Life in a Japanese meeting

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

- Alain van der Heide

To understand a meeting in Japan, you have to accept two fundamental truths. The first is, that even after you die, you may continue the meeting in the next life. The second is, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. If you accept these truths, then you are ready to sit at a meeting table in Japan.

A good meeting is scheduled in the middle of the week in a large conference room and has a start time of about 10 a.m. There is never a stop time scheduled. It starts as late as 10 a.m. because literally everyone has to attend, and some of the attendees have to travel ungodly distances to be there. Unlike American meetings, a Japanese meeting just sort of organizes itself around the start time. There’s definitely an option of beverages from tea or coffee, a variety of fruit juices, and for the gaijin (foreigner) the selection of canned beverages from coca cola to Suntory sweat. People start arriving as early as 30 minutes before, but everyone is there as close to the meeting time as possible. Someone who will be more than 5 minutes late has a cell phone and will announce their train/traffic problem in ample time for others to settle into the comfort of planning the lunch, or perhaps the evening meal that will spin out of the meeting. The key thing in the meeting is that everyone is present. I mean everyone. I have sat in many meetings where the most junior technician who was most recently qualified to tighten screws sat next to a division vice president responsible for 2,000 employees.

In a good American meeting, the designated organizer begins the meeting with a summary of the issues. At this time the meeting can go one of several ways. The organizer, if it is I, summarizes the issues, states the conclusions and adjourns the meeting. Alternatively, a more progressive American might make a few suggestions and then throw it open for discussion, with a careful eye on the clock. A typical up-through-the-ranks American who has no formal meeting discipline will throw the meeting to the winds and permit a rambling discussion which leads nowhere and may accidentally hit upon a solution by blind luck. However the American does the meeting, the meeting has a distinct beginning and end. The beginning is when the meeting starts, and the end is when the meeting ends.

Welcome to Japan. Meetings here have no beginning or end. The true Zen of a Japanese meeting is that they happen in waves. When the meeting is at the crest, the meeting participants are in the same room. When the meeting is at the trough, they are separated but on the phone. Between times, the meeting is either headed towards a crest or a trough. Being in the same room may simply be nothing more than the time where the meeting participants share ritual rice and feed the meeting body.

Many an American has been shocked to discover that at the end of a meeting (the time when everyone left the room), the conclusions the American had thought had been reached were still under discussion. What that American failed to realize were the two points that we started with. The first is, that even after you die, you may continue the meeting in the next life. The second is, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. Let’s discuss what these two ideas mean.

What American would assume that in the next life he may continue to participate in a meeting on, say, soybean production in Nebraska? From a Japanese viewpoint, to assume you won’t participate is merely a sign of being short sighted and reeks of unprofessionalism. Remember, Sony has a 200-year corporate plan. If you don’t think you’re going to be involved in a problem, forever, then you simply don’t belong. Dying and going to heaven is not a Japanese culture idea. Dying and then coming back and doing it over and over and over again until the stock holders scream with joy, is a more Japanese way of thinking.

The second idea, the nail that sticks up, is actually a children’s proverb in Japan. This is a way of saying two things. The first is that if you’re stubborn, you’ll get smashed flat. The second is if someone is stubborn, you have to stop what you’re doing until the stubborn one is smashed flat. This is the true meaning of consensus in Japan. If there is a disagreement about anything, then everything comes to a screeching halt until there is no more disagreement. This is one reason that meetings go on for years.

The American who expects a meeting to actually come to an end with a conclusion is simply, wrong. The purpose of a meeting in Japan is not to come to a conclusion. The purpose of a meeting in Japan is to develop consensus about the current status and direction. It takes an act of God to come to a conclusion in a Japanese meeting, and even then, God may find himself pounded flat if he can’t agree with the group.

The confusion most Americans have with a Japanese meeting is that towards the end of the day, everyone leaves the meeting room to go to a restaurant or bar. In the American context, that means the meeting is over and now it’s time to unwind. In the Japanese context, it merely means that the company’s food service is closed and we’re all getting hungry. The good part about such things is that the food in Japan is excellent, so as the meeting continues in a smoke filled room with dish after dish of unidentified edibles mixed with alcohol slowly digesting in your stomach, there is a mellow time where you may be tempted, if you’re the nail that sticks up, to go flat.