Forum - View topicAnswerman - Are Japanese Offices Really That Horrible?
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#861208
Posts: 423 |
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You don't have to work in an office.
No matter where you are, no matter who expects it of you, you don't have to do it. Everyone has the potential to start their own small business, and these problems will never go away anywhere until societies develop to the point where everyone is in business for themselves, and people don't expect an organization to take care of them. I will never understand how people think being an employee is freedom. |
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melmouth
Posts: 167 |
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Perhaps we make the dumb mistake of working for someone else because we lack the capital to start a business AND to live while waiting to see if it will prosper.
Amazingly, the huge groups of people known as "working class" and "poor" commonly lack capital. I guess you didn't realize that, huh? |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2577 Location: Germany |
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I have an office job, due to being a librarian and couldn´t be happier. I can´t even rack up overtime without using these hours in form of days off / shortened work days in a timely manner. The pay is great, so is job security. 2 thumbs up. But i do work for the government.
My uncle on the other hand had his position terminated after taking payed leave for like half a year when his son was born, so the private sector can have it´s thorns over here too. About Japan´s "growing" female work force. These numbers mean nothing if no meaningful positions get created and if basic job security doesn´t exist. That is why prostitution and it´s spin-offs have such a weird standing in Japan, as young women have to do something to make money. A bit like in the middle ages... HBO´s Vice had a segment on this recently. It was pretty interesting. |
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ultimatehaki
Posts: 1090 |
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It's laughable how far from reality this comment is >-> Anyway, pretty much all Asian countries has this problem but Japan is definitely known for it. It's sad seeing how these workers have a feeling of hopelessness to the point they kill themselves even tho they are more than likely doing a great job even without the OT. The whole work ethnic of Japan needs re-working. |
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Chrysostomus
Posts: 335 |
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I love how blatant the gynocentrism becomes when Westerners talk about Japan. Basically, being born a man condemns you to corporate slavery where they even have a word for overworking people to death. One of the most insane working cultures on the planet but it's a really, really bad thing that women are discouraged from it. Never mind the fact that it's a working culture absolutely at odds with the work-life balance that's the #1 priority for women around the globe.
"But women should have the choice to work themselves to death, like men, and be treated exactly as the men are." Okay, sure. But is there ANYONE, inside Japan, seriously arguing that men shouldn't work if they don't want to, and that they should be taken seriously by their parents and their girlfriends and everyone else? That they should seek financial welfare from a career woman and they shouldn't be judged as a lazy bum for doing so? Is anyone arguing for true equality? Yeah, I don't think so. |
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Watanabefan
 Posts: 152 |
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The famous Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino did a book called Out that dealt with some of this. The main character used to work at an office and basically got shunned by her bosses when she didn't resign as soon as her first child was born. The corporate expectation was that her job was basically a glorified temp gig until she was ready to start shooting out babies.
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#861208
Posts: 423 |
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There are tons of ways to start a business without capital, at least now that the internet is a thing. I'm not talking about people poor enough that they don't have access to the internet, I'm talking about people with enough internet access and free time to be reading an internet forum. By "potential", I meant intellectually. People poor enough to lack a computer with basic internet access - which is the only capital you need - still have the intellectual capacity to work for themselves, just like anyone else. I'm not telling extremely poor people what they should do. I'm really not telling anyone what they should do right now. I'm saying that this is a trend I'd like to see take off. And also, the same ideas that would get average middle-class office grunts out from under the influence of their corporation, if they became culturally normal and widespread in a society, would also get extremely poor people out from under the influence of whichever factors you'd say are what keep them down (which is a debate I'm not trying to get into). (Ideas meaning how others react and what others expect you to do. If you started an online business today with the goal of quitting your job in a year, people around you might look at you like you're crazy. If you made it a success, others might follow suit, and in five years, the people who thought you were crazy might not react that way towards the next person they see making a plan like that. If enough people do this to make it a trend, industries would shift to fit that pattern. Services for extremely poor people could also follow this trend, providing the resources to start that sort of business, and internet access, instead of providing resources to find another retail job. If you think poor people aren't smart enough for this, then you're insulting them, not me.) Last edited by #861208 on Fri Apr 27, 2018 1:10 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Brand
 Posts: 1028 |
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I work in a field where it is fairly easy to freelance full time. But to get the work and the clients I need to work full time is the type of work I don't want to do. So, I work in an office where a sales force handles that part and I am a 100% fine with that. I don't feel any sort of yoke around my neck. Also, at least in the U.S. healthcare is a big factor as it is very expensive to purchase on your own. |
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#861208
Posts: 423 |
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Again, I'm not talking about you right now, I'm talking about trends that should happen. You might not feel a yoke around your neck, but others that work your same job might - say, if another company in your industry were sexually harassing women with the same job that you do, and expecting them to marry and quit; or underpaying people, along gender lines or otherwise; forcing you to use some outdated technology because your company signed 15-year contracts for it, while the makers of a better alternative are struggling to find customers because of that. There are generally accepted ways of dealing with these problems, but I think they'd be much better solved if everyone - not just women, not just people who feel they're not paid enough, not just people who feel there are unnecessary limits pushed on them, but everyone who recognizes that these things are possible - were to choose to freelance instead. If enough people decided that they would rather freelance - individually or in teams - the industry would have to follow suit. Some third-party would create services that give freelances everything your boss gives you, but without being tied to one company's culture and policies. Healthcare will get to where it needs to be, or you can move to a different country. I don't mean that as an insult, I think living in different countries is something everyone should do. (Again, I'm talking about trends on a ~10-year time frame or so. And I'm not trying to launch a discussion about American politics.) All of the problems with freelancing are caused by the fact that the majority doesn't freelance. I say that what needs to happen is that, instead of accepting that as a fact that can't change, people should push it towards the tipping point, and increase the proportion of people who do freelance to the point where the rest of the world has to accommodate. Which would help people who don't like office culture for whatever reason, and also help extremely poor people by making it so that irrelevant things aren't held against them. Edit: Oh yes, and important thing - some jobs, like government jobs, would still make sense to be permanent for one employer, but conditions and expectations would still improve for them as a side effect. |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5498 |
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So how did it come to this? I thought Douglas MacArthur re-write all of Japan's laws from the ground up, so stuff like this would not be.
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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I would note that this description is probably the most perfect example of a job that damages psycho-social health possible. Besides the long hours and dysfunctional, backstabbing coworker dynamics described elsewhere in the article, this shows the most poisonous thing a job can have: pointlessness. These jobs are at best artifact positions from when offices needed a typing pool and at worst office decorating. They're paid to sit there and play-act productivity, writing documents that print directly into the shredder, from the sound of things, such that their output does nothing for the company, society, or their careers. Some bits of declining sexism may actually make this worse, as making tea at least meant someone had something to drink. Unfortunately, the job not really having any role besides sapping the sanity of those who hold it means that there's no fix beyond scrapping it entirely, leaving those people unemployed. Of course, it's interesting to note that the Netflix sub and dub say that Aggretsuko is an "accountant." Is that a liberal translation to a job with a similar reputation for unhappiness in the west, or have companies started giving OL's titles that at least imply actual work? As for starting your own business, the show addresses the practical issues. Addressing the actual root causes would have been well off topic for a show about OL's, but I suspect the main issue is the economic niche for small businesses is over-saturated by vanity shops started by bored housewives who don't want or can't handle real jobs (see: MLM) and aging businessmen who don't want to admit they're retired. It's similar to how creatives have a tough time making money because there's already more trash novels and terrible songs than anyone would be able to consume in a lifetime coming out every day. Also, small businesses are overrated. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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I have to admit, this variant of "the solution to capitalism is to capitalism harder" is new to me. But I still don't think it would help. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people forming companies, and working on specialized tasks. Doing so makes countless things possible that would be completely impossible under an everyone-is-self-employed model. The problem is that it's commonplace for employees to be treated like productivity-generating automatons instead of human beings, and this tends to get worse the further down the corporate ladder you go, peaking at literal sweatshops in third-world countries. Decentralization makes this problem worse, not better, because there's even less structure and regulation; we're seeing this now with the "sharing economy," which is mainly an(other) excuse for companies to provide no benefits and dispose of workers who don't perform flawlessly. If everyone worked for themselves, there wouldn't even be an Uber executive to blame when a single one-star review destroys your credibility and ruins your life, and everyone would be at risk of that sort of thing all the time. I don't know what the solution to our dehumanizing economy is, but doing away with our minimal ability to keep the troublesome aspects of it under control definitely isn't the answer. |
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AsParallel
Posts: 1 |
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Not wanting to ragebait, but this is also life for female software developers in the US. We imported a lot of the bad parts of Asian culture along with the Asian managers.
Reality: I've put in 100+ hours a week for the past 8 weeks delivering an understaffed project, and a consistent min 70 the rest of the time for the past 6 years. I have two blustery, preening, bombastic asian managers who take credit for pretty much all of it and didn't even bother attending a single meeting until they saw the project was a slam dunk they could mushroom stamp their names on. I'm frequently singled out to fetch things, do other people's work, take notes, draft training material and update documents that should be the PMs job. The one time I said no, I got "not a team player" on my performance review, which cost me a $15K bonus. I only see promotions and pay increases when I lateral and go somewhere else, but it's always the same job and the same situation. And it's the same for every female coworker I've ever had, and all my friends. It's [censored]. And it doesn't matter; I'm used to it, I can deal, I love the actual engineering part of my work, when I get to do it. It is what it is. For better or worse, Retsuko is my spirit animal. |
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meruru
Posts: 475 |
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Want to talk about insane overwork culture? The United States, land of no guaranteed paid vacation, maternity leave, or extended sick time/temporary disability leave. Heck, most places don't even offer true sick days, you just get to use up your PTO or come into work sick like everyone else. You know no other industrialized county, including Japan, has no guaranteed paid maternity leave? Japan, which has such a bad reputation for treating female workers poorly, whether it's deserved or not, is better than the United States on that score. We hardly have any national holidays where all companies close either. Japan has a lot in comparison. Not that I'm saying America is worse, but put it in comparison, and maybe you'll change your mind about Japan being so bad in particular. We might not have the long work weeks (though some industries expect that too, without paying overtime either), but we also probably end up working more days.
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Aquamine-Amarine
Posts: 276 |
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Are you ignorantly assuming that conservatism is sexist? It's not, stop lying. God I hate this website so much. |
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