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Company dormitories shape company men

Hiro's graduation from the training program into his first position was marked by his move into a twenty-square-meter dormitory room assigned to him by the company. Ringo salarymen must live in a dormitory or with their parents until they are married or turn thirty years old. Formally, Ringo told the employees that living in the dormitory was necessary for security reasons, because the salarymen were managing money and therefore needed surveillance. For the same reason, dormitory residents were not allowed to own cars. Pragmatically, the dormitory serves to keep bachelor salarymen under control and to further their education. It is customary for a young salaryman to share a room in the dormitory with a senpai: over the years, Hiro learned a lot about doing business from various older colleagues in the dormitory.

When Hiro arrived at the dormitory, he found that everyone had already been assigned a room and a roommate. The first evening, the dormitory manager told the new arrivals that they had the option to leave the dormitory and live with their parents. It was obvious, however, that he frowned on the idea and didn't expect anyone to take him up on the offer, because room assignments had been finalized the day before.

Hiro grew to enjoy dormitory life. Ringo sponsored vigorous sports competitions among dormitories, and the young salarymen grew close by playing together, drinking together, and learning together. One member of Hiro's doki quit Ringo years later to go to business school in America, eventually finding a job with a foreign bank. Hiro's friend says that he still maintains good relationships with his old comrades from the dormitory despite his departure from Ringo, because of the bonds they forged while living together.

However, dormitory life afforded Hiro very little privacy. The residents had to return to the dormitory by 11:00 PM. unless they were working overtime; no one could stay out overnight without telling the dormitory manager where he could be found. The young salarymen were under watch all day, 365 days a year. Early in his career, Hiro was told by a senior officer of the bank that Ringo men had to be on alert twenty-four hours a day--after all, that was what it meant to work for a Japanese company. Hiro felt that, in the dormitory, this was more than just a figure of speech.

As a consequence of this lifestyle, Ringo's young salarymen found it difficult to meet women. Like about a third of his classmates, Hiro met his future wife during college. Another third of the men in Hiro's year group are still bachelors, well into their thirties, while about a third married people they met through friends or the office, because they had few opportunities to find potential partners any other way. A significant number of Hiro's colleagues married "office ladies" who worked for Ringo, though such liaisons had to be kept secret from everyone except the salaryman's boss. When such a couple married, the woman had to leave Ringo because the bank has a rule against spouses working in the same office.

Hiro greatly liked his senpai roommate, who taught him many lessons. For example, Ringo used a formal document to initiate new credit lines, and it turned out there was a specific way to fill out each blank in the form. No one at Hiro's branch showed him how to complete the form, so his senpai demonstrated the way to write a correct proposal. The senior-junior relationship between the roommates was unambiguous, even though the two were the same age. Hiro's colleague had joined Ringo a year earlier, in this context, seniority within the bank is the critical factor governing who should use polite Japanese when talking to whom. However, in an earlier time, Ringo had recruited some employees straight from high school. Having been with the company for some time, they naturally behaved as senpai toward Hiro's year group, despite the fact that some of these men were younger than the men in Hiro's cohort. This caused some resentment among the college graduates, who felt uncomfortable deferring to younger men. Generally, however, age and seniority went hand in hand, as the great majority of salarymen in the dormitory had joined Ringo immediately after earning undergraduate degrees.

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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