Turning Japanese? I really think so.

Author’s Note: This essay is election-related but not political. If you can’t read one more word about the election and have to skip this one, I understand. Come back after, and let’s see if I was right.

I am flying 30,000 feet above sea level, white-knuckled and consumed with feelings of dread.

It isn’t a fear of flying. Although I’ve never been particularly fond of flying, I don’t ever experience a panic response. And, truth be told, I am flying Air Canada in Business Class, and not for the first time. My experience making this trip, in this fashion, on this particular airline, has been consistently outstanding for several years now.

It isn’t concern about my destination. I have been to Tokyo, Japan, the headquarters of my employer’s global parent company, five or six times over the past decade. I actually love the city. It’s clean and busy and easy to navigate. It’s familiar enough to be comforting and unusual enough to be exciting. And Tokyo residents wore masks before wearing masks was cool.

It isn’t the gathering I am headed toward. I am blessed to be making an annual pilgrimage to spend time with a very small group of professional colleagues – I dare say friends – from the US, the UK and Japan to brainstorm, plan, compare notes, socialize and the like. It’s quality time spent with people I genuinely like, respect and value.

No, the source of my unease is the image of what I anticipate returning home to. I’ve barely left, and I’m dreading the flight home.

I remember 2018, an earlier Tokyo trip for a different meeting. The rooms were larger and the sessions were longer. The content was interesting but less relevant to my position at my company. I remember coming back from a long day, into a graciously appointed hotel room, where I immediately and mindlessly turned on the television. Instantly I was watching international news coverage of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Footage taken from helicopters showed students and faculty crouch-walking from the building to presumed safety behind parked cars; a line of police vehicles with stone-faced law enforcement officers behind them. The camera was shaky, not quite black and white but grainy and washed out in that news footage kind of way.

Or maybe that’s just how my mind has retained it.

Despite living in Pennsylvania, fully 1,000 miles from the shooting, I was instantly connected to the victims and their parents. I was kin, separated by cruel fate and a dozen time zones.

It was Valentine’s Day. Seventeen students and staff were murdered.

Despite the abject horror of the incident and the surreal experience of watching it from the other side of the globe, I can tell you I was fine when I landed in Philadelphia a few days later. The moment was past, if no less significant. Life went on in Pennsylvania, and most other places. I’m not proud of that.

I’m especially not proud when I check the internet to find US school shootings have increased every year (save 2020 when the school year was halved by Covid) since Parkland. Especially not proud to discover that this year alone, as of October 15, there have been 58 school shootings, killing 28 and injuring at least 72 more students and staff.

As awful as that is, as bad as it sounds, life went on.

So what’s different about this trip? This time I will likely walk purposefully back to my room and turn on the TV mindfully. I will probably glance at my phone during meetings, distracted by what’s going on during and following the election.

I completed an absentee ballot and hand-placed it in an official collection location in my county in preparation for the trip that would take me outside the US for the second most important presidential election in the country’s history. (I maintain the very first one, in which there was only a single candidate and the concept of political parties was conceptual at best, remains and will always be the most important election. But this is an undisputed number two.)

As of this writing, I don’t know who will win. I know who I voted for. I know who my wife, my kids, voted for. I know a few people, including some very close to me, are voting differently. I don’t enjoy knowing that, but I accept it. And until there is a winner, that knowledge – who voted for whom – honestly has no teeth. But it will. Regardless of who wins, it will.

Because what I am grinding my teeth about, turning the screws on a rancid, worsening headache, is the knowledge that I will likely be returning to a nation in flames.

A little more than a decade ago, the company that owns my company was bought by another company – one that I’d never heard of: Tokio Marine Group . I couldn’t have been more confused. First off, why was Tokio spelled that way? And second, what did Marine have to do with it? I came to learn, quickly and in some depth, that the Tokio Marine Group is one of the oldest, largest and, frankly, most respected insurance entities on the planet. And while that sounds like it should be intimidating, it never has been.

Rather, I have found my international colleagues – and for purposes of this article, my Japanese colleagues – to be off-the-charts smart, kind and honorable, possessing the kind of integrity you hope for in a colleague but can’t expect. For example, one of the first things I was exposed to was Tokio Marine’s culture of “Good Company,” a trio of commitments that guides its employees worldwide and unites its member companies across geographic, language and business lines. The three tenets are:

• Empower our people.
• Deliver on commitments.
• Look beyond profit. (Said another way: Find ways to help, to give back to our communities)

Elegant and simple, these principles come from a business culture where insurance is thought of as virtuous profession, a profession that exists to help people in their time of need. Almost any US resident over the age of 25 would spit milk out of their nose at the notion of a society that doesn’t vilify insurance companies. It’s an old joke, a meme: Lawyers, insurance companies, used car salesmen. The bottom of the food chain.

Not in Japan. Not at Tokio Marine.

In 2011, when the huge tsunami hit Japan, killing more than 18,000 citizens, claims employees self-organized and left their homes to set up temporary offices in the hardest-hit areas. They took themselves away from their families to help others a little faster. A little better.

That’s the mettle of the people I call my global family. Take that, insurance-haters.

Thanks in large part to my good friend Dr. Christine Murphy Hernandez and insights gained through her talent development programs, I started to learn Japanese business etiquette. It’s useful when traveling, but equally important to watch it play out at home in the US. For example, Japanese ex-pats (in my experience) go out of their way to adapt their behavior to their foster environment. They more than meet Westerners halfway, even adopting American nicknames to make business and socialization easier for the Yankees.

Americans, on the other hand (again, in my experience) are often clumsy and clueless. They learn a little about professional etiquette and then thank God when their Japanese counterparts are forgiving and gracious in the face of so little effort. It isn’t always that embarrassing, but sometimes it is.

Some Japanese business culture rules are actually really useful. For example, they correspond more formally in email – carrying through some of the structure of old-timey business correspondence that many of us have sacrificed as email and texting have become primary in business communication. Another one: Meetings are to share updates and information; you do the work in advance and show up prepared. I confess, that one took a little getting used to. I have spent most of my career flying by the seat of my pants more than I would like to admit.

Another aspect of Japanese business culture is a staunch unwillingness to be confrontational in a meeting. It is not at all unusual to leave a presentation, having received tacit approval and gratitude for one's contribution, only to return home to an email not at all reflective of the information you presented. This is toxic politeness, if such a thing is possible. For someone like me, born and raised in the fast-paced Northeast, a quick train ride from New York City – the epicenter of the world – telling someone they are full of sh*t is a God-given right. And being told you’re full of sh*t is proof the person was listening. We call that validation.

Not in Japan. In Japan, manners matter. There’s a way you’re supposed to exchange business cards that demonstrates you actually recognize and appreciate the role your colleague plays. Seating at meetings, dinners, even cab rides, is a complex matrix based on seniority and hierarchy.

The hardest lessons learned are often the most valuable and always the most lasting. I remember a conference call with one of my earliest Japanese colleagues. We were in a conference room together, connecting via speakerphone with a highly placed broker who was jockeying for position in the new, expanding organization. The broker had requested the introduction, and I was about as charming and helpful as I could be, all while maintaining I had absolutely no standing that would help this individual improve their position, pricing or potential with our company. When the call was over, I clicked off the speakerphone, rolled my eyes dramatically and said to my colleague something like, “Well that was special!”

My Japanese colleague didn’t respond right away, but as I gathered my things and made ready to leave the conference room, he said to me, very evenly, “David. I know you don’t like [broker name]. But he represents a great many of our clients and we will have to find a way to work with him.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed, over my shoulder on the way out. “I ‘get’ people from New York. We’ll be fine.”

The walk back to my office took less than two minutes. In that time, something was bothering me and I couldn’t quite figure what it was. Back in my office I looked out the window and then it occurred to me: I had just been reprimanded! It dawned on me slowly. I was incredulous for a second, and then embarrassed. Obviously, I had overestimated the persuasiveness of my charm. My colleague thought I was pushing back on having to deal with a blowhard. In point of fact, I deal with blowhards all the time! And I’m not too bad at it, as evidenced by my tenure and title.

I had to decide when and how to go back and remediate the situation with my Japanese colleague, whom I liked and admired - and still do. I didn’t want him to think I was “one of those” Americans. I eventually found the right opportunity and tone to reassure him. He never once admitted that I had annoyed him with my judge-y outburst. But I knew. And I took the lesson to heart.

I’m on a plane over the ocean, scrolling through movies on my little screen, not really seeing them. I’m thankful for no Wi-Fi: For the first time in months my phone isn’t blowing up with fundraising texts, not just from the presidential candidates but from at-risk candidates from both parties in states I’ve never even visited. Every ringtone, every street corner cluttered with signs shouting candidates’ names, hits raw nerve. The isolation is better, I think. But the isolation leaves me alone with my thoughts, and that’s not always good, either.

For example, I am imagining the hours after the polls close. I cannot imagine a good outcome – only bad and worse. If one side wins, there will almost certainly be violence. It’s a given. Then will come the courts. The grandstanding. The spin. The antagonism. The vitriol and outrage. Gridlock and divisiveness.

If the other side wins, well that’s that. It will mean fundamental changes to so many of our systems and culture. Gridlock and divisiveness become the best-case scenarios. The US may never be the same, not in my lifetime anyway.

Not that “the same” should be our success metric. Consider how low the bar has become.

I think about my destination, about Japan. I don’t know the language after 10 years, not bothering to learn; now I regret it. I like and admire my colleagues there. I appreciate the virtue they see in our shared profession, the import they place on humanity, accountability, civility. In Japan you don’t talk in a crowded elevator; it’s impolite. In Japan you don’t use your phone on the subway; you have an earpiece, and you text or quietly play a game no one else can hear. During my visits to Tokyo I’ve discovered at least a hundred ways to stick out like a sore thumb, to evoke the proverbial turd in the punch bowl. Show up American. But no one has ever made me feel unwelcome as a result. I once spent a full 10 minutes pantomiming taking a shower - like a character in a Benny Hill sketch - before a store employee helped me locate and purchase bar soap.

No one ever told me to sit down, shut up or go away.

No one ever called me a name or accused me of ruining their island country.

Again, a low bar, but this kind of casual meanness has become table stakes in the US over the last handful of years. We don't demand better of each other, and we don't lead by example. And things get worse.

I’m not stupid. I know the absence of criticism isn’t acceptance. I know there are biases and misgivings, on both sides, all sides, generations deep. And I know Japan has its own problems, some of them even related to the very traits I’ve been extoling as virtues.

Still, I can’t help thinking.

I know everyone dies. Maybe there’s something to be said for being killed with kindness.