lack of communication skills
friday, 20 june 2008
12h20
yesterday, i went for lunch to this "cuban" restaurant which served jambalaya and burritos -- you can imagine how cuban the whole experience was. i went with a colleague from work, a u.s. professor who's been in japan for a while now. talking with him revealed me much about this so poorly understood culture. i learned, for example, about how the compensation system in companies and universities works in japan. from my conversations with my japanese friends and my little research on japanese workers' productivity and their satisfaction at work, i have learned that there's very little variance in the salary of workers within the same tenure-skill category.
the amazing thing is that workers seem unable to negotiate their salaries and one very important reason for this seems to be that they simply don't talk about it. the topic is so not discussed that, after my colleague's friends advised him against raising the issue with his supervisors-to-be when he got the job here, he then realized that his pay would be extremely low compared to his former job and in spite of what the prevailing "market" wage was for people in similar positions. only six months later, when he was about to quit, did he receive a letter stating that he had been "promoted" and would receive a huge pay increase retroactive to his first day on the job!!
how did that happen? well, apparently -- and even more bizarrely --, wages at public universities are set by the ministry of education for every single worker... but then they are regulated by the school, so they can change this salary to whatever they want later on. that's all very weird but the strangest thing is that the school never even told him this would happen so the poor guy must have been depressed for half a year thinking he had made the worst career move ever.
now, it seems as though this sort of miscommunication is very common. foreigners are often confused because they don't know exactly what a japanese person implies by something she did or said... and japanese people who have lived abroad say that even they don't know what their countrymen (and women) mean in many occasions... and i guess locals who've never been abroad would think the same if they only knew any better!
i can perfectly kimagine now a wife who leaves her husbane, maybe because she had to be single to apply for a job, or claim an inheritance, or something... only to tell him six months later, oh, nevermind, it's ok; i just did it for the job, but now i got it with the nice compensation package and all, and now we can get back together and make it up for all the sex and good memories we missed in the meantime.
now i think i begin to understand the whole suicide thing!
12h20
yesterday, i went for lunch to this "cuban" restaurant which served jambalaya and burritos -- you can imagine how cuban the whole experience was. i went with a colleague from work, a u.s. professor who's been in japan for a while now. talking with him revealed me much about this so poorly understood culture. i learned, for example, about how the compensation system in companies and universities works in japan. from my conversations with my japanese friends and my little research on japanese workers' productivity and their satisfaction at work, i have learned that there's very little variance in the salary of workers within the same tenure-skill category.
the amazing thing is that workers seem unable to negotiate their salaries and one very important reason for this seems to be that they simply don't talk about it. the topic is so not discussed that, after my colleague's friends advised him against raising the issue with his supervisors-to-be when he got the job here, he then realized that his pay would be extremely low compared to his former job and in spite of what the prevailing "market" wage was for people in similar positions. only six months later, when he was about to quit, did he receive a letter stating that he had been "promoted" and would receive a huge pay increase retroactive to his first day on the job!!
how did that happen? well, apparently -- and even more bizarrely --, wages at public universities are set by the ministry of education for every single worker... but then they are regulated by the school, so they can change this salary to whatever they want later on. that's all very weird but the strangest thing is that the school never even told him this would happen so the poor guy must have been depressed for half a year thinking he had made the worst career move ever.
now, it seems as though this sort of miscommunication is very common. foreigners are often confused because they don't know exactly what a japanese person implies by something she did or said... and japanese people who have lived abroad say that even they don't know what their countrymen (and women) mean in many occasions... and i guess locals who've never been abroad would think the same if they only knew any better!
i can perfectly kimagine now a wife who leaves her husbane, maybe because she had to be single to apply for a job, or claim an inheritance, or something... only to tell him six months later, oh, nevermind, it's ok; i just did it for the job, but now i got it with the nice compensation package and all, and now we can get back together and make it up for all the sex and good memories we missed in the meantime.
now i think i begin to understand the whole suicide thing!
posted by adrián at 12:41
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