The Nail That Sticks Out: Adventures of a Female “Gaijin” Attorney in Corporate Japan

by Samantha Anderson

As is true of many relationships, you don’t know someone—or someplace—until you live with it. It’s a little like finding a great house, then discovering that every time it rains, the place sinks two inches.

I loved living in Japan. Working in Japan was a different story. Just as most of the streets have no names, rendering it nearly impossible to find your way around without a map, I found myself with a second full time job navigating around the potholes and pitfalls of Japanese business culture.

The first and most important discovery: that “saving face” and allowing others to do so is paramount in Japan. Unlike the U.S.— where, frankly, we love a good laugh at someone else’s expense, and schadenfreude is practically a national pastime — in Japan, you can be face to face with someone and never know how he or she feels about you. For example, in the U.S., if you think your evening guests are overstaying their welcome, you stop serving food and drink. In Japan, by contrast, they will offer you more tea rather than asking you to leave. In the business world, if a co-worker doesn’t like you, he or she will usually be unfailingly and excessively polite. This can be confusing to the uninformed, to say the least.

This need to look good extends to the informal policy that no employee leaves the office before the boss leaves for the evening, even if all your work is done for the day and you are just waiting it out. Failure to abide by this usually results in the boss’s displeasure as well as subtle withering looks from long-suffering co-workers who hang in until the last hours. This is made even more painful by the open office floor plans that feature row after row of desks set end-to-end like in the old Hollywood office comedies. [As an aside: I challenge those of you who complain about cubicles to work a day without ANY walls between you and 100+ co-workers.]

All that open space and light breeds some unique species. Consider the case of the “office flowers,” the young, pretty women hired to serve tea to guests, perform light administrative tasks and generally “decorate” the office by their mere presence. Or that of the “window-seat tribe,” or madogiwazoku, the former upper-level employees who have passed their prime and are given a sort of in-house retirement. They live out their worklife contemplating the view and doing little else. While it may sound like a great gig—who wouldn’t love a window office, high pay and no work?—the resulting loss of respect from co-workers leads to an attendant loss of self esteem for these workers who have dedicated their lives to the company, often to the detriment of their family.

Trying to be the counselor my employers and clients demanded within a culture that routinely relegates women to a service class was both challenging and educational. Although more of the larger, traditional Japanese companies have at least given lip service to policies promoting advancement of women into positions of real responsibility, it’s easy to understand why even determined Japanese women play down their ambitions.

Nemawashi, laying the groundwork for any decision, no matter how small, by talking to everyone who could possibly be involved ad nauseam, is part of the day-to-day operation of any organization in Japan. Yet women, no matter what level, are often excluded from settai, entertaining for business purposes, and thus from the big decisions and major deals, made in the smoking room—“no girls allowed”—or over drinks during late-night excursions to hostess and karaoke bars.

The Japanese have an expression: The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. You get the idea: don’t step out of line and don’t dare make waves, except in a sanctioned way. If that’s true for men, it’s doubly so for women in Japan’s corporate corridors. A gaijin (foreigner) like me is a curly-haired, blue-eyed, female “nail” that, by definition, draws the hammer’s attention, a situation that is often difficult to navigate. At least I know my way around without a map now.