If an employee doesn't care for a drink on the way home, it is almost certain that he will be left behind in the race. As described above, a pub or tavern often serves as a clinic or information center, or even a training camp. A successful organization man grows over drinks. He doesn't hesitate to spend a little extra on his career development.
Never Fail to Consider the Mysterious Power of Women
As discussed in Chapter 3, the successful organization man owes his career progress in no small measure to his wife. In Japan, therefore, it has been the ideal of a man to marry a woman like Mrs. Kazutoyo Yamauchi of the sixteenth century, who bought her husband a very valuable horse with her savings and thereby assisted him in rising in the society. Mr. Yamauchi, a samurai of 400 koku (rice stipend) when married, was greatly honored with his beautiful horse and stepped up the promotional ladder to daimyo rapidly. Finally, he was assigned to be lord of the Tosa clan, with a stipend of 202,600 koku. Though his performance and achievements in the battlefield were remarkable and recognized, his outstanding career progress was credited in history to his wife. Since then, she has been esteemed by Japanese people as the exemplary wife of an organization man.
Nobody denies that a wife's assistance is indispensable to a husband's career progress. But we tend to forget the mysterious power of women in other respects. As an example, let us look at the Japanese custom of sending chugen (midsummer presents) and seibo (year-end presents) to superiors.
Japan is a land of greetings by presents. One present is given after another, on one occasion after another. When people visit a friend in the hospital, they naturally bring him a get-well-soon present. If they go to see a departing friend off, they usually give him a small amount of money as a farewell present. Both at weddings and at funerals, every attendee is expected to grace the occasion with a present in proportion to his social status. Some presents are given in celebration of others. Some are made to help defray the considerable expense of an event, such as a wedding or a funeral. Some people expect to receive a favor in return for the visits they make and the presents they take. In any case, the Japanese are a very practical people, and the economy would sink to a considerable extent if everybody stopped giving presents as greetings.
Chugen and seibo are the most popular presents in Japanese society and are given at bon (the midsummer Buddhists' festival) and kure (year-end). These presents are given from the lower echelons to the upper echelons—for example, from subcontractors to the parent company and, within the organization, from subordinates to superiors.
Chugen and seibo, the so-called greetings of bon-kure, have a long history. When the tradition actually began is unknown, but it flourished in the Tokugawa period and became a firmly established custom. The tradition is all well and good, showing as it does the innate appreciation to a superior who performed some expected favor. In the preindustrial society, the peasants gave homemade rice cakes or hand-made wooden clogs as indications of their sincere gratefulness, but nowadays people buy handsome factory-made presents from department stores and have them gift-wrapped and delivered.
Today, chugen and seibo are important seasonal greetings of the organization man, for they come at the time of the semiannual bonus. Thus, when the season comes, factory-made greetings pile up in the house of a VIP as existence of his importance or the magnitude of his leadership. All are customary greetings, but they are not without diplomatic value. Intimacy invites intimacy; trust invites trust. Chugen and seibo have thus become the seasonal lubrication for maintaining personal relationships.
Women often play an important part in this tradition. For example, when the wife of Mr. Department Head speaks very highly of Mr. X's excellent greeting item by saying, "He has a strong sense of gin" Mr. Department Head is sure to be impressed with Mr. X. In turn, Mr. X, with his great sense of selecting an item for Mrs. Department Head, wins the good, clean, and easy battle to get on his manager's mind.
Here is another example of a woman's mysterious power. People often say that female workers in a company are just window dressing and are not utilized to their full capacity. In Japan this is generally true, because Japanese women prefer marriage to lifetime employment. Nevertheless, we shouldn't overlook the fact that these female workers are usually engaged in secretarial and liaison work and are therefore in close touch with managerial personnel. Very often they are information messengers. Secrets of workers and internal affairs often slip out of their mouths while they are working around section chiefs and department heads. Their role as emotional propagandists should not be underestimated.
Unfortunately, the mysterious power of women is undervalued in Japan, which has a strong tradition of male supremacy inherited from feudalism and Confucian concepts. But the truth is that Japanese women have as much strength of will and are just as brave as men; they may even possess greater will power and psychological strength than men. They just reserve their powers within.
Be an Expert at Haragei
A homogeneous group of people who speak the same language might naturally be expected to be highly communicative. However, in this enclosed island society, where personal relationships are emotionally delicate, people are liable to hold their tongues or speak in a roundabout way and imply their intentions rather than communicate them directly. Everyone in Japan expects the other person to understand the whole thing by hearing only a small part of it.
This is particularly true in business. Many businessmen will express themselves clearly in sports or other activities but will restrain themselves when it comes to talking about serious business matters. In communications between superior and subordinate in particular, people are not likely to unfold everything on their minds. The person in a lower position, therefore, is likely to fail to respond properly unless he reads the mind of his superior correctly.
Many a Japanese bows without reason, smiles meaninglessly at times, and uses ambiguous words often in conversation. All these actions are designed to disguise his own intention until he has read the other person's mind correctly and thus gained an advantageous position in the exchange of words. The Tokugawa style still prevails in Japan.
This sort of haragei (intuitive communication) takes place in the ringi decision-making system described in Chapter 4. The system itself is good insofar as it utilizes the abilities of the younger organization men at the bottom. But to obtain final approval at the top, the planner has to prepare a ringisho carefully so as to get it through the necessary channels and obtain acceptance at every checkpoint. His proposal must be stated in diplomatic language of the highest degree, or in words slippery as an eel, if it is to get through and must not clash with the interests of upper echelons. The proposal can never be baldly frank. To prevent rejection, the planner uses vague words. In Japan, such a statement is said to be as iridescently colored as silk fabric (tamamushi-iro).