FOUR: FOREIGN WOMEN AND JAPANESE CORPORATE CULTURE
By: Wei 陳薇荃
Tags: My Research, Gender Equality, Work Culture, Japan, Taiwan

As Ya-Ting talked about her company, the first thing she said was that it is ‘completely traditional Japanese’ because the president was an older male. Her efforts to fit in and maintain the harmony in the workplace can be observed in situations, such as how she tried to dress in such a way so as not to stand out. Since she worked at a company with only ten employees and she came to Japan with the intention of gaining experience working in a Japanese environment, she had to negotiate between her identity as a foreigner and differing expectations of the local work space. Moreover, while pointing out how strict the work environment might be, the president was fine with her trying to change the ‘unwritten rule’ which assigned clerical tasks to women. It is worth noting that Ya-Ting’s company did trading with companies in China and she was the only non-Japanese employee besides her division manager. During the interview, she told me that if her Japanese colleagues went on business trips with her to China, she would have to be their interpreter. As her colleagues depended on her when dealing with Chinese clients and on business trips, this gave her some measure of power to change workplace practices. Moreover, her professional skills allowed her to be treated equally and her voice to be heard.

Women’s Power Over Men

Ya-Ting’s interactions with her Japanese male colleagues as a woman may be rare. Nevertheless, interactions between female and male employees in the Japanese workplace have been studied by anthropologists in the past. Dorinne Kondo (1990) conducted her fieldwork at a confectionery factory in Tokyo and observed how women’s role as workplace ‘mothers’ strengthened their power over their male counterparts which significantly made their position as part-timers on the shop floor less marginalised. As an example, Kondo describes the interactions between the twenty-one year old male artisan, Yamada-san, and female part-timer, Iida-san who was in her early forties. As she writes, one morning Iida-san was late for work and was yelled at by Suzuki-san, a young craftsman. To explain this behaviour, Suzuki said, “Well, if you see someone every day, you kind of miss them when they’re gone (Ibid: 294– 295).” Kondo further argues that women like Iida-san made themselves socially central at the workplace by offering informal support to men, such as fixing the collar on their uniforms, making the male workers gradually depend on them.

Similar to how Kondo describes the female part-timers as ‘mothers’ in the factory, Ogasawara (1998) uses the marriage metaphor to describe the relationships between men and women at the head office of Tōzai Bank. The office ladies (OLs) in her account were assigned miscellaneous jobs and catered to the needs of the male employees. As a result, she points out that men became dependent on the assistance from their female counterparts providing one way in which women were able to gain control over them. While about two decades have passed since Kondo and Ogasawara conducted their fieldwork, women in the Japanese workplace are still expected to provide miscellaneous support based on the interviews I conducted with the Taiwanese women working in Tokyo. Moreover, even though Kondo and Ogasawara argue that women acquire informal control over men by providing miscellaneous support in the workplace, such an argument seems no more than an excuse to justify women’s disadvantageous position. Ya-Ting would also have disagreed seeing it as gender discrimination and unequal treatment to women in the workplace. As a foreign female employee at her company, she tried to bring some positive changes that brought men and women closer to equality.

How Ya-Ting exercised her power in the office in changing the gendered work culture might be different from the women in Kondo and Ogasawara’s research. Nevertheless, they were all able to acquire power over their male counterparts as the men in their workplaces relied on them in some capacity. In Kondo’s study, it was motherly love making the male workers feel attached to the middle-aged female part-timers. At the bank where Ogasawara conducted her fieldwork, the salaried men did not even know how to make copies, and therefore they had to rely on the assistance from the OLs to conduct their own duties. In Ya-Ting’s case, it was her professional skills that made her colleagues rely on her at work. As a result, she was able to acquire power over her male counterparts without providing miscellaneous support, such as making copies, cleaning, and serving tea.

Innovation in Management

In contrast to the traditional corporate culture, the online travel magazine Ting-Ni worked for, which was a start-up company founded in 2013, had a rather flat organisational structure, according to her. She told me that the CEO was only 28 years old and the eldest employee was 35. In addition, one-third of the employees were non-Japanese. She said, “The Japanese at our company had to spend quite a long time in order to get used to working with us foreigners.” During the first three months working there, she felt questioned and untrusted by her Japanese co-workers. The CEO noticed it, and therefore added ‘Company Culture (kaisha bunka)’ on their website stating:

To recognise diversity

To trust one another

To create an environment which each person can unleash their full potential

Evidently, in contrast to larger corporations in Japan, start-ups tend to place greater value on diversity and the individuality of each employee. Moreover, Ting-Ni’s company seems to promote innovation in management allowing employees to work outside of the office, such as at cafés or anywhere else they prefer, which is rarely seen in Japanese companies. Examining entrepreneurship in Japan, Parissa Haghirian (2016: 135) argues that new young companies create jobs, take risks, develop profitable strategies as well as a more contemporary Japanese style of management. Although existing literature often argues that Japanese companies ignore diversity and treat foreign employees as if they were Japanese, evidently there are changes appearing in individual cases as the result of integration and conflict between Japanese and foreigners in the workplace, especially at small and medium-sized firms.

While foreign female workers in the Japanese workplace often struggle to adapt to the gendered work culture, they have the power to change it due to their professional skills making their Japanese colleagues dependent on them. In addition, as the number of foreigners in Japan continues to increase and more companies adopt a more innovative way of management, presumably there will be more changes brought to the Japanese workplace and their Japanese colleagues might also re-think the ‘unwritten rules’.

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