If you have worked for a Japanese organization in Japan, you may have received a letter, a piece of paper, certifying that from that day on you are officially employed by the company. Then the HR director gives you the printout of the company’s code of conduct plus the rules about holidays, paid and unpaid leave, etc. There is no job description to tell you exactly what your responsibilities are or who you will report to. 

For many Japanese employees, however, the next step is intuitive: they go into observation mode, begin to read the room, and adjust their behavior to that of their new in-group. 

Japan’s organizational culture has developed within a long history of relatively tight community structures, apprenticeship-based learning and repeated experiences of managing risk collectively. While historical realities such as rice farming, natural disasters and feudalism are not a simple explanation for contemporary behavior, they provide useful context for understanding why observation, adaptation and group awareness can carry such weight.

I still remember the words of the president of JATA, “For better or for worse, we are like a village.” Yes, the long-term employees shared workplace experiences. They had the same knowledge of the company’s history, structure, and operations. None of them needed to explicitly convey to one another what had happened five years earlier because they had worked in that context together and had the same relational understanding. They did not need to spell out every concern, intention or next step. They could look at each other and understand within reason what the next step would be by reading a pause, a change in tone or facial expression, or even by hearing an incomplete sentence. In the Japanese language, the expression 以心伝心* captures the ideal of mutual understanding that can exist between people who share a strong relational context. 

The burden of teaching

Throughout school and university, I remember my teachers and lecturers going to great lengths to explain concepts, philosophies, and frameworks. At the end of each term, we were often expected to write essays demonstrating our understanding of what we had learned. We were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that real knowledge meant being able to explain something clearly, even well enough for a child to understand it.

There was a certain expectation built into the learning process: the teacher’s job was to make knowledge accessible, while the student’s job was to show that they had understood it. If something remained unclear, asking for an explanation was not a sign that you had failed to learn but part of the learning process itself.

This creates a curious contrast with another approach to learning, one in which the newcomer is expected to spend more time observing, imitating, and gradually working out the logic of the environment before demanding an explicit explanation.

The burden of learning

Different learning environments place different amounts of responsibility on the instructor and the learner to bridge the knowledge gap.

Many relatively low-context, highly explicit environments (the United States is one example) tend to make the explicit transfer of knowledge a strong expectation. In such environments, asking questions if you have any is understood as a common practice. Japanese workplaces tend to place a greater emphasis on contextual learning and observation. In many Japanese workplaces, the expectation leans towards “You don’t know the rule yet, so watch what people do, notice the pattern, and gradually learn how things work.” While this understanding is rather intuitive for native Japanese employees, non-Japanese can struggle with it because it is seldom explicitly explained to them.

When I started working for a Japanese company in 2001, I was left to my own devices for a week. Three days into the job, my manager walked past my desk and casually said, “Ah, you are still learning, aren’t you?” despite the fact that I hadn’t received any written or spoken instructions by him. Would it be a surprise to say that I was thinking, “Yes. But how am I supposed to learn when nobody has told me anything?”

The language even has expressions that capture aspects of this learning process: 見習う(learning by observing and following someone’s example) and 見て覚える (learning by watching). 

This is not to say that Japanese people refuse to explain. They are happy to when asked to do so and I have had the fortune to learn from many of my colleagues. Yet, in a culture where people have accumulated the same experiences, know the same history and understand many of the same assumptions, explicit explanation is not considered the primary mechanism through which someone becomes competent. In  Japan, which is also a culture of apprenticeship, knowledge is acquired through observation, imitation, experience and contextual understanding. 

Observation is part of the learning process

While “Watch what your employess do” may sound like vague, inefficient or even negligent management, in Japan observing on the purpose to learn is in itself a form of work. The observer is collecting information about hierarchy (who speaks first), decision-making (who actually influences and makes decisions), the process before and after a meeting, what is discussed openly/privately, what happens when something goes wrong, which behaviors are rewarded or discouraged, etc. Observation, in this sense, is the learning process itself and the product of this process is watching the invisible software of the organization run before you partake in it.

Is there a solution?

Although it may be tempting to ask “What is the rule?” it may be better to find an answer to the question “What assumptions and values are behind the way people here behave?”

Once you begin looking at Japanese organizations and workplaces this way, many things that initially seem vague, inefficient or unnecessarily complicated start to become more legible. You begin to see the patterns behind the behaviour and, more importantly, to anticipate what is likely to happen next.