I\'d like to hear some opinions on Japan. Especially from people who\'ve actually lived in Japan and worked in Japan and stuff like that.
My main reason for this is that I was born and raised in the U.S., and now I currently work and live in Japan, and I\'ve been having lots and lots of issues with the way people work here.
Basically this post is going to be about me going on a rant about how the Japanese working environment is screwed up and stuff like that, and how I don\'t expect the Japanese economy to recover in the least bit in the near future.
First off, I\'d like to say that no one in this country wants to make specific decisions about anything. Whether they\'re afraid to make decisions or whether its simply something built into their nature, it just doesnt make sense. I\'d be working in a project, and a decision about something darn important has to be made, yet no one, especially the manager, wants to make the decision about how to go about the project and stuff like that, and everything is so vague.
Second off, the people I\'ve been working with, they seem to like to have a bunch of meetings which never result to anything. Almost everyday, for at least 2 hours, I\'m sitting in some meeting, and every single stinkin meeting the same things are said, yet nothing seems to progress. Everyone seems to like going in circles, and absolutely nothing gets resolved in the meetings.
Third, no one has any sense of creativity or originality in this country. Basically I\'m working on a project where we incorporate a certain system into a certain big named company, and we\'ve been asking the customer about their thoughts on the new system we\'re about to incorporate and what kind of additions and customizations they\'d like to see in the system. We get some results of what the customers want, and then we simply add exactly what the customer wanted into the system. Ultimately this may sound okay, but what the end product looks like is simply a mess of a system which no one can actually use because no one stopped to think whether those additions were necessary, whether there were other ways to do the additions, and no one ever thinks about making the system logical and easy to use. If the customer brings up a certain idea, then no one stops to think about how that idea should be incorporated into the system, and what kind of changes should be made to make things easier to use and simply better. I dont get it in the least.
I dont get it. This country was supposed to be known for their brain power and stuff like that, yet once here, I find that no one here actually has a brain. Everything that could be done in a day takes at least a month to complete, and I\'m completely surprised that anything actually gets done in this country.
And everyone here is in lala land. Everyone seems to shy away from reality, and seems to be in their own little world, thinking that things are going great. No one here seriously thinks that the economy is that bad, and no one seriously thinks that anything bad is going to happen to them. They simply blame everyone else.
Specific examples would probably be nice, so here\'s my example. The Japanese government is currently has a bunch of scandals going on, and people are getting fired left and right. This in a sense is a good thing because you\'d figure that all the corrupt government officials will eventually get filtered out, and that all that would be left would be the good officials. But there are fundamentally two problems with these scandals.
First off, scandals and corruption in the government did not simply start recently. Its been an ongoing issue since about 10 years ago, and it seems that almost every month, someone new is under the microscope. Once that official resigns from his/her post, a new scandal breaks loose, and someone else eventually resigns. Its an onoing issue for over 10 years, and nothing has really been done about it. No one ever stopped to think why such scandals are occuring. No one ever stopped to think how these scandals could be avoided. Instead, they just scratch on the surface, and never really deal with the core of the problem.
Which is the second point I wanted to bring up. The rules and regulations in the government are absurd. Recently a representative was forced to resign. The government had been giving her group a lump amount of money to pay for her secretaries, however she was found guilty of holding back a certain amount from her secretaries and was using that money to fund many of her government activities such as campaigns. She had not been reporting this fact to the government, and supposedly this is against the law here. If simply looked at, she broke the law, and she has to pay for it, yet no one addressed whether the law she broke was something that was a) necessary, and b) realistic. No one stopped to think if the law could be re-written so that people like her don\'t have to do such things to fund her campaigns.
There is no sense of checks and balances as there is in the United States, and there is no judicial branch which examines laws and examines the reason why those laws were originally stipulated, and whether she broke the law against the reasons that it was originally stipulated.
No one wants to make changes in this country, no one ever wants to look at the root of things and make sound suggestions as to how things could be better, and all everyone does here is simply rant and complain about issues and problems, but no one ever does anything specific to change and problems. Simply put, nothing ever gets done in this country, whether it be in the government or inside a corporation.
I love this country, I love the products which this company has given, yet having lived here for close to a year now, I find that I don\'t love the people that live here, and I definitely don\'t follow their train of thought and the procedures they use to try to accomplish tasks.
