I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
- Hunter S. Thompson
Negotiation in Japan is in many ways very similar to having a team of army ants removes your skin one bite at a time in a hot blazing sun in the middle of the desert. It’s not that anyone is out to get you, or torture you, it’s more like, there’s always another angle on a problem that hasn’t been explored, yet. Always. The unwary American who thinks they’ve finally reached an agreement is merely preparing him or herself for a never ending series of what I call “oh by the ways.” This is when someone looks up at you with big round eyes (difficult if they’re Japanese, but possible) and says, “Oh by the way, what do you think about….” Eventually, though, the “oh by the ways” come to an end and you have an agreement, perhaps even a signed contract. The stupid American thinks the deal is closed. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In the Japanese context, you must understand the character of the person you have just married via contract. There’s always room for divorce, but if you stay in the marriage, you darn well better understand the limits of how far you can push the relationship, just in case you have to push, which you will. A contract, as we all know, is just a piece of paper. Without the people behind the signature, the contract creates nothing. Thus, the Japanese are quite right in wanting to know more about the people behind the signature. And they have ways of understanding completely whom they are dealing with.
The favorite character evaluation methodology is the bar. In the United States, a bar is one of these places where chairs line a counter and small booths may surround the bar as a sign that food may be served in addition to alcohol. There is usually some kind of music or television background turned up loud so that after a while, no matter how hard you try, you invariably grow deaf and lose track completely of whatever is happening in the conversation. In Japan, there are bars like that to cater to the western minded. That however, is not the kind of bar where business is consummated. The bar I’m thinking about is a special place. It’s right off a main business district that runs 24 hours/day. It’s brightly lit on the street day or night. You can see traffic jammed for miles around. As you walk you are bouncing off pedestrians and little blue mopeds with massive package hooks carrying home delivery sushi and sweet potatoes and pizza. You jostle under these crazily lit street signs that are a hodgepodge of English, and katakana and hiragana and kanji, which most Americans dismiss as “oriental”. Walls that have no windows are lined with these little post-it backed postcards of nude women with phone numbers and enticing statements that you wish you could read. Suddenly, your host of the evening smiles and says, “This is it.” You turn left into an alley that has plastic garbage cans on one side and a small 3-person elevator stuck into the brick wall on the other. A half dozen people crowd into the elevator with you, and you try to read the sign to see how many people can ride in the elevator. Instead of the traditional OTIS you see MITSUBISHI and a sign that looks like “6 λ” which translates to 6 persons. Since the elevator only holds 4, and there are 8 crammed in, you don’t know what to do other than inhale and try not to become intimate with the executive on your hip or the 16-year-old schoolgirl on your buttock. Five floors up, your host says “simasen…” and forcibly evicts you out of the elevator like a chicken bone popped by a Heimlich maneuver.
In the hallway, there are three doors, the one to the left, the one to the right, and the one you just came through. The right hand door is the fire escape, so you turn left under a 3-banner cloth and open the door on the left. Inside it’s like the den of a luxury house. There are two soft sofas in a step down configuration, a small wet bar to the left, curtains obscuring windows that were boarded up decades ago, and a unisex bathroom with directions printed in both English and Japanese. You don’t know it yet, but the toilet is not western style, which means that the seat is non-existent. There just a round porcelain aiming point about 1 inch off the beautiful tile inlaid floor. By the time you need to know this though, you really won’t care anymore.
The hostess runs from behind the bar as you enter shouting “simasen simasen” until she realizes that you’re an American, then she says, “welcome thank you,” and leads you to one of the sofas across from your host. As you settle into the plush soft sofa, out of nowhere, a remarkably beautiful young lady plants herself at your side, puts a bowl of peanuts in front of you, puts her arm around you, puts her beautiful face about 4 inches from yours and asks “what you like to drink?” If you’re happily married, at that point, you turn beet red out of embarrassment of all the thoughts that can go through your mind in less than 1 second. If you’re not happily married, at that point, you turn beet red out of embarrassment of all the thoughts than can go through your mind in less than 1 second. Since you take too long to answer, the girl says, “is whiskey ok?” and you nod hoping that you don’t have any embarrassing growths showing. She returns in a few seconds with a 12-ounce tumbler full of something, whiskey probably, and sits close snuggling. You suddenly remember that you’re with your host and look over to where he’s sitting with his girl smiling at you and he asks, “Do you like?” This is the beginning of the character evaluation. Anyone who is not a Mormon or in a substance abuse program will promptly drain that tumbler.
The evening is about 5 minutes old when you realize you’ve had too much to drink. What you don’t realize is that every time you take a polite sip from the glass, the glass magically refills itself, thanks to the girl who’s worked her way into your lap at this point. After an hour or so, your host, reminds you that you haven’t been to the bathroom in a while, and everyone scrambles out of your path as you zigzag the 15 feet or so from the sofa to the bathroom door. Once inside the bathroom, you have a chance to review what has just happened. Aside from the fact that you can’t remember how to get your zipper down, you realize that even in your wildest dorm days, you never had that much to drink in one hour, and you feel happy that when you finally do get that zipper open, you can see only one urinary organ instead of three. Your life is now operating at the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Back on the sofa, your host who has matched you sip for sip has the advantage since he comes here at least twice each month for the last 15 years. His liver is three times the size of yours, and he can live on 4 hours of sleep each night where you need 8, or 18 on this night. He’s asking the girls what they think of you. He has a mental check list of basic character points, such as whether or not you can keep a tune, did you confess to any personal indiscretions in your youth, did you snuggle too closely with your date-by-the-minute, and how dramatically does your personality change when you’re under the stress of having every neural pathway discharge at once? He then has the hostess call for a cab, knowing that when you slide out of the bathroom, the only fantasy you’ll have is that of either going into a sound sleep or vomiting non-stop for 15 minutes. The bar is not designed to handle either fantasy.
Meanwhile, back in the bathroom, you’ve only injured yourself slightly when you tried to zipper your pants without removing yourself from the pathway. The bleeding has stopped, and you feel ready to face your host. Opening the door, you breathe a sigh of relief as they herd you back into the elevator, down onto the street and into a waiting cab without even asking you to pick up the tab. Whether or not you throw up in the cab on the way to the hotel is left to your imagination. Only one part of the character evaluation remains to be discovered. Will you remember to be at the conference room promptly at 8 a.m. for a contract review, or will you oversleep?
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