Self-Sacrifice Under Industrial Feudalism
Employees of a Japanese company are just like the samurai of the Tokugawa period. They are enclosed for a lifetime in the castle (the enterprise). Their single-hearted loyalty to the lord (top management) is essential. The high spirits and self-sacrifice of the samurai were extremely favorable to Japan's making a start as a modern state in the Meiji era and then carrying out a reconstruction and further economic development in the postwar period. Quite a few examples in earlier chapters have demonstrated this.
Here is a statement that a middle-aged housewife made in a magazine several years ago:
"My husband is now over forty years old but still works incredibly hard. He leaves home at 6:30 every morning and hardly ever comes home before midnight. Over the last two weeks, he came home three days at 1:00 a.m., five days at 2:00 a.m., and two days at 4:00 a.m. Over the weekends, as a result, he just sleeps, sleeps, and sleeps. All he says to me every day is, 'I must work, I must work. Oh, I am too busy!' Now I'm not so ignorant as to believe all these words. He works very hard every day for his company, which in turn provides him with enjoyable drinks after work. He never entertains his two children and me; nor does he buy clothing to please us. We are just fed and have enough to live on. The rest of his income is spent on the social activities of the evening. The days have passed like this for fifteen years. I have been suffering much, but seem to have gotten used to it. I am now able to look at it objectively from a different angle, and complain less about my family life to my sisters and friends. I no longer try to correct my husband's life or blame the company for its working standards. I have resigned myself to my fate and accepted it as inevitable. I just hope that my children will not grow up to be like their father."
This is an extreme case and a rare one. This man is one of the world's great "workaholics." But there are many lesser workaholics who sacrifice their home lives for their work. Hard work is the pride of the samurai worker. Employment is not only his lifeblood but a centrally significant "good" for him. Japanese men place primary importance on their castle (place of employment), and their homes accordingly become mere lodging places for them to sleep in and commute from. The wife of the vice president of a big trading company, a man victimized in an aircraft scandal, once described her husband this way in a magazine: "He lodged in my house for twenty years." If this was true of the vice president, no doubt those who worked under him also lodged in their houses just for sleep and devoted themselves unconditionally to the company.
The organizational style of Japanese enterprises today is very similar to the Tokugawa system of han (feudal clan). The employer-employee relationship is rooted in that between the ruler and the ruled of the clan. The relationship is based on on (social debt handed down by a favor), not on a contract.
The Western employer-employee contract can be fulfilled by the equalizing of work and wages, but on between ruler and ruled is usually limitless and never can be paid off. The suicide note left by an ex-councilor who was involved in the bribery scandal of KDD (International Telecommunications Incorporated) manifests such a feudalistic relationship. It read, in part:
"I was just an ordinary man of no special ability. I owe the former president and the former general secretary a great deal. By their favor, at my retirement at age fifty-eight, I was given a special post as the so-called councilor in the president's office. After that time, I was filled with a zeal to repay their favor, and I tried my best to follow their directions. In this case, too, I was only trying to make up for the delinquencies of the two. . . ."
In the contract-based society of the West, when an employee is asked to commit an unlawful act, he can refuse by saying, "That is not part of my job description." But this is not possible in Japanese society. In a feudalistic system, there is no job description. All orders given by a senior are duties. An employee has to go beyond his regular commitment if he is to succeed. Anyone who fails to take on extra work as required temporarily, and instead punches a time clock at nine in the morning and again at five, becomes an outcast.
Two Homes
The Japanese worker has two "homes." One is the residence he shares with his wife and the other is his workplace, which he considers his central life station. When a worker speaks of his company, he always refers to it as uchi-no-kaisha (literally, "my company"; practically, "my dear company," for uchi-no implies an intimacy of kinship). The company is like a home for most of the men, in much the same way as the samurai regarded the lord's castle as their central life station. In fact, modern Japanese workers usually spend more time in their workplace than in their homes.
A typical Japanese company has numerous characters: a community mayor, an old-timer, a big shot, friends, brothers-in-work, sisters-in-work, seniors, juniors, and so on. In other words, the company is a village-type community. There are also festive activities, protocols, and customs. No definite line separates official and personal affairs. Such a system, of course, may become a source of friction among workers, but at the same time it provides them with plenty of opportunities to assuage the wounds and sorrows of the working class. The worker can borrow his pay in advance, deposit his savings in a company fund at a better interest rate than a bank provides, drink at company expense, receive loans from the company for buying a house, and complain to his colleagues about what he cannot disclose to his wife. Naturally, such workers stay with the same employer much longer than workers do in the West. Japanese employees repeatedly say, "Uchi-no-kaisha, uchi-no-kaisha." The company is no less than the control tower of their lives. It is like a spiritual harbor for floating souls. The loyalty of Japanese workers resides in this strong sense of belongingness, of being part of an organization in which all members' destinies are tightly interlocked.
This is why Japanese husbands spend most of their time away from their families. In nine cases out of ten, they are occupied by affairs of the company. The wives, on the other hand, stay at home and have no idea of their husbands' jobs. They do not know the men's world. Of course, the wife of a shop owner may have a chance to see her husband at work, but most husbands work at offices, stores, or plants, and seldom talk about their struggles in the battlefield when they return home. Since this has been true for many years, Japanese wives are not necessarily dissatisfied and never try to lure their husbands away from the lord and castle.
Instead, the wives focus their energies on the family. They take up bravely the entire burden of providing nurturance and education for their children, all the way from infancy to adulthood. Such mothers are called "education mamas" in Japan, and they are the chief promoters of the notorious "examination hell" that Japanese students go through. Their great task is to ensure that their offspring get into the right kindergarten, then into the right primary school, then into the right junior high school, then into the right senior high school, and then into the right university. Their purpose in sending their children to the right schools is, needless to say, to install them in stable jobs with big companies and get them on the promotional escalator. The future of the children is calculated beforehand by their mothers, who devote all their energies to the task. Lacking the confident helping hand of their husbands, these women find it very difficult to cut the umbilical cord.