LITMIR.BIZ

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side in a single step. The street had a pedestrian traffic light. The light was red. The streets were completely and totally deserted except for the two of us. Having lived for years in New York I instinctively moved to cross. My friend reached out his arm and prevented me.

      “Red light,” he said.

      “Oh come on,” I said. “It’s completely deserted. No cars are coming. No one else is around. Why would we let a dumb, inanimate machine tell us if it’s safe to cross?”

      “Arupaato-san, of course I know it is safe to cross. But I have the inner strength to stand here and wait for the green signal. That is the problem with you gaijin. You are weak. You lack the discipline to stand here and wait for the green light.”

      It was an argument that was hard to refute, from the Japanese perspective anyway. We gaijin don’t work on Saturdays. We might do overtime once in a while, but not as a regular thing, and we expect to get paid extra for it. We don’t share desks at work and expect to have a whole desk all to ourselves. We complain if the offices we work in are more crowded than the legal limits imposed by the municipal fire department. We don’t think smoking should be allowed in the office. We don’t think women with the same job description as men should automatically be required to make tea (coffee), wear uniforms when men doing the same job don’t, or neaten up everyone’s desk at the end of the day. We sometimes allow the people who work for us to tell us that we’re wrong and we even get angry when they fail to advise us that the truck they see roaring down the road, which we haven’t noticed, is about to flatten us. Not only don’t gaijin do the many basic things that every Japanese company worker understands, is expected to do, and expects others to do, but we’re not even aware of most of them.

      Hence the solution of physically walling off the office that was Tokuma International from the rest of the Tokuma companies housed in the same building. Not only were the walls meant to protect the gaijin within from clashing with the normal Japanese people working nearby, but they were also meant to protect the Japanese workers from exposure to the gaijin next door and its gaijin-friendly Japanese staff. Tokuma International was the only no-smoking part of the company. No one worked on Saturday. The secretary didn’t wear a standard issue office lady (OL) uniform or clean desks (OK, she did make coffee). Each person had their own desk. And we had a reasonable amount of space to work in.

      For those unfamiliar with the look and feel of a typical Japanese corporate business office, they typically look very much like the chaotic homicide squad rooms in American TV crime dramas, only more crowded and less well organized, and with no private offices for the lieutenants. The meeting rooms look exactly like the interrogation rooms where the suspects are grilled and bullied into confessing to crimes. Only the company’s president on the executive floor would have his own office. Even presidents of smaller subsidiary companies might share a desk with one or more assistants, though they would have larger desks than everyone else.

      Even the offices of major Japanese corporations look as if Godzilla came rampaging through and management decided the cost of cleaning up or repair wasn’t justified. The employees are Japanese. They’ll make do. Each floor of a Japanese office building is generally designed to be used as a single, large open space. In even the most famous corporations, the staff share desks. Four or six employees to a desk, seated on both sides of it, facing each other with a computer or stacks of files serving as a semi-porous middle barrier. A single printer, copier, and fax machine is shared by an entire floor. Sometimes by two floors, and people might have to make a trip upstairs or down to pick up a printed or faxed document.

      Tokuma Shoten’s offices sat in an impressively stylish architect-designed building. But the offices themselves were designed for Japanese employees. The Tokuma International office on the other hand, was designed for gaijin. Inside its newly erected walls, each of the four original Tokuma International employees had his/her own reasonably sized desk and computer. We had a printer, copier and fax machine for four people. We had a sofa and two armchairs for casual meetings and a table and four desk chairs for meetings where papers and documents had to be spread out. We had bookcases full of relevant but seldom-used legal and industry tomes plus massive Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionaries. We had a display cabinet containing one of every consumer product or book Studio Ghibli had ever produced.

      Our tenth-floor office also had large corner windows with views that extended all the way out to Tokyo Bay. From my desk I could see all of Japan’s various modes of transportation at a single glance. There was the shinkansen Bullet Train just slowing on its final glide toward Tokyo Station. The various color-coded JR local and long-distance lines came and went every few minutes. The newly built and driverless Yurikamome train zipped along on rubber wheels toward the Odaiba entertainment area and the Big Site convention center. The aging but still graceful Monorail, a leftover from the 1964 Olympics, leaned precariously leftward as it rounded a curve on its way to Haneda Airport.

      There were the gracefully arching branches of the Shuto, the overhead highways. These were clogged with traffic that barely moved all day. Once or twice a day I could spot a ferry just easing into its berth at the Takeshiba piers after completing its twenty-four-hour trip from one of the far-away Izu-Ogasawara Islands, incongruously an official part of metropolitan Tokyo. There was the newly built Rainbow Bridge standing astride the harbor and linking it to the island of Odaiba. The bridge was silvery white in the morning sunshine or bathed in colored lights against a hazy pink and purple sky at dusk.

      All day, passenger jet aircraft banked low over Tokyo Bay on their final approach to Haneda Airport. Immediately below, bustling Shinbashi’s wide main streets were packed with cars and busses mired in the heavy traffic. The warren of narrow pedestrian-only alleys in the mizu shobai (bar) district were mostly empty in the morning and crammed with wandering pedestrians once the evening rush began. At the beginning and end of the lunch hour, which everyone took at exactly the same time, the sidewalks were full of people.

      Just behind our building, ground had been broken for the soon-to-be new modern high-rise district of Shiodome. But the initial digging had unearthed a forgotten mansion, a daimyo yashiki, and now all construction was on hiatus while anthropologists used toothbrushes to excavate Edo-era teacups and teapots from the muddy soil. The original Shinbashi train station, Japan’s very first, had also been discovered nearby and was similarly being excavated and restored.

      It was a spectacular view out my office window. And I have to admit, I spent time enjoying it. Only Mr. Tokuma’s own office two floors up had so special and so expansive a view of Tokyo. His was, of course, much bigger and much better.

      To populate our special office, Suzuki, always conscious of the interpersonal dynamics of the workplace, had hand-picked Tokuma International’s initial operating staff. To begin with, there was one male from the Tokuma publishing side of the business with experience in computer games and accounting. And there was one female from Daiei Pictures with experience in overseas film sales and a good knowledge of Tokuma politics.

      To avoid the potential for sexual complications at work, Suzuki made sure that the male staff member was younger and majime (boring), and that the female staff member was the senpai (senior) in terms of industry knowledge and experience. This, he believed, combined with his having specifically chosen two people who he was sure would not find each other attractive, would preclude any workplace complications from an office romance. As it turned out, these two original employees ended up marrying each other about a year later and left the company.

      Since nearly all of Tokuma International’s business was with people from outside of Japan, a secretary who could speak English was needed, or at least one who could receive phone calls convincingly in English. None was available from inside the Tokuma Group (a sign of a truly Japanese company), so we proceeded to hire one from the outside. This gave me the opportunity for firsthand experience of how Japanese companies hire their employees, a process that differs somewhat from how Western companies do it.

      Suzuki let me know that he had contacted an employment agency and had scheduled appointments with three prospective candidates. The first candidate, a young woman in her early twenties, was shown into a conference room accompanied by a representative from the agency, and we were joined by three

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