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Initiation of a new salaryman

In the beginning, new salaryman trainees are never quite sure how to dress or behave. An easy solution would be to imitate one's senpai's haircut and dress, but a senpai is, by definition, several years senior--the men in Hiro's doki (year group of salarymen entering the bank) had to learn how to dress like first-year trainees, not veteran Ringo men. Hiro's first lesson in the Ringo way: get a new haircut. His senpai had warned him beforehand that a Ringo trainee's hair should be "really, really short," so, like the others in his doki, he showed up for the training program prepared. Later in his career, after he had been posted to a branch bank in the Ringo system, Hiro came to understand the symbolic purpose of Ringo's code. "You are insulting our customers with that long hair!" spluttered a senior officer there, who sported a crew cut. Ringo men had to wear their hair short as a sign of respect for the bank's customers.

A new haircut was just the beginning. The company directed each trainee to master a seventy-page guide to business manners. Hiro and the others in his year group had to learn how to sit on a chair, where to place their hands while talking with others, how to bow, what posture to assume when standing, how to exchange name cards, how to get on an elevator, where to sit in a car, and where to sit in a train (a context quite different from sitting in a car). New trainees were expected to make mistakes and learn by having them corrected. For example, if a junior employee exited an elevator before a senior one, his mistake was pointed out immediately, and he was expected to feel shame. The purpose of all these rules was basically to keep the new salaryman from looking like an idiot, which would reflect badly on both him and his trainers. For example, someone who did not know where to sit when accompanying a branch manager on a business call would feel intensely embarrassed, so Ringo's minutely prescribed etiquette served to protect trainees from humiliating themselves.

Hiro later discovered that some of these rules seemed common to all kaisha, whereas others were peculiar to Ringo. Yet it never occurred to him or his peers to ask why they should observe rules whose violation would have gone unnoticed outside Ringo. Anyone who asked that kind of question wouldn't last long in a Japanese company. Through sharing the same rules, the employees of a kaisha strengthen the ties that bind them to each other. Those who do not follow the rules are outsiders, and only an insider can meet the expectations of other people, allowing him to function within the organization.

Excerpted from Inside the Kaisha: Demystifying Japanese Business Behavior, Chapter 1, by Noboru Yoshimura and Philip Anderson (c. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1997 ).

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