Is working as a cashier or janitor literally worse than dying over there?
If you're a Japanese man raised by middle class parents, the prospect of working as a cashier or janitor implies:
You will never have economic security. Substantially all cashiers are hourly contract workers; virtually all janitors are. (The janitorial exceptions are government employees.) Contract workers can have their employment terminated in a fashion similar to in the United States. This contrasts markedly with the traditional expectation of the Japanese middle class, which is lifetime employment.
Your parents will consider you a failure, principally because you have failed in the one thing men are expected to do.
You will find your dating and marriage prospects markedly curtailed. You will be considered a loser by the vast majority of young women who you wish to date. Some will tell you that, in as many words. Many will prefer euphemisms like "My ideal boyfriend is someone who has debuted in society." Honest labor as a cashier is not considered honest labor in the Japanese middle class, at least not for a member of the middle class.
Japan is a very status-conscious society. Cashiers and janitors occupy some of the very lowest rungs of it. You will spend most of your day being obseqiously polite to people; you will watch other people spend their fragments of your day snubbing you, repeatedly, in the ordinary course.
You have recently read of other blue-collar employees who worked service jobs dying cold and alone, because the government safety net doesn't really consider them a priority, they had no savings, and they never had a family for the above reasons.
So, tell me: given that this is your mental model of reality, and the mental model shared by substantially everyone you consider a peer or mentor, how attractive does working at 7-11 sound to you?
Oh, salient fact: if you work so much as one day at 7-11 past college you'll probably never work as a salaryman. You're damaged goods for the rest of your life. If you thought of maybe doing it for 6 months while spending your time playing in a band and then getting on with your adult life, go ask one of the 45 year olds working at 7-11 and living on ~$1,400 a month how that decision worked out for them.
The above math, or something close to it, is why most salarymen consider themselves blessed to be proper employees at a stable corporation, even if that job is actively killing them. (n.b. I'm not Japanese but I am a recovering Japanese salaryman. "Salaryman" is a local coinage which identifies full-time white collar employees of a certain strata of Japanese companies which are desirable to work at. The traditional expectation is that you sign a deal with the devil ^H^H^H^H^H your company where the company insulates you from all risks and in return you commit to the company mind, body, and soul.)
So damn insightful, this comment. Travelling through Osaka last Autumn and we stumble upon a small underground Reggae bar. We're sharing tales, having fun with the dudes that ran it, and I get conversing with the owner over the last cigarette:
Me: "Cool spot you've got here man. Must be fun?"
Dude: "Yes, for bit. But I'm 35."
* Silence*.
He starts telling me about how the novelty has worn off and he's stuck between a rock and a hard place and how wearing hip-hop garb has an expiry date.
I know - these are concerns of young adults everywhere - but found his deadpan awareness of the increasing opportunity-cost interesting (and hilarious, at the time).
Hey Patrick, thanks for the additional insight. I had considered moving to Japan at one point in college and studied up on the culture quite a bit, but obviously have no first hand experience like you do.
Two things I've wondered about that I'm hoping you can shed some light on...
First, do people that low on the totem pole socially have any tendencies to emigrate to societies with more open cultures about this stuff like Europe or America? I realize there can be a cost barrier, but even a cashier could save up enough to make the move if they were dedicated enough to the idea.
Second, my experience with cashiers and other service staff there was the expected flawless politeness. But beyond that, people genuinely seemed to want to go above and beyond and take pride in their job, even if it was "just as a cashier." Is my perception due to just not being well-attuned to the social/body cues of the Japanese? In America, the cashier at a 711 typically hates their job and many give off the impression of being a slacker. Some practically exude this. I never once encountered this in a 711 in Japan. So do most of the cashiers there really hate their jobs/status and just make a good show of things? Or am I just blind to the cues?
Japan does not have a recent experience of high levels of emigration. (It did back when Japan was still a poor nation. There is a large Japanese diaspora in the United States and a few countries in South America, notably Peru and Brazil. That's a long story.) Factors counseling not emigrating include linguistic isolation (the overwhelming majority of not-comfortably-middle-class Japanese people do not speak useful levels of, most relevantly to their chances for successful emigration, English), cultural attitudes regarding the importance of Japan to Japanese people [+], and similar issues.
Your second question: depends on the cashier.
Note that a good portion of the things I were referring to are a result of falling out of the class you were born/raised/worked into. (Japan doesn't have classes... but Japan totally has classes.) If you never expected anything in life other than going to an agricultural high school and maybe working on the farm, like many young'uns in Gifu, then moving to Tokyo and working at a convenience store might not be catastrophic. If you expected to test into a good college, and did, and then end up working at a convenience store... that's a violation of the proper order of things.
Also, I would give non-zero credence to an explanation that a hypothetical observer who can't speak the language and has very little experience with the culture perhaps not understanding subtle distinctions like the difference between one's participation in a public social ritual and what one can tell one's closest friends when all of you are drunk. What's a good US example... hmm... OK, here's one: sincerity of religious belief. That's a spectrum, right? And Americans exist along that spectrum, right? And we have to have functioning radars for where someone is on that spectrum or it's socially disastrous, right? Imagine a hypothetical politician who pings your radar as "Absolutely zero sincere belief in any religion." Think backwards to the cues they give off to give you that impression. OK, now imagine that guy says, in response to a debate question, "Mr. $FOO, what is your favorite Bible verse?" and answers "I really like all of them, because I'm a Christian." That probably changes your radar value not at all, right? Because that's exactly what you'd expect a politician to say? The modal Japanese person, who probably does not have as good a radar on this issue as you do, will probably be confused as to why you think this politician is not religious when he just said something religious and claimed belief in a religion. And you could imagine writing a fairly long anthropological comment on a message board to that person saying "No, no, that's just the way we do things here. That question always gets asked and not having an answer to it, or disputing the basis for the question, would be political suicide. He's pretending to care about it and we pretend, for form's sake, to believe him." whereupon the Japanese person would say "Wow, you crazy Americans, so inscrutable."
[ + ] "What, like nationalism?" Not exactly the sense that I meant it in. Try on your mental model of a nationalist American for a moment: suppose an American spends several years abroad then comes back. Is this happy or sad? Happy, of course, because America is clearly the best place to live in the world and of course Americans would prefer to live in America, like everyone else would if they had the opportunity. A Japanese nationalist, on the other hand, would more typically say that the returning Japanese person is a sad event because the traitor will probably bring their foreign contagion with them. Is there even a word in English for what I'd be if I moved back to America next year? "What, an American?" No, a word which describes "previously lived a long while in another country." Japanese has a word for this (slight oversimplification for brevity going on here but I'm thinking of 帰国子女) and if it describes you you have challenges associated with that.
Thanks--this was a very clear explanation. I'm familiar with the concept of kikokushijo from some Japanese friends in college--there really are some ways of thinking that are completely foreign culturally and your example is a great way of highlighting that.
I've read that Japan's younger generations are starting to break free from the mold of "lifetime employment" and similar concepts as corporations have begun to show less and less loyalty to their employees as they become more competitive globally, and as Japan becomes more Westernized. Have you seen signs of that? Are the days of the traditional salaryman numbered?
The whole concept of the salaryman has always been fascinating to me. On the one hand, you have Japan, which is probably up there with Germany when one looks up the definition of "efficiency" in the dictionary. On the other, you have this concept of people working insane hours which have been proven to be less productive than when people actually get solid rest, have good work/life balance, etc. in terms of actual output, reduction in errors, and things that generally align with the concept of kaizen.
I have this notion in my head that Japanese corporate culture is extremely inefficient, with people essentially just creating endless bureaucracy and shuffling paper back and forth. Can you comment on any of these things?
Yes, things are changing (slowly). My accountant left a salaryman gig (!) at 25 (!!) to open his own business (!!!) in accounting (!!!!) which successfully convinced Japanese businesses to use a 25 year old washout as their accountant (!!!!!). I happen to know a ~60ish year old Japanese software entrepreneur. This entrepreneur recently raised a venture round (!) from a US VC (!!!). She's a woman with approximately ~40 years of experience operating a software company. (This is so outside the norm that exclamation points do not do it justice. If instead of meeting her I had heard about her second-hand from the Pope, I would have called him a liar.)
My view on Japanese corporate efficiency is essentially that Japan had a few things going right for it, including a de-facto world monopoly on applied mathematics ("which is useful"), which lasted for a few decades. Those were very, very good decades, and no amount of other inefficiency in Japanese companies/government/etc could make a monopoly on math lose. ("Monopoly" is a slight exaggeration for effect.)
Japan no longer has a monopoly on math. It took ~30 years, but Ford and GM spent enough time looking at Toyota such that they can make a car which is, if not a Toyota, at least not a death trap. Korea and China skipped directly from dirt-poor nations to industrial-powerhouses-who-can-math without taking the US' 200 year detour through "Let's try running factories like they are public schools and public schools like they are factories." Meanwhile, the US becomes the global center for software (which works out swimmingly) and Japan becomes the global center for robots (which works out swimmingly if one owns robots but not so much if one competes with them) while cranking up industrial output and industrial efficiency but concentrating the gains of it rather than passing them around many folks as previously happened.
Statistical quality control. Edward W. Deming or a name very like that. The US and Britain made vast strides in quality engineering during WW2 and then ignored it. The Japanese got religious about it.
Are Korean and Chinese not like factories? I always thought they were more so than American, to the point of famously turning out people who have a bizarre ability to imitate knowledge but not have it (much like Chinese factories can fill dollar stores and Walmart with stuff that has an amazing superficial resemblance to functionng functioning products)
I think its about teaching rote memory vs creativity. It seems as though Math and rote memory are the things that attribute to the success of large scale operations. Whereas Creativity (thinking outside the box and connecting the dots of seemingly different things) is what attributes to the success of new ventures.
It's North American culture to be able to think outside the box (regardless of how bad the public school systems are here) which is why most of the innovation comes from here. It is also why the factories are mostly in Asia, because the process of streamlining production has a lot to do with getting the math right.
TL;DR: Japanese treat the worst type of job as if their lives depended on them. If I ever see a Japanese tourist with problems, I'll storm the gates of Hell to help them. :-)
I went to Japan for vacation a few years ago. I have some bad allergies so in many small stores (conbini?) I went up to the cashier with some stuff and a machine translated note about my allergies.
The cashier seriously read the content list of everything I brought, then made two piles of things I can eat and things I couldn't eat. Every damn time. We are talking almost a statistical sample here.
That wouldn't happen anywhere else I've been, or even heard about. [Edit: I do claim to know this better than patio11, since he knows the subject area a thousand times better than me. He is too close. Do ask him about why/how, I saw the difference. And yes, I come from a place high on the social trust scale. There is still a big difference.]
Edit 2: About the subject matter of renting friends, buying used underwear, etc. You need to make a difference between common phenomenons and extreme phenomenons in a tens of millins of people area. The tail end of the Bell curve with so many people is weird.
Thank you for your reply, and that only adds to the horror.
I get that my question may have sounded like "Can't these bums just stop complaining and rent a small apartment and live lean?", but I figured if that was an option, they'd do that, but I had no idea why. Thank you for posting as to the reason this doesn't happen.
For a bit of background, both of my roommates work at Wal-Mart, and while they don't enjoy as much spending money as I do they certainly aren't treated like garbage like Japanese convenience store workers are.
If you're a Japanese man raised by middle class parents, the prospect of working as a cashier or janitor implies:
You will never have economic security. Substantially all cashiers are hourly contract workers; virtually all janitors are. (The janitorial exceptions are government employees.) Contract workers can have their employment terminated in a fashion similar to in the United States. This contrasts markedly with the traditional expectation of the Japanese middle class, which is lifetime employment.
Your parents will consider you a failure, principally because you have failed in the one thing men are expected to do.
You will find your dating and marriage prospects markedly curtailed. You will be considered a loser by the vast majority of young women who you wish to date. Some will tell you that, in as many words. Many will prefer euphemisms like "My ideal boyfriend is someone who has debuted in society." Honest labor as a cashier is not considered honest labor in the Japanese middle class, at least not for a member of the middle class.
Japan is a very status-conscious society. Cashiers and janitors occupy some of the very lowest rungs of it. You will spend most of your day being obseqiously polite to people; you will watch other people spend their fragments of your day snubbing you, repeatedly, in the ordinary course.
You have recently read of other blue-collar employees who worked service jobs dying cold and alone, because the government safety net doesn't really consider them a priority, they had no savings, and they never had a family for the above reasons.
So, tell me: given that this is your mental model of reality, and the mental model shared by substantially everyone you consider a peer or mentor, how attractive does working at 7-11 sound to you?
Oh, salient fact: if you work so much as one day at 7-11 past college you'll probably never work as a salaryman. You're damaged goods for the rest of your life. If you thought of maybe doing it for 6 months while spending your time playing in a band and then getting on with your adult life, go ask one of the 45 year olds working at 7-11 and living on ~$1,400 a month how that decision worked out for them.
The above math, or something close to it, is why most salarymen consider themselves blessed to be proper employees at a stable corporation, even if that job is actively killing them. (n.b. I'm not Japanese but I am a recovering Japanese salaryman. "Salaryman" is a local coinage which identifies full-time white collar employees of a certain strata of Japanese companies which are desirable to work at. The traditional expectation is that you sign a deal with the devil ^H^H^H^H^H your company where the company insulates you from all risks and in return you commit to the company mind, body, and soul.)