Japan’s office worker struggles to adjust to a ‘new normal’ – The Japan Times
Posted: August 27, 2020 at 3:53 am
New normal is an old phrase, traceable to science fiction author Robert Heinleins 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Its 2075; the moon is a penal colony; the inmates revolt and look forward to a better future, when life can get back to normal, a new normal free of the Authority, free of guards free of passports and searches and arbitrary arrests.
The crisis-ridden 21st century has given the expression new life and a lurid cast. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States; the 2008 Lehman Shock; the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent nuclear meltdowns; worldwide weather events of unprecedented violence; and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic, all spawned warnings of a new normal, more sinister by far than the old, in which anything can happen and much that does is ghastly hitherto unthinkable, now commonplace.
A book published in June by investment company CEO Masakazu Mito bears the title, The New Normal: Can You Live in a World in Which the Salaryman is Extinct?
Were going to have to, it seems. COVID-19 didnt kill the distinctive Japanese type known as the salaryman. Its been an endangered species for years. Globalism stunned it, information technology outpaced it, career women challenged its masculine exclusivity even before artificial intelligence threatened it with terminal redundancy. Then came COVID-19, with its frontal assault on the office culture. Social distancing, remote work, officelessness can salarymen breathe this air?
They cannot, Mito argues. Only entrepreneurs can, he fears. Thats good and bad good insofar as the vigorous entrepreneurial spirit is; bad because, after all, the salaryman had his virtues as well, whose extinction would be societys loss.
No figure typifies postwar Japan better than the salaryman. He was born prewar fathered, as it happens, by one of the nations most remarkable entrepreneurs. Konosuke Matsushita (1894-1989) founded Matsushita Electric in 1918. We know it today as Panasonic Corp.
He was a round peg in a square hole, a visionary among realists a realist himself, however, one of whose visions, the salaryman, was realism personified to subsequent generations. When the 1929 depression hit and unemployment soared, Matsushita, spurning conventional wisdom (as journalist Mark Weston tells us in Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japans Most Influential Men and Women), laid no one off. Lifetime employment was his unspoken commitment; company loyalty, the anticipated payoff.
Matsushita didnt stop there. Next came garnishes like the company song, the daily morning assembly eccentricities then and quaint now, but in their time a new normal. It molded the salaryman ethos.
When I joined Matsushita in 1937, I hated the daily ritual of morning assembly, Weston quotes Toshihiko Yamashita as recalling in later years as Matsushita Electrics president, everyone reciting the company creed and singing the company song.
The creed consisted of seven principles: Service to the public; teamwork for the common cause; courtesy and humility; and so on platitudes that smack embarrassingly of a return to nursery school; and yet, Yamashita continues, by daily repetition of these laudable ideas you gradually take them to heart.
You had to. Company officials do their best to reinforce employee identification with the company, wrote scholar Ezra Vogel in his 1979 classic Japan as Number One. They provide elaborate annual ceremonies for inducting the new employees. For spiritual and disciplinary training, the employee may go on retreats, visit temples or endure special hardships. To strengthen the bonds of solidarity, the new employee may be housed in company dorms even if it means being separated from his spouse or parents.
Patronizing? Stifling? Some found it so, but for the rest of the 20th century, lifetime employment in the protective environment provided by major Japanese corporations was what college graduates most aspired to an aspiration far from dead even now. A lost generation now in its 40s and 50s, victims of the hiring freeze of the 1990s and 2000s, have ample reason to envy the prosperous stability their fathers and grandfathers took for granted.
Such stability is gone. Society has moved on, the economy has moved on, technological change demands faster responses than traditional corporate consensus-based decision-making can muster. Men want private lives and family lives; women want out of the kitchen and nursery. And now, COVID-19. Company spirit masked is company spirit smothered.
Mito draws our attention to an emerging phrase: bunsan shakai (the dispersed society) the dissolution, in effect, of the bonds of solidarity. If revolution suggests speed as opposed to evolutionary slowness, COVID-19 is a revolution. What it has given us masks, telework, online socializing, takeout-only ghost restaurants is summed up by two old words newly coupled: social distance. Japan had less of it than other developed societies. Its catching up fast. Not fast enough, if rising infection rates are indicative.
Will we ever relate to each other again as we did pre-COVID-19? If dispersion brings out the latent entrepreneur in us, so much the better, says Mito. The economy will be the richer for it, and so may we all be, in ways not merely economic. It could make us stronger and more self-reliant. It could also, he adds ominously, turn us inward to a degree not necessarily conducive to emotional well-being.
Humans, he points out, are communicating animals. As infants we crave skinship. We grow into words and sentences, simple at first, increasingly complex and nuanced as we mature. Children deprived of communication are prone to development problems, he says, and, as adults, no pleasure is complete and no sorrow unrelieved without telling someone about it.
New communication devices in the 20th and 21st centuries have driven us from one new normal to another, making face-to-face communication less and less necessary, more and more irksome. Before COVID-19, it was already possible to live without ever leaving the house. During COVID-19, we are encouraged to in some places, required to. After COVID-19, what then?
Well know eventually not soon, barring unforeseen sudden good news on the medical front. The longer COVID-19 endures, the farther its new normals are likely to take us from old ones.
Big in Japan is a weekly column that focuses on issues being discussed by domestic media organizations. Michael Hoffmans latest book, now on sale, is Cipangu, Golden Cipangu: Essays in Japanese History.
View post:
Japan's office worker struggles to adjust to a 'new normal' - The Japan Times
- Talk of the Times: Touring the rich history of Cape Ann - Gloucester Daily Times - February 6th, 2021
- What Fighting-Type Pokemon Are You, Based On Your Zodiac? - GameRant - February 6th, 2021
- Upcoming PC games for 2021: the biggest PC games coming this year - Rock Paper Shotgun - February 6th, 2021
- New B Ed Session starts - The Tribune India - February 6th, 2021
- Erwin Schrödinger - The Mystic Vision - February 2nd, 2021
- Majora's Mask 20th Anniversary: Changing The Future - The Young Folks - October 24th, 2020
- Who was Carlo Acutis? Get to know the tech whiz on his way to becoming a saint - Manila Bulletin - October 17th, 2020
- Facing Disinformation In Teaching And Learning | Armenian American Reporter - Armenian Reporter - September 28th, 2020
- Pastor Bob Cottrill on Christianity, Faith, and Intuition - News Intervention - September 26th, 2020
- How To Support Racial Justice, Diversity and Activism This Week In Louisville (8/24) - Louisville Eccentric Observer - August 27th, 2020
- The 7 Stages of Spiritual Development | The Chopra Center - May 17th, 2020
- Psychics Arent Therapy But They Can be Therapeutic - SF Weekly - May 17th, 2020
- 1 thought on Freethought for the Small Towns: Case Study - News Intervention - May 17th, 2020
- CELEBRATE YOUR UNIQUENESS - May 4th, 2020
- Working from home the next revolution, now happening - Fabius Maximus website - April 9th, 2020
- The Intuitive Healer Training Program | Wendy De Rosa's ... - March 30th, 2020
- CHLOE WYMA ON THE ART OF AGNES PELTON - Artforum - March 5th, 2020
- Ancient solutions: The shamanic view of mental illness - The Vermilion - February 4th, 2020
- Keith Leon S. to Host Walking with Angels Live Workshop & Book Signing - Broadway World - January 12th, 2020
- Kamaru Usman vs. Colby Covington at UFC 245 highlights the best MMA card in years - The Daily Dot - December 5th, 2019
- Canadian's and Others' Convictions to Divine Interventionism... - News Intervention - October 20th, 2019
- The New Naturalists - Bay Nature - September 21st, 2019
- Intellectuals And The Path to Rome: A book review - Evangelical Focus - September 21st, 2019
- Could Apple Arcade Be the Best Gaming Subscription Service Yet? - Goomba Stomp - September 21st, 2019
- Residential training for Spiritual Evolution - September 14th, 2019
- Somatic Spiritual (Evolutionary) Practice -- The Big ... - September 11th, 2019
- Great Mother Evolutionary Self-Healing Traning - September 11th, 2019
- SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION Godfrey Esoh - September 9th, 2019
- The School of Evolutionary Herbalism - facebook.com - September 9th, 2019
- Why the World Needs More Spiritual Heroes - Big Think - September 9th, 2019
- What Is Spiritual Development - Spiritual Development - July 12th, 2019
- Welcome to Chakra Evolution by Collette Oonah Corcoran - June 24th, 2019
- On Evolution: the first video in a Free Video Series with ... - June 22nd, 2019
- Home | Accelerated Evolution - June 15th, 2019
- Monika Nataraj - Mystical Dance, Shakti Spirit, Teacher ... - June 15th, 2019
- A Course in Miracles Minister Training - pathwaysoflight.org - May 16th, 2019
- Teacher Training - Shiva Rea - May 16th, 2019
- welcome | The Living Institute - May 16th, 2019
- An Evolutionary Roadmap for Belonging and Co-Liberation ... - May 12th, 2019
- Hidden Light Codes - Espavo - Stronger Spiritual Life - April 30th, 2019
- Evolution Healing Center - A Spiritual Retreat in Yarrow, BC - March 27th, 2019
- LIFE RESEARCH ACADEMY - Past-Life-Regression & Spiritual ... - March 24th, 2019
- Evolution - New World Encyclopedia - March 24th, 2019
- THE FIVE REALMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS - PanHarmonic - March 5th, 2019
- 350 Best Spiritual Quotes That Will Enrich Your Life - March 5th, 2019
- Cultural Transformation Tools Training | Barrett Values Centre - March 5th, 2019
- Interspirituality: Evolutionary Hope for the Human Family ... - February 2nd, 2019
- HEY: Healing Emphasis Yoga Therapy Training Program ... - December 19th, 2018
- The Barrett Model | Barrett Values Centre - December 19th, 2018
- Reiki, Spiritual Healing & Christian Prayer | Reiki Evolution - November 19th, 2018
- David Crow Medicinal plants and Spiritual Evolution ... - November 17th, 2018
- Psychological, Conscious, and Spiritual Evolution | Awaken - November 13th, 2018
- Sattva Yoga Academy | 200, 300 & 500-hr Yoga Teacher ... - September 30th, 2018
- Clergy - Wikipedia - August 18th, 2018
- The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of ... - August 5th, 2018
- Opening to the Infinite with Craig Hamilton and Jeff Careira - July 5th, 2018
- Evolutionary Dynamics with Ken Wilber - June 17th, 2018
- Spiritual Healing & Evolution Classes | Spiritual Arts ... - May 29th, 2018
- Lakshmi Rising School for Yoga - May 27th, 2018
- The Definition of Spiritual Intelligence - May 20th, 2018
- What is SK (Spiritual/Holistic Kinesiology)? - gettingthru.org - April 23rd, 2018
- What is Spiritual Coaching and Healing? - April 16th, 2018
- Spiritual abuse | Apologetics Index - April 15th, 2018
- Spiritual Counterfeits Project | Apologetics Index - March 27th, 2018
- Meditation and Contemplative Studies Certificate Training ... - March 17th, 2018
- 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training & YA Certification in Costa ... - March 2nd, 2018
- Direct Divine Light Healing Program | Spiritual Arts Institute - March 1st, 2018
- Circle Ways & Evolutionary Tarot | Collaborative ... - February 15th, 2018
- Programs School of Evolutionary Herbalism - February 12th, 2018
- Spiritual Success Mastermind PayPal Psycademy - January 17th, 2018
- A Course in Miracles Minister Training - January 10th, 2018
- Opening to the Infinite - Opening to the Infinite - January 7th, 2018
- Reverence, Ritual & Renewal with don Oscar Miro-Quesada ... - December 25th, 2017
- Why Eckhart Tolle's Evolutionary Activism Won't Save Us ... - December 13th, 2017
- Skillsets of Evolution - December 11th, 2017
- Soulutions for Daily Living - Bios - Psychics, Healers ... - November 23rd, 2017
- Practice of Direct Awakening - Meditation 2.0 - November 12th, 2017
- The Spiritual Warrior : Abode of the Eternal Tao - October 20th, 2017
- The Shift Network | Awaken To Your Full Potential - September 21st, 2017
- MIND GAMES: Mindfulness has its place, but not as a quick mental health fix - Sarasota Herald-Tribune - September 5th, 2017