Re: [tlug] (OT) The enigma of Japan (was: UNIX jobs on TLUG)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Doug McLean writes:
 > On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
 > > Martin Killmann writes:

Actually, he didn't.  I did. :-)

 > > As pointed out, there is often a technical requirement (eg, frontline
 > > customer support) for a fairly high level of skill in Japanese.  But
 > > you can often work around that by entering a job that doesn't require
 > > customer contact.  What you can't avoid is office politics, though,
 > > and that is extremely difficult to participate in on equal footing.
 > > You have to play a different game.
 > 
 > Respectfully, I think this is true for immigrants anywhere.  We take
 > for granted that we don't have to worry about that in our home
 > countries, but people I know who are immigrants to the US would no
 > doubt say similar things about us.

They would, and as far as my experience goes, they'd be talking about
a different phenomenon, at least in academia.  I've worked in very
multicultural contexts in both the U.S. and Japan.  No question,
immigrants are at a disadvantage in faculty and committee meetings in
a U.S. university.  But it's very different from the twisty maze of
little passages all alike a non-Japanese finds himself in here.  I've
seen plenty of Asians and not a few Latin Americans do very well in
American academia by out-politicking native-born Americans in broken
English.  I don't know any English speakers who've done the same here.
The ones who've been successful IME are those who play the gaijin card
when it's useful.

 > > That's certainly good advice.  However, if you've done the same in
 > > another culture before, you will discover that in Japan important
 > > parts of the barrier remain in place even after you've become
 > > "fluent".
 > 
 > Again, ask an immigrant to the US or any Western industrialized
 > country, and they'd probably say the same thing.

And again, they'd be talking about something different.  van Wolferen
puts it well when he writes that while none of the phenomena you can
observe in Japan are uncommon in other countries, the degree, and even
more so the degree of correlation of diverse patterns is high enough
to constitute a qualitative difference.

 > Still, people can still thrive in different environments.

No question about it.  I'm not saying that you can't, nor that it's
harder in Japan than in other cultures if you go about it correctly.

What I'm saying is that *regardless of how talented you are
linguistically* to succeed in Japan you have to play a different game
from the one that you would play in Ireland or France, and a very
different one from the one that Japanese play among themselves,
especially in business.  (I find purely social relations to be very
much the same as anywhere else I've been.  It's business and academia,
and from what I can see politics, that differs from other cultures.)