One of the risks of living in a foreign country is that it is tempting to take one’s experiences as a representation of the whole, and to generalize about a culture based on the activities of the people that happen to be around you.
I largely am able to avoid these kinds of things by adding, “In my experience…” or “To me, it seems that…” to the beginning of my sentences. That covers me semantically, but I also need to make sure that mentally I don’t start prejudging people that I meet for the first time.
Having said that, I do feel that after living here in Japan for 12 years that I am able to make some very generalized observations about Japanese people and Japanese culture. One of those observations applies to specialization.
Many Japanese people that I meet here work at a company where they are considered generalists. In university they study some topic, and occasionally they get a job at a big company that allows them to use their university knowledge to help the company succeed. However, it seems to me that a vast majority of people hired by major Japanese companies are asked to forget whatever they learned in university, and start from scratch learning their new company’s business. They learn about how to work at the company, and maybe after five or ten years they are transferred to another department which may or may not be related to their previous work, and they start to learn something else. They are treated as a general worker (many Japanese workers don’t have job titles) and are expected to do whatever work is assigned to them.
However, when a Japanese person is given a task (or chooses one for themselves), they throw themselves wholeheartedly into it. This task becomes their entire focus, and they will do whatever it takes to improve their skills in doing it. Many older Japanese people are praised as masters of one art or another, and the greatest praise is reserved for the people that do one thing so well as to be the best. What you actually do, whether it is artistic or not, or useful or not, these questions don’t need to come up. Someone focused on something, got really good at it, and gained the respect of other people because of it.
I see this a lot in the daily lives of the people around me. They want to become better at English, so they hire a teacher, they make a study space at home, they spare no expense for materials, and they give up their free time in the hopes that they can become “better” at English. School kids join a sports club and so they practice after school every day, at least one day of the weekend, and every fiber of their being is about doing well in their sport.
What all this means to me is that there isn’t a lot of room for people who dabble. The people that try lots of things just a little bit, the people that are slightly talented at several things have no improved social status or respect compared to the people that focus on one thing.
Personally I think that dabbling is a good thing. Thanks to dabbling I’ve been able to find an interest in things I never thought I would, and to try new experiences (especially when travelling). Getting a taste of something new is, to me, a way of maintaining your youth and wonder in a world that is getting smaller and smaller the older you become.
One of the things that comes up in conversation with Japanese people sometimes is the fact that I have had several different careers in my life. I worked as a winemaker, a web designer, an English teacher, and there’s probably lots of other little jobs I did in between those. For the Japanese people I talk to, the idea that you could be working in a wine company and in the back of your mind be thinking about web design, well, it is a totally alien concept. For them, you work in job A so there is no room to even consider thinking about job B.
Because of this focus on single-minded improvement in one task, I do think that sometimes Japanese people have less flexibility and don’t do as well “thinking on their feet”. Sudden situations that come up and require quick decisions and skills that are perhaps not as practiced as others may be a challenge.
Japanese people tend to thrive in a world where there are clear rules, black and white distictions, and clear direction. Give them a task, allow them time to practice it, improve it, repeat and repeat it, and you’ll get the best quality work you’ve ever seen.
As I alluded to in the beginning of this post, these are simply generalizations and I am sure there are plenty of exceptions to what I have observed so far, but I do think it is a really interesting aspect of the culture.
