In this case, in-person greetings. For about the first week in the new company, every single Japanese person I had ever known, or had even ever met, stopped by unannounced to congratulate me on my new position and to sit and chat for five to ten minutes about nothing in particular. People I had never met dropped by unannounced to congratulate me on joining my new company. The office was filled with pots of lovely white orchids: gifts from people who had wanted to drop by but couldn’t make it. Some were even from the heads of major Japanese corporations. Although I was impressed, I could never understand how, with this many people always just dropping by and having nothing in particular to talk about, anyone could ever get any work done. At least for the first few weeks of a new company’s existence.
Once the external ceremonial aisatsu had begun to die down, I was visited by various people from within the Tokuma companies. The first was Mori-san from Toko Tokuma, the company that worked with partners in China to produce Chinese films by Chinese directors. Mori-san was a serious-looking man with a large scar running down the side of his face, gleaming yellow eyes, and tobacco-stained brownish teeth. He was rumored to have worked for the Japanese CIA in Taiwan during the War. Mori-san sat with me in my office and mustered what for him passed as a pleasant voice and told me he had just dropped by to warn me to stay out of his China business.
The head of Daiei Pictures, the live-action movie production group, dropped by with a few of his senior managers to let me know that yes, they had been told that I was in charge of selling their films abroad, but no, Daiei didn’t need any help from me. They had their own people who had managed perfectly well before my arrival and they would continue to do so without me.
The head of the Tokuma legal department dropped by to let me know that he was in charge of all contracts and that I was not to even think about negotiating a contract without consulting him first. The head of book publishing came by to say that he’d heard I would be helping him with book deals outside of Japan, but that since I didn’t have any publishing experience, I should just leave all that to him. And the head of the interactive games business came by to thank me for not bothering to use my Disney contacts to try to expand his distribution business outside of Japan. The head of the music division delivered this same message by not even bothering to come over to see me.
Unlike the aisatsu visits from people outside the company, the aisatsu visits from the people within the company at least seemed to serve some kind of obvious purpose. The same could not be said for the frequent internal meetings I was required to attend. I understood that the real discussion of any issue in a Japanese enterprise takes place before any meeting is called. If there is an issue that needs to be resolved or a plan someone is seeking to have approved, the relevant parties meet informally, usually one-on-one or in very small groups, and often at a bar or restaurant somewhere. In a less formal setting, fueled by alcohol or not, company employees float ideas and get a sense of who might be in favor or who might oppose a thing, and crucially, what the real reasons for being for or against might be. The process of visiting and obtaining the approval of all required persons in advance is called nemawashi (securing the roots). In this way the arguments for or against any proposal or new idea and the decision makers’ positions on the proposal have all been fixed long before any formal meeting takes place.
Once the nemawashi has occurred, a meeting is called to pretend to discuss the matter in question, and the attendees vote on the outcome in accordance with the positions they have previously (and privately) confirmed they would take. By the time the meeting has been called, everyone attending already knows what’s been decided. In the meetings I attended, I always hoped that there would be at least one guy who never got the memo or who was out of town or something, and would come to the meeting, be astonished at what was being proposed, and argue about the decision. Of course that never happened. It always surprised me how much time and energy went into the fake and pointless discussion of something that had already been decided, and that I was always the only one in the room who seemed to mind.
When setting up our new company, Tokuma International, we had hours and hours of “discussion” meetings to determine the new company’s official policies and work rules. Japanese law requires any incorporated company to have official policies on a number of things, including rules governing employment, though surprisingly no one seems to pay much attention to them once they’re finalized and written down. Suzuki and I had worked them out in advance, and Suzuki had done the nemawashi with some of the other division heads and explained the rules to Mr. Tokuma and gotten his approval.
Nonetheless, a series of meetings were held to discuss the policies and rules. The meetings were attended by no fewer than a dozen people, including Mr. Tokuma himself. We slogged through the minutiae of potential human resources issues and rules and regulations. We once spent the better part of an hour deciding whether an employee making his/her first business trip should be allowed to purchase a suitcase at the company’s expense, which was the rule in the other Tokuma Group companies, and if so, exactly what kind of suitcase it could be and how much such a suitcase would cost.
We also briefly touched on larger issues like maternity leave, long-term sickness leave, grounds for dismissal, employee evaluations, and performance review frequency, though none of these topics held the attention of the participants the way the suitcase issue had. All of this seemed like overkill for a company that had only three employees and was never expected to have as many as a dozen—especially since the rules that Suzuki and I had decided on and Mr. Tokuma had approved were already being printed up for submission to the government agency that monitors such things. And it wasn’t as if the other people in the meetings didn’t know this.
Another feature of Japanese meetings that has always puzzled me is that once a person begins to talk, no matter what he/she has to say, the floor is his/hers for as long as he/she thinks he/she needs to say it. Even when the person is saying something completely and wildly off topic, overlong, or embarrassingly inaccurate, no one ever intercedes, politely or otherwise, to end or limit the speech. The person just keeps going