I really enjoyed this film but was wondering how commonplace this behavior is in the Japanese workplace. Much of what it shown is appalling to American office workers. How typical is this?
shareFor all its advancements in technology Japan is still a hierachical society and pretty archaic in its internal office politics.
shareI'd like to think that because of this rigid hierarchial structure and bizarre business practice, most of the large trading corporations like Yumimoto are in the state of decline, while most Japanese women no longer feel any bit ashamed for being single past 30, and "gaijin" workers are sometimes hired as "saviors" to pull them out of recession.
shareI worked at sony from 1994 to 1995...while I only worked there for 15 months, it was the most exhilarating and terrifying experience of my life.
My thinking going into it was "will I be smart enough or will I be a hard enough worker?" but I came to learn that I was just as smart as any japanese person and worked as hard or harder then many of them.
I describe working for a japanese company as like going to boot camp - people yell at you for doing something incorrectly, yet what they are asking you to do is mostly intended to "break you down" rather than teach you something useful. While I worked with many kind and intelligent Japanese people (who were, on avg, much more friendly to me than the avg. american coworker) I have to tell you that the Japanese culture is diametrically opposed to western culture. I make no claim as to which is better, just that they are about as far apart as any two cultures...
One minor point...in the film, the office area that they work in looks very nice by Japanese standards...while Japanese office buildings feature some very exotic and modern (aka cool) appearances from the outside, the insides are usually very barren.
It is true about working women in japan...you are out by age 30 - the few that are left are either secretaries or one of the very very few being groomed for top mgmt.
Hello All,
Fear and Trembling might be the word, but it's more less the same anywhere I have traveled in the World. As Thomas Jefferson once lamented, 'traveling makes you wiser, but less happy'.
I have a particularly nuanced vantage point because I am married to a Japanese woman, and I have worked for two large companies in between my slog for a Ph.D. I have vacationed and worked in Japan as well as the U.S., so I feel a sense of unease when watching Fear and Trembling. I worked for the mega-corporation that went bust, called HomeBase, after finishing my bachelors degree, and then quickly retreated to the Ivory Womb for my post-bac degree in language and film. In order to keep my relationship alive at the time, I took a sabbatical from my University and applied to an English teaching corporation called GEOS in Tokyo of all places. GEOS was one of the very esteemed English-teaching/instructional companies in Japan, but was going deeper and deeper into the red because of overexpansion and corporate bureacracy. Much as the ironic stereotypes dance in our collective unconscious (Americans export massive amounts of produce, but don't eat any of it; likewise the French sell lots of perfume and make-up, but use little of it), they manage to stay on the stage. GEOS was losing major ground at the time to start-up language companies like GABA (where my wife worked), which had moved to using computers for accounting and scheduling of students and teachers. GEOS was like living inside of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. No one had an idea what they were doing. Abilities and intelligences were often trammeled by authors of virtuous intent. Much of my training did little to prepare me for the other unsaid difficulties of living in a culture where shame, pride and joy were as differently rearranged in the room as a lamp put on a conveyer belt. I had to--like Amelie in Stupeur and Tremblent--put my students dates in a little book with a lot of other students, use punch cards fill in meaningless dates and work plans for my companies appeasement--all of which was a great distraction of my duties to teach the students, not inscribe them inside accounting books. This was bizarre because in an area like Akihabara (the electric city) you were witness to some of the most amazing technologies on earth (cell phones that talked through your jawline so you could hear in loud, busy terminals; plasma screens before Americans had them). And of course, being an American, you could never tell if someone was angry at you, proud of you, bashful or indifferent to you because you lacked an ability to speak Japanese and understand the slight bodily gestures that comes with any language.
The film is largely accurate, but I can't help but find fault in the satire chiefly because I don't think the director had spent enough time in Japan to give added complexity to this. Japanese people can be very giving and tender, so the S&M relationship built between Amelie and her stunning Superior-Matrix is potentially dangerous if you had never been to Japan. In 1990, I can tell you that outsiders were welcome and treated more like glimmering trinkets than as asbestos smear-jobs. Currently, I find the book/film's presumption hard to believe because while business and OLD Japanese customs and values concerning harmony are diametrically opposed, the film and the author seem to forget that harmony had gone out with baby and the bathwater during the neon-infested Jap Bubble 80's. Profit and success were number one.
In America, with bemused Liberal Arts degree in hand, I suffered worse as a retail clerk at HomeBase. My college education served no purpose as I was subjugated to a computer screen and laser gun to check-out customers. My boss made sure 'we were always working', and he made sure that everything about us was as controlled as the lighting fixtures above us. I will never forget when I was instructed the proper distance of how far I had to leave before I was TOO far from my register. He even counted the steps from my till. Isn't this just as crazy and absurd as a translator cleaning toilets?
The corporations I worked for were both humiliating, but for varying reasons and rationales. Perhaps the one problem I had with the film was its lack of boffo, extremist humor or the fact that it failed to show a balanced and complicated view of the workers. Is Tokyo really that awful. Sometimes. But the lives inside of its Japanese workers deserve the same kind of complexity that Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansan was given in Lost in Translation (also in 2004).
[deleted]
Well, I don't know if Corneau should be given that much credit for his directing. I really don't think he rises to the Renoir-Godard-Gondry heights of filmic bliss. Just look at his back catalogue of previous works. However, Kaori Tsuji and Sylvie Testud certainly deserve credit for their acting though. They were easily two of the best performances I saw that year.
'Sometimes onesidedness can bring out truths better than balance' Really? Like a kind of Donald Rumsfeld version of TRUTH? TRUTH, if you want the Kantian version, should be weighed out by collecting multiple perspectives of a moment in time. I would say that those kind of extreme kinds of truths work best when its satire, but the film is oddly unfunny at times because it's angle is not aimed toward both sides of misperception. And it isn't attempting satire in that kind of relentless one-sideness that makes a great satire brim and burn with ideas. Tokyo isn't at the office (although Corneau would like to think that). It exists beyond that office door. And the main fault I find in Corneau's translation is that he cuts out Sylvie's narrative about Tokyo that is exciting and complex as well as funny (this was originally in the book). The problem with Corneau is that his pacing of the film is rather dull and he doesn't build up the paranoia as well as let's say 'Office Space' or 'Best in Show'.
While I did enjoy the film, I thought the managers gestures and facial reactions were out of keeping with how the Japanese handle 'misconduct'. Kaori's reactions were much more accurate to the non-verbal forms of communication present in Japan. This really isn't accurate--this is a kind of mistruth that is obvious and not funny. It is a bit of Orientalizing that just works at creating more false images of Japan. Every culture deserves to be satirized, but only if you have the proper source material to work from.
I worked in a Japanese school from 2003-5 and found that the reality of Japanese office politics was pretty well rendered in this film.
In the Japanese office (and society in general), all relationships are rigidly heirarchical, there is no real 'communication' (a lot of talking about things and building 'consensus', but that is all just form and the decisions have already been made), and it is entirely acceptable for superiors to yell at, bully, or belittle their inferiors, and generally behave in a manner abhorrent to most Westerners in the workplace.
Fubuki's speech about the primacy of Japanese intellect was also something I witnessed more than once, usually from older Japanese men, so it was interesting to see those words coming from a young Japanese female. However, I found most Japanese that I met who were under about 35 years of age to be reasonably open-minded and not beset by the anachronism and blinkered racism of many older (55+) Japanese... I find parallel attitudes in older Weserners, so that is not an isolated criticism of the Japanese.
The most important lesson I learned in the Japanese Office Space was that everything is about form, forget substance. Observe the form and you'll get along.
I think that this film was more even-handed than you assume.
It's also really more about Amelie than anything else.
When we're Amelie's age, many of us don't really have a good objective stance on where we are and where we ought to go. Thus our first-laid plans sometimes end in nought and seem a bit laughable later on. In this case, she had a romanticized, childish notion of how it would be go back to Japan and "be Japanese".
I think the "rigid Japanese corporation" was in this film a bit of hyperbolical metaphor for when our youthful dreams first clash directly with reality.
And she wasn't humiliated only because of the "rigid Japanese-ness" of the company: she did in fact flub some fairly simple tasks.
I’m an America currently finishing my degree in Australia and I have a Japanese wife. We got married last year. I’ve only visited Japan once and this movie really freaked me out. I study engineering and if I am ever granted the ability to work for a Japanese company, I hope to god such unprofessional attitudes and procedures are not practiced. I can never hold my tongue yet at work I believe professionalism is the most important ideal.
shareI think the time period this film was set in is very important as well. 1990 was effectively the twilight of the common hierarchical Japanese corporation, portrayed in this film by the fictitious Yumimoto (blatant allusion to the Sumitomo Group) Group.
The Japanese economy had seen its peak and companies like this were destined to suffer due to the rigidity of its structure in the economic stagnation that would follow. It's the guys like Saito and Omochi who symbolise old corporate Japan; its emphasis on rules, degredation of women in the workplace and also its deep suspicion of Western business values. Tenshi symbolises the new breed of Japanese worker, a realisation that this strict adherence to outdated values will lead to disaster for the company and also a belief that women can contribute to the company if they have the skills for it.
This split in the Japanese business society is represented by the 'boycott' of Amelie's toilet in the film. The guys who continue to go to the toilet remain dedicated to the old values (which had helped Japanese economic growth earlier but were now ineffecient in a globalised economy) and the people who went to the 43rd floor recognised change was needed in the workplace to maintain efficiency and competitiveness.
Of course some of the chauvanistic behaviour seen in the film remains in the Japanese workplace, but it is changing; it has to if Japan wants to stay a powerful economic force. Some old values in Japanese companies remain desireable: the commitment to common goals and the loyalty to the job. However, the degredation of women in the workplace is coming to an end and they are evolving from their previous roles as 'Office Flowers' and potential marriage prospects for men in the company into worthwhile contributors.
I think that's one of the most interesting posts I've ever read!
I think that's one of the most interesting posts I've ever read!
I have just watched this movie and I'm starting the book today, but I got curious about one aspect: I was shocked at the physical aggression, I mean the way Fubuki and Omochi would drag Amelie by the arm out of the room. Would something like that actually have happened? Or am I missing something? I mean, the Japanese are portraied as rather formal and I noticed that people avoid touching each other in daily behaviour, but when they got upset they had those rather violent impulses that didn't seem to fit. And what about all that yelling at subordinates? Would that happen in a Japanese corporation?
share[deleted]