From this article by Tim Rogers
Via elvis-shrugged
SOME JAPANESE OFFICE TRADITIONS ARE GENUINELY TERRIFYING
Every once in a while, you’re outside, and you find a huge crowd of people in suits and ties. They take up all of the sidewalk. They’re all drunk. They just got out of a mandatory company party in the nearest wooden-submarine-like Japanese restaurant whose menu consists of whatever fell off the garbage truck as it peeled away from a flock of particularly aggressive crows that morning. They’re standing a circle, completely of their own accord. The boss is nowhere in sight. Someone in this group of juniors influenced them all to get into this circle. Anyway, they start chanting something. You can hardly understand what it is, even if you fluently understand the language. What the hell are they doing? The chant soon becomes a scream. This group of maybe forty young men and women in suits are screaming in unison.
What the hell is that about? The answer is: nothing. They’re screaming for screaming’s sake. They’re doing this to show that they have some energy — any energy at all. This is a subtle hint: Their lives, bodies, and souls belong to the company; the energy that resides in those bodies is all to the company’s benefit. If you say it like that, it comes out as sensationalist and weird. Well, it’s that kind of thing. You know how football players get into a huddle before a game, bump fists and yell “GOOOOOO TEAM”? It’s like that, only they’re doing it after successfully Achievement Unlocked: The Drunkening. High school students will do it to celebrate their anticipation of successful performance on, like, college entrance exams. Certain times of the year roll around, and you can’t navigate a well-populated street without encountering a large group of screaming, chanting businesspeople. Sometimes, I stand and watch them as they continue to chant for literally a half an hour at a time. Lots of people who I meet as tourists seem enamored with the idea when they first encounter it. It’s a different kind of culture. Well, no one likes it after a while, least of all the people who are doing it.
Maybe I can sum up every little point I’m trying to make in this whole word-slab by saying I don’t like that so many people agree to do things that they obviously hate doing. At least football players like playing football. Sometimes, they love it! Sometimes, they get severe brain damage, too. Maybe the Japanese don’t get severe brain damage from screaming all night in the death-like frigidity of a winter night, though they do sometimes pass out. I’ve heard maybe six dozen variations of this story from friends who work in hyper-large corporations: Some poor guy, during the Mandatory Daily Morning Gather And Scream in the middle of the office (or, in some cases, the large conference room downstairs), passes out, has a heart attack, an asthma attack, an aneurysm, whatever. I only once worked for a company big enough to have Gather And Scream events every morning, though I was lucky enough to work in a division with mostly old dudes who weren’t expected to participate, so that made me not expected to participate, either.
I don’t know. I know someone’s going to say I’m a racist, or being intolerant, or whatever, though man, that kind of thing is creepy as hell. In other news, looking at my outline of to-be-written bullet points, I am struck by just how many of them concern screaming.
Okay, here’s one mostly related: In many Japanese offices, you’re required to scream “Good morning!” at the top of your lungs, clapping your hands to your thighs, as soon as you enter the office area every morning. Everyone in the office then shouts “Good morning!” back to you. At my orientation for one company, the Human Resources Girl — whose face (figuratively) literally screamed “Hall Monitor” — was going over the “Good Morning!” protocol. Her explanation weird despite its terseness: “This is how adults interact in Japan.” Most of the people at the orientation, like me, were under twenty-five. “Before we move onto the next item, does anyone have any questions?” I seriously and portentously asked a question, then, which I thought was hilarious: “If we’re the first one in the office in the morning, do we still have to scream ‘Good Morning’ and clap our hands to the sides of our legs?” Her answer was immediate, and humorless: “Yes.” “Well, I mean, there’s no one else around to hear it, right?” “You still have to do it. It’s the rule.Every employee must do this. That’s why we call it ‘protocol.’” This instant was actually the very first time I begin to ponder the logistics of actually going ahead and being homeless. You know, cardboard, up against concrete, is not only not uncomfortable — it’s pretty good for your spine!
I pushed further: “What if I am the second person in the office, and the first person is someone with whom I have, previously, managed to successfully cultivate a congenial personal relationship? What if it’s a person whose first and last name I know, with whom I share interests and hobbies, and we’ve previously agreed that we think this ‘Good morning’ shit is some serious bullshit, and we just agree to be like, ‘Hey, what’s up’ to one another in the morning and we’ve also agreed that hey, if anyone else asks, we’ll just go ahead and say ‘Oh yeah, that dude totally screamed “Good morning” to me this morning’?”
The HR girl didn’t even blink: “You still have to carry out the customary ‘Good Morning.’”
