Japanese workers
My impression about Japanese workers, companies and industries is that they tend ferociously stick to what works.
Westerners often accuse them of being old-fashioned and for lack of creativity. But the flip-side of not jumping into new ideas constantly is that the Japanese workers don’t forget previous discoveries. I imagine at a Japanese company you will be told to do something in a certain way because that’s how it has always been done. No one may know the actual reasons, but they trust that such reasons do exist. The thing is that even if you don’t know those reasons, they probably still work for you.
So if you just go ditching all the rules you don’t understand, like at some hip startup, you may face more challenges you don’t know how to effectively solve. Also, since the Japanese are not constantly looking for hacks to succeed, they more naturally just work very hard at the fundamentals.
From https://medium.com/@xevix/gaijin-engineer-in-tokyo-aaa9be8919b2:
Decisions are the first step to failure, and nobody wants to fail. But decisions must be made. How does this dichotomy resolve itself? Meetings. Endless meetings and emails, planning documents, pre-planning documents, post-planning documents, meeting documents, and endless discussion of all the things by all the people all the time. The thinking goes, if everyone is involved in the decision-making process, then when something inevitably goes wrong, there’s no individual person to blame! Problem solved.
If a matter in dispute just stops being disputed, then the matter is resolved. If it’s impossible to satisfy two contradictory goals, just satisfy none of them, or don’t check if you’ve satisfied them. When someone finally brings it up, just fall back on the usual platitudes:
すみません — I’m sorry
そうですね — Yes, you’re right (but I will do nothing about this)
仕方ないです — Nothing can be done (it is inevitable)
さあ — Who knows (I don’t know, maybe nobody knows?)
In Japan, high-ranking people expect to be let in on new proposals prior to an official meeting. If they find out about something for the first time during the meeting, they will feel that they have been ignored, and they may reject it for that reason alone. Thus, it’s important to approach these people individually before the meeting. This provides an opportunity to introduce the proposal to them and gauge their reaction.
