TraveLearning!

Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to travel for business. These were of course official trips, but they gave me a chance to learn about the culture, state of affairs, and lifestyles of that particular country. 

So during my stint at Tata Docomo, I used to travel to Tokyo a lot. 

This is just one of the stories which I’d like to share because I found it interesting how different cultures view the same situation in such different ways.  

I was in Japan, and the one thing which struck me to my very core is that the Japanese are the most humble people on this planet ...period. It’s amazing to experience their graciousness. Be it in the way they greet people or the way they respect everyone and everything. Especially if you’re from another country, they will give you all the more respect. Not that they expect it back, because they are as gentle as they are warm and polite. 

This was on the face of it, but in reality, when we spent more time with our Japanese colleagues, it was quite different from what was initially portrayed. Our team had a great rapport with theirs and over time we became comrades, so they opened up to us. Something most Japanese won’t do with foreigners.

One day they said we have to go to a karaoke bar. I a big karaoke fan and so I jumped at the idea. They have a very different kind of karaoke bar where you go into a place and it’s a small private room which seats 5-6 people with a TV and a system, not like we see in India where you go into a pub on karaoke night where everyone is singing and having a gala time. Japanese karaoke is very different but very popular. 

So one of them said, "I’ve finished all my work, but I can’t go home early, so I’m going to tag along with you guys for the karaoke night." 

Quite intrigued I asked why. He said "My wife will think that I’ve lost my job."

 I found that odd, so I probed further. And he said, we are under a lot of pressure from our wives because we have to tell them we are working and we have a job, and everything is hunky dory. So if we go home early they will think we have lost our jobs!" 

What??? Whoa! Phew! That was quite a revelation! 

Because it’s quite the contrary here in India. I was a bit taken aback, feeling, if this is how they actually think, they must be living with a lot of pressure. 

That thought was validated when the guys took me around to see some executive apartments for the Tata guys to stay in while there. So in that exercise we were chatting and he was telling me that stress levels of the Japanese people are very high, because they’re working non-stop, proving and reproving themselves to their bosses so they need to show they’re working nonstop. That’s why they go out to pubs and bars. When they finish late and they go home, their family will think that late means good, and all is well. 

Once when we went to the station of one of the metros, one guy actually pointed out some little noises and other stuff. There was a nice sound of birds chirping, but when you look up in the sky there are no birds. We Indians were wondering why. They said in Japan the stress levels are so high, and the suicide rates are so high, that the government has introduced a lot of soothing sounds to help the people to be more mindful, more relaxed, and less stressed.

So again, great learning - outwardly, very polite, humble, harmless and peaceful, but when you dig a little deeper, you start realising these guys have their own set of pressures and more often than not, they succumb to it. Unfortunately the suicide rates in Japan are among the highest in the world. 

Apart from this, we learned some really good etiquette about how the Japanese sit at a conference table. They have these seating arrangements, very nice and culturally Japanese. So if there’s a contingent of a team of 3-4 people, then you sit exactly opposite each other in terms of designation and peers. That’s to say, the head of their team and the head of your team will sit exactly opposite. Their next in lines will sit exactly opposite and so on and so forth. That was something very nice to learn, from a business culture point of view.

This is just one of the stories from my Travel diaries. 

All in all, my trips to Tokyo brought about some really amazing learning opportunities. 

A phenomenal revelation of Japanese culture as such.

Because....as the saying goes...

“Never Judge a Book by it’s Cover."