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Fun, Friendly, Factful Newsletter #163
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Our main article describes what volunteers See Through now needs, and what’s involved.
Our video is a behind-the-scenes video, made by volunteers, about a See Through project training volunteer filmmakers to make videos celebrating local volunteers.
Our podcast is a peek at a draft script for Episode 7 of a new series, involving four lifelong friends, one of whom becomes a yakuza...
Main Article
More Volunteers Required - Know Anyone Who Wants To Reduce Carbon?
We’re often asked if we need any help, what kind of help, and what work needs doing.
This article describes the most urgently-required volunteers roles at See Through, and what might be involved.
Please consider donating some of your own time, or circulating this article among people you might think would be interested in contributing, either as expert veterans, or enthusiastic beginners seeking expert mentoring and seeking to combine real-world experience with measurable carbon reduction.
Video
This video was made by one of the pictured volunteer filmmakers who participated in the 2-month long pilot of 1 Sunday Morning, 4 Films: doing good in Finchley.
1 Sunday Morning’s World Premiere at the iconic Phoenix Cinema was one layer of a matryoshka doll of volunteering.
A team of See Through News volunteers mentored 4 volunteer local amateur filmmakers to make 4 films about local volunteers, which was screened as a community service to an audience of community volunteers, along with other short films made by local volunteers.
If you’d like to discuss organising the next 1 Sunday Morning, 4 Films in your community, why not volunteer?
Podcast
Many thanks to those who gave feedback on the draft scripts of our future series of The Truth Lies in Bedtime Stories, from See Through News. Working title :
The Slow Reveal - how it took me 20 years to realise one of my three Japanese friends was a yakuza
Episode 1: Extraordinary Circumstances - see newsletter 157
Episode 2: Year of Bonding - see newsletter 158
Episode 3: Staying In Touch - see newsletter 159
Episode 4: Me v. Japan, Home Leg - see newsletter 160
Episode 5: Me v. Japan, Away Leg - see newsletter 161
Episode 6 - My Fortnight As A Japanese Housewife - see newsletter 162
This work in progress is available exclusively to readers of this newsletter - any comments of feedback greatly appreciated.
Listeners to previous The Truth Lies podcasts will know how the format will eventually get around to carbon drawdown-related point, but not until the very end.
The rest of the story is just a hook to attract attention, and engage interest, to earn the right to make the carbon bit land when the time comes…
A key point for anyone following the story up to this point - following audience feedback, we’ve changed the name of one of the characters from KATSU to YUTAKA…
**
The Slow Reveal - how it took me 20 years to realise one of my three Japanese friends was a yakuza
Episode 7 - Salariman
In 1987, I hadn’t even heard the word ‘yakuza’.
I had no idea, though I may already have had a clue or two, that one day ‘Id be present when one of my Japanese friends finally realised that the second had known for some time that the third was a yakuza.
I had no idea about organised crime gangs anywhere in the world, let alone Japan’s particular version of them.
In the spring of 1987, with my final exams imminent, I was starting to think about my own career.
The previous summer, I’d been in Japan as Osamu and Yutaka had made their transitions from student life to the working world.
Now Daisuke, with his fluent English, mysterious banking connections, and jet-setting sophistication, seemed about to be the next.
He called me a month or so before my final exams. Daisuke said he had another trip to London to meet potential employers. Could I spare the time to meet up?
I’d not yet thought about emplyment, but many of my classmates had already started looking for jobs. Their experience seems to be of having to chase employers, rather than the reverse, but Daisuke had always seemed to be operating at a more elevated level to any of us.
This time Daisuke suggested the venue. It was not a grimy Chinese restaurant, but a bar I’d not heard of.
It turned out to be an expensive wine bar in the City of London, overlooking the Thames, surrounded by skyscrapers.
Daisuke ordered a bottle of Bordeaux. I hoped it was his treat, as the house red cost more than I’d expect to spend on a meal for four.
It was still a mystery to me how Daisuke, a postgraduate student of an obscure traditional Chinese instrument at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, could live this lifestyle.
For my classmates who’d started their job searches, there seemed to be a very clear choice between following your passion, and staying student-poor, or compromising with a dull, but more lucrative ‘proper job’.
Daisuke’s ability to pursue his personal musical passion while keeping a string of banking suitors on the hook defied our understanding, and limited experience, of the world of work.
While the waiter fussed over the cork and the pouring, I asked Daisuke how he did it. His reply, between tasting the wine and nodding at the waiter, was something about being
in London for ‘exploratory chats’ with various financial institutions.
This left me none the wiser, but I got the feeling anyone else in that London wine bar would have nodded knowingly.
Instead, I marvelled at how well Daisuke fitted in. I grew up in London, but sipping fine wine in this City bar surrounded by urbane international jet-setter financiers, Daisuke seemed far more at home than me.
I was the only one not wearing a tie.
I didn’t ask Daisuke who was paying for his trip. I just admired how he was somehow managing to have his student cake while eating his pick of the banker cake too.
Daisuke was Daisuke. He seemed to be immune from the suffocating rules of Japanese employment I’d seen ensnare Osamu and Yutaka the previous summer.
Beaming Osamu, ‘Preserving Tradition’, was girding himself to join an employer he expected to work for until retirement.
Osamu had taught me the Japanese word for a white-collar worker, derived from English - salariman.
I’d seen how my other host, Yutaka, had been affected by the first two weeks of his salariman life. Even Yutaka, ‘The Bountiful Winner’, had been ground down by his first sparring session with Japanese working life.
In the hours I’d seen him, on weekend furlough from his company dorm, Yutaka was a shadow of the casual, carefree student I’d met in China. Not entirely crushed, but much subdued.
Daisuke said Osamu and Yutaka were now settling into their careers. They’d soon move out of their company dorms to make way for this year’s recruits, and were looking for apartments. They were already being sent on domestic business trips, and had been told they’d soon be able to deploy their Chinese language skills on trips to China.
I could easily imagine Osamu in this role, with his fluent language skills and footballer’s camaraderie. Yutaka’s shortcomings on the language front might still be compensated for by his superpowers on the sociability front.
Within a few weeks, my final exams over, it was my time to consider my own transition to working life.
In the summer of 1987 I graduated with a First-Class degree in Chinese, zero prospects, and no notion of what was to come next.
I was now the only person who could answer the question of what I was to do with my life.
I’d always been a keen consumer of news. Journalism seemed like a fun and interesting thing to get paid to do, but this was more vague notion than career plan. I had no idea how one became a journalist, nor any family connections to guide me.
Along with thousands of others, I applied for the BBC’s graduate training scheme. Like all but a couple of them, I was rejected. I had no Plan B.
In 1987, it turned out, employers were not that interested in 22-year-olds with fluent Chinese, who could read Chinese newspapers, quote Tang poetry and pontificate on Yuan Dynasty drama.
In 1987 China was still emerging from its slumber. Studying Chinese was still seen as an academic eccentricity - not quite as useless as Sanscrit, but not far behind.
Whatever Daisuke had, I didn’t. No international banks or investors were vying for my consideration. Britain had no salariman escalator for me to step onto, like Osamu and Yutaka.
Back at Square One, I phoned Suzuki-sensei.
I’d hit it off with my lecturer from my first lesson of the Beginner’s Japanese I’d chosen as a course option after my year in China.
Suzuki-sensei had asked if anyone knew any Japanese words. One by one, my classmates ventured a hesitant ‘konnichiwa’, ‘origami’ or ‘karate’. When it was my turn, I recited the lyrics of one of the songs Daisuke, Osamu and Yutaka had taught me in our Chinese student dorm, without realising quite how filthy it was. Fortunately, Suzuki-sensei was more amused than appalled.
Now, on the phone, she asked about my career plans. I said I had none. Suzuki-sensei paused briefly, then suggested sogo shosha might be worth contacting.
Sogo shosha, she explained, meant ‘general trading companies’, but they carried much more heft in Japan than theri direct English translation suggested.
The sogo shosha were effectively global sales & distribution agents, and buyers for Japan Inc., she said.
Japan’s economy was booming, said Suzuki-sensei. Its sogo shosha, were the intermediaries through which almost everything was imported and exported in and out of Japan - not to mention between other countries around the world. If anyone might hire a Chinese-speaking Brit, she reckoned, it would be a sogo shosha.
Suzuki-sensei rattled off the names: Mitsubishi, Marubeni, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Itochu.
I said I’d heard of Mitsubishi, but Suzuki-sensei explained that this wasn’t the automobile manufacturer. The sogo shosha, she said, were way bigger than any carmaker. They were among the biggest companies in the world.
Unlike Daisuke, I knew nothing about finance or business, but this claim sounded like misplaced national pride.
There were so many companies that must surely be bigger - Exxon, General Electric and Ford, - not to mention Japan’s own manufacturing giants like Toyota, Panasonic and Sony. The notion there were bigger companies I’d never even heard of seemed implausible.
Still, I was in no position to be picky, and it was kind of Suzuki-sensei to suggest them. The phone directory yielded the London addresses of all five sogo shosha she’s mentioned, all at ritzy-sounding City locations.
I hastily concocted a resumė, and drafted a covering letter. In what I hoped was an appropriate, grown-up-sounding tone, I introduced myself and my qualifications, such as they were, and enquired whether they might by any chance have a China-related job opening.
After a couple of revisions to strike what I imagined to be the right tone, I made five copies, changing only the recipients’ names and addresses. One by one, I inserted them into the postbox, before giving it a slap for luck.
Within a week, I had four rejections, and one invitation for a ‘chat’.
A few days later, trying to look like it wasn’t the first time I’d worn the suit my mother had helped me buy, I located the City skyscraper I’d first heard of when consulting the phone book a week earlier.
In a meeting room overlooking the City, I faced two men in suits. One was the Japanese Head of HR for the European headquarters of one of Japan’s big five sogo shosha, the other his British deputy, who I soon discovered spoke Japanese. I’d seen gaijin speaking fluent Japanese on the telly during my fortnight as a Japanese housewife, but this was the first time I’d met one. It looked impressive and cool.
I didn’t go in with high hopes for this ‘chat’. Sogo shosha bought and sold everything everywhere, and I had no experience of trading anything anywhere.
Even so, the meeting somehow fell short of my low expectations.
The HR boss quizzed me on my thin resumé. I did my best to dress up my studies and backpacking in mainland China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia, but there was nothing very substantive. I soon ran out of steam, and both the HR manager and I seemed to be struggling for ideas to stretch the meeting any further.
With a polite cough, the Japanese-speaking English deputy brought his boss’s attention to the bottom of my resumé. To bulk it out, I’d listed all the courses I’d taken, and he pointed to my Beginner’s Japanese course.
The HR manager nodded, and asked me if it was OK if he asked me a question in Japanese.
Absolutely fine, I replied, genially.
He posed his question, slowly and clearly. His deputy listened intently, pen poised over his notepad.
I focused hard, determined to glean whatever meaning I could from the stream of Japanese syllables.
Just like when I watched daytime TV at Yutaka’s house, while his Mum had her morning nap, every now and then a familiar phrase, a verb or noun I recognised, or an imported English word like ‘salariman’, would jump out
His question seemed to go on for hours, but probably lasted no more than a minute.
I knew he’d finished from his upward inflection, raised eyebrows, and because his deputy’s pen was hovering over his notepad, waiting to record my reply.
Seconds passed. I avoided any eye contact, but watched the pen slowly fall, before coming to rest on the notepad. He’d realised I wasn’t pondering judiciously before replying, but simply had no clue what his boss had just asked me.
The interview, if that’s what it had been, ended shortly after. I kept a straight face all the way to the elevator. Before I’d left the building, I was rehearsing the anecdote for my friends. The fact that I would never again see my interviewers, or set foot in their office, freed me from any embarrassment.
Two days later I opened a letter offering me a contract of employment. It mentioned nothing about China, but said a position was available in their Textiles Trading Division.
I considered my options. I had none.
A couple of weeks later, a year after Osamu and Yutaka started their working lives in Tokyo, I too became a salariman in London.
Daisuke turned out to be the only one of us who didn’t join a Japanese company. Shortly after I started at the sogo shosha, he left the Conservatory of Music and joined me in London. Some investment bank had won the bidding war for his services.
Daisuke soon installed himself in a fancy new apartment, a short walk across the Thames from the financial district skyscrapers.
Both our jobs involved a lot of intercontinental travel, but Daisuke and I would meet up from time to time in some wine bar or another to catch up and compare notes.
I always left thinking I’d learned much more from him than he did from me.
Daisuke seemed just at ease in the elite world of international banking as he’d appeared to be as a student.
He’d jet off to New York, skip around the capitals of Asia and tour the financial centres of Europe. As far as I could gather, his work involved helping the super-wealthy invest their super wealth. When it came to work, It felt like I had much to learn from Daisuke, and little to teach.
Daisuke would occasionally quiz me on certain aspects of the British class system he’d encountered in his work, but even then he’d often be better informed when it came to public school rankings, the relative statuses of Oxbridge colleges, or the reputations of traditional British investment banks.
I had some British friends who’d landed jobs in British or American banks, management consultancies or investment companies. Their experiences helped me triangulate a bit on the general business culture, but only Daisuke could help me when it came to understanding my new salariman status.
When it came to helping me understand my new employers, Daisuke, The Big Help, more than lived up to his name.
Unlike him, I was on a vertiginous learning curve. My starting point was almost total ignorance about just about everything I needed to know, from business, to trading, textiles and Japanese corporate culture.
As this was my first proper job, my first challenge was to understand where my general business ignorance ended, and where my specific Japanese cultural ignorance began.
Before long, Osamu and Yutaka also became my salariman consultants.
I started making frequent business trips to Japan, sometimes accompanying British customers, sometimes joining my head office colleagues to negotiate with Japanese suppliers.
In Tokyo, I’d usually manage to find an evening or two to catch up with Osamu and Yutaka. We were all busy young salariman, but we somehow found time to have a drink, often at hotel bars late at night, after saying goodnight to our clients.
Daisuke would sometimes join us, on a flying visit from somewhere to somewhere. One way or another, barely a month would pass without me seeing at least one of my three Japanese friends.
Each time we saw each other, I’d come away clutching another piece of the salariman jigsaw.
They taught me about the importance Japanese place on shared experience. Japanese routinely excel at organising reunions with everybody from kindergarten friends, to high school classmates, university club members, or sports teams.
I’d even experienced this in person. Osamu, Yutaka and I would attend reunions of the Japanese cohort of our year studying in China, where we first met. I’d be the only non-Japanese present, but as I’d shared this experience, I was part of the in-group. As my Japanese improved, our conversations no longer had to pass through the filter of our relative Chinese language abilities, and I grew to know them better.
One thing that astonished me was that every single one of the male Japanese students from our year in China was now a salariman. For graduates of Chinese, at least, business seemed to be the only acceptable career path.
Only one of my British classmates was working in business. The rest were pursuing other paths - teaching, on the dole, waiting in restaurants, travelling, studying.
My British friends were surprised that I’d ended up in business, but none was more amazed than me. Napoleon called Britain ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but by the late 80’s, business had a grubby reputation.
For my contemporaries, the only reason to work in business was to make loads of money. Few of us had an ambition to make money for its own sake, me even less than most.
They were even more astonished that someone as un-fashion-conscious as me had ended up trading textiles.
I soon added a new party trick to my repertoire, telling stories of selling Sea Island Cotton shirt fabric to Savile Row tailors, or container loads of poly-cotton twill to Manchester furnishing wholesalers.
These anecdotes went down a storm, but this was literally my day job.
Almost no one ever asked about my life as a salariman. Working at a Japanese company was off-the-scale weird, but this was my daily reality.
In truth, I shared their incredulity at where I’d ended up, but I was becoming increasingly fascinated by Japan, as expressed through its corporate culture.
I saw my job more as anthropological field research than a career move. I enjoyed the small-hour heart-to-hearts with my senior Japanese colleagues, lending a sympathetic ear as they described their professional and personal dilemmas.
Over whiskies in London’s Japanese bars and restaurants, my Japanese colleagues, despite being a decade or two older than me, would pour out their hearts to me.
Should they push for that promotion, and hurry back to get ahead at head office? Or should they prioritise their wife and children, who much preferred London’s less pressured pace, and less stressful schools?
I found these dilemmas far more interesting than profit margins and monthly sales targets.
Their stories revealed the emotional truth that was concealed by all that bowing and smiling and formality I observed at the office.
I began to realise I was seeing tatemae and hon'ne in action. My Japanese friends often used these terms to explain Japanese corporate culture to me. Indeed, understanding the distinction between tatemae and hon’ne seemed to be the key to most of my questions about Japanese society.
Tatemae was the face you showed in public - your facade.
Hon’ne was your true inner feelings, literally ‘authentic sound’, shared only with close friends and family.
The gap between tatemae and hon'ne is a measure of the stress of being Japanese, and obeying Japanese cultural expectations. How my Japanese colleagues treated each other in the office was tatemae. What they told me about their colleagues in the bar in the small hours - that was hon'ne.
Tatemae is Japan’s profounder version of what we call things like tact, politeness, etiquette, face, and diplomacy. I used to joke that, as a fellow tea-drinking island nation, such niceties are not unknown in Britain, but however two-faced we may think British people are to each other, we’re amateurs compared to the Japanese.
Reflecting on my fortnight as a Japanese housewife, and how stressful even relaxed, cool, casual Yutaka had found his first encounter with Japanese corporate culture, I felt I was starting to scratch below the surface of Japanese society.
I soon concluded I didn’t want to be a businessman, but didn’t quit. The cross-cultural anthropological field-work I found myself immersed in was much more interesting than advancing myself as a salariman.
The strange thing was that showing an interest in their personal lives, seeking the bar-room hon'ne that lay beneath their office-meeting tatemae, turned out to be precisely how to advance myself as a salariman.
My sogo shosha had hired other British graduates, as part of their long-term recruitment plan for local managers to take over from expensive Japanese expats.
But one by one, my British colleagues quit in frustration. They’d imagined that working for one of the world’s biggest companies would be a career boost. Instead, they found themselves frozen out of all the important decision-making. They’d prepare for a meeting for hours, and show up ready to argue their case, only to find decisions had mysteriously already been made, rubber-stamped by their Japanese colleagues within minutes.
Ironically, given my lack of career ambition, I had two big advantages - my anthropological interest in Japanese culture, and my three Japanese friends.
Yutaka had tried explaining Japanese meeting strategy to me after his first week at his salariman boot camp. He had to write down the kanji for me to grasp his explanation.
Nemawashi, he wrote down. I had to look it up. Nemawashi’s basic meaning was a horticultural term meaning something like ‘root-tending’. The dictionary suggested it could be figuratively used to mean ‘consensus-building’ or ‘greasing the wheels’.
It turned out that there were plenty of business books written in English about nemawashi. In the 80s , foreign management consultants were making their own fortunes by writing books explaining the secrets to Japan’s booming economy.
Instead of out-shouting each other in contentious meetings like in the West, they’d say, Japanese salariman used nemawashi decision-making. They tended the roots, carefully nurturing their ideas, over weeks of asynchronous bilateral meetings between all decision-makers, usually over late-night drinks in quiet bars.
Nemawashi can be slow, but it does mean that by the time the meeting happens, everyone has had their chance to shape it and is on board, and committed.
Textile trading turned out to be a particularly favourable environment for advanced nemawashi studies. From raw materials to apparel, textiles is a particularly labour-intensive industry, which makes it politically sensitive, which creates a lot of loopholes.
I learned not just about yarn counts and fabric finishing processes, but also quota systems, export insurance schemes, foreign exchange futures - and Japanese corporate culture’s strategies to game them all, carefully nurtured, late at night, one-on-one, in quiet bars.
As my Japanese improved, I could tend to the roots in Japanese, further greasing the wheels.
My lack of professional ambition turned out to be the piston behind my meteoric rise through the salariman ranks.
Over the next four years, my employers gave me free twice-weekly Japanese lessons, in office time.
They flew me business class to rich-country customers and developing-world suppliers.
They paid me handsomely. They promoted me rapidly, making me the youngest section manager in the company’s 150-year history.
They selected me as one of 10 non-Japanese staff from around the world to spend 3 months of Head Office Training.
When the other 9 returned home, my employers gave me another 6 months in Japan, spent in intensive language courses, and on-the-job training with colleagues at Head Office.
As my Japanese improved, my relationships with my colleagues deepened.
Less tatemae office formality, more hon'ne bar-room true feelings.
Throughout, I was in regular contact with my salariman advisors, Daisuke, Osamu and Yutaka.
They helped me break through the tatemae lies but as I was about to discover, I was still yet to discover the hon'ne truth about one of my three Japanese friends…
I was yet to be present when one of them finally realised the extraordinary thing that the second had known for some time about the third.
In Episode 8 - Yakuza Studies, my understanding of my friends reaches new depths, or so I thought.