Again on the topic of Japanese business culture, here's another article I translated from the Japanese language blog of Eiji Sakai, a Japanese software engineer and with a CPA from an American university and an interest in economics, culture, and technology.
This article is called "Working With People From Different Cultures" （異なる文化をもつ人たちと働くということ）
Working With People From Different Cultures
Nowadays, due to the spread of the Internet, interaction with people from around the world is more and more common, and it's becoming an age in which we must cross national borders and do daily business with people from other cultures.
Can Japanese companies respond to these changing times? Japanese companies are far too specialized for Japanese culture, and I wonder if it isn't the case that only Japanese people can work in them.
For example, I want you to take a look at this. It's a blog entry from a Japanese man who lives in Singapore, and calls himself a "foreigner NEET" (Not in Employment Education or Training), because he was unable to hold down a job here in Japan.
This entry is entitled: "The correct way to use paid holidays is to have fun." [Link appears to be broken now.]
In this article, Mr. Foreigner NEET severely criticizes the assertion made by a certain website that "paid holidays are not for having fun, they are provided for when you get sick." Paid holidays, along with being a legally established right of the common worker, are the employer's obligation. It is not expressly established how paid holiday should be used. So of course, it should be the case that you can use them for fun as well as for when you get sick. Many countries also have mandated that companies also provide separate paid sick leave. But it is also true that in Japan there are a lot of companies in which it is understood that paid holidays are only to be used when you're actually sick. It seems that there are very few people in Japan who actually use all of their paid holidays every year.
Now let's imagine the situation in which a foreigner comes from abroad to Japan and starts working at a Japanese company. We'll say he is given two weeks paid vacation a year. But when he tells his boss he wants to take two weeks of vacation, his boss tells him that will be difficult. How exactly is his boss supposed to explain this situation to his new employee? The foreign employee will likely stress that the employee handbook says that he gets two weeks of paid vacation a year, so he should be able to take time off. But if the boss explains that this is Japan, and in Japan you're expected to use only half of your paid holidays, will his new foreign employee understand and consent to this requirement?
Consider the English-speaking world, where if a company's rulebook specifies that an employee shall be allowed a certain number of paid holidays, that is exactly how many he or she will be allowed to take. It's not common practice for the official stance to differ greatly from what happens in reality. For businesses in the English-speaking world, all the rules are expressly stipulated in the employee handbook, and the gap between what's written there and how the business is actually run is small, and it's not common to hear "Well, it's not a written rule, but it's just common sense to do it this way." I feel this makes it quite suitable environment for people from various cultural backgrounds to work together.
Even if Japanese companies were to imitate the way English-speaking companies work, it would probably be hard for them to surpass these companies in terms of performance. Japan has a long, independent history, and that has fostered a unique culture here. I think what's important now is to thoroughly contemplate what the essence of Japanese culture really is, and to create a new form of Japanese culture that adapts to the age we live in, where it is necessary to work and associate with people of various cultural backgrounds.