Download or read book Japanese at Work written by Haruko Minegishi Cook and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book empirically explores how different linguistic resources are utilized to achieve appropriate workplace role inhabitance and to achieve work-oriented communicative ends in a variety of workplaces in Japan. Appropriate role inhabitance is seen to include considerations of gender and interpersonal familiarity, along with speaker orientation to normative structures for marking power and politeness. This uniquely researched edited collection will appeal to scholars of workplace discourse and Japanese sociolinguistics, as well as Japanese language instructors and adult learners of Japanese. It is sure to make a major contribution to the cross-linguistic/cultural study of workplace discourse in the globalized context of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book With Respect to the Japanese written by John C. Condon and published by John Murray Press. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Japan has been on center stage of the world economy for decades, interactions between the Japanese and Westerners continue to be on the rise. Daily communication in both business and social settings is commonplace, and connections through the Internet and mobile media make what felt distant only a few years ago seem familiar. Our cultures and social norms remain vastly different, however, and professionals working in Japan are likely to confront new challenges every day. For example, what are the three biggest challenges for Westerners who go to work in Japan? How can you tell when “yes” might mean “no”? When you are the guest in a taxi, who should sit where? In the fully updated second edition of With Respect to the Japanese, readers discover not only answers to basic etiquette questions, but also how to communicate successfully with the Japanese and, in the process, earn mutual respect. John C. Condon and Tomoko Masumoto use real-life examples (from kindergarten classrooms to the boardroom) to explain the contrast between these two distinct cultures. In this essential guide to Japanese culture, you will learn how vital societal characteristics affect communication, decision making, management styles and many other aspects of work and everyday relationships.

Download or read book How the Japanese Learn to Work written by R. P. Dore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is regarded as a world leader in the field of education and training for improved economic performance. Yet success in Japan is often achieved by going against what is regarded as ideal practice elsewhere. This book offers the most comprehensive review available in English of the many facets of Japanese vocational education and training. Covering the system from primary education through to in job-training offered by companies, this book provides a detailed study of current practice giving equal emphasis to formal training in explicitly vocational courses, and informal training in factories, shops and offices. The authors analyse the difference between substantive 'person-changing' training and mere 'ability-labelling.' They raise important questions, such as: To what extent does the need to package skills to provide convenient qualifications distort the actual training given? How efficient is it to rely on professional trainers to certify the acquisition of skills, rather than run separate testing systems? The authors reveal how, in Japanese companies, employees are strongly motivated by pride in the successful execution of their jobs, and that much company training is carried out by colleagues.

Download or read book This Japanese Life written by Eryk Salvaggio and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most books about Japan will tell you how to use chopsticks and say "konnichiwa!" Few honestly tackle the existential angst of living in a radically foreign culture. The author, a three-year resident and researcher of Japan, tackles the thousand tiny uncertainties of living abroad. -- Adapted from back cover

Download or read book There s No Such Thing as an Easy Job written by Kikuko Tsumura and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A] 21st-century response to Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener.'" -NPR “A thought-provoking, drily funny critique of capitalism and the systems of self-worth that are built around it.” -TIME, “Must-Read Books of the Year” A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig--watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods--turns out to be inconvenient. (When can she go to the bathroom?) Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job--writing trivia for rice cracker packages; punching entry tickets to a purportedly haunted public park--it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful. And when she finally discovers an alternative to the daily grind, it comes with a price. This is the first time Kikuko Tsumura--winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award--has been translated into English. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is as witty as it is unsettling--a jolting look at the maladies of late capitalist life through the unique and fascinating lens of modern Japanese culture.

Download or read book Friendship and Work Culture of Women Managers in Japan written by Swee-Lin Ho and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-31 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on ethnographic data gathered from fieldwork spanning a 15-year period, this book offers new insights into understanding the lives and experiences of women managers in Japan. Based on empirical case studies, it explores the ways in which professional women in Tokyo creatively mobilize their friendships as a strategic site for mitigating the disappointments in their working lives, and conceptualizing new understandings of independence and equality. It analyses their use of language, time, space and money to negotiate new identities in an increasingly flexible work environment. In examining the challenges and opportunities faced by these corporate workers, this book also extends anthropological debates about the changing meaning and importance of work for women, as well as their relationship with money and separation from the realm of domesticity. As a study of women's lives in and out of the workplace in Japan, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese culture and society, anthropology, sociology, gender and women's studies.

Download or read book A Sociology of Work in Japan written by Ross Mouer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-11 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What shapes the decisions of employees in Japan? The authors of this comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the relationship between work and society in Japan argue that individual decisions about work can only be understood through the broader social context. Many factors combine to affect such choices including the structuring of labour markets, social policy and, of course, global influences which have come increasingly to impinge on the organisation of work and life generally. By considering labour markets, social policy and relationships between labour and management, the book offers penetrating insights into contemporary Japanese society and glimpses of what might come in the future. Underlying the discussion is a challenge to the celebration of Japanese management practices which has dominated the literature for the last three decades. This is an important book for students of sociology and economics.

Download or read book Office Ladies and Salaried Men written by Yuko Ogasawara and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In large corporations in Japan, much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as "office ladies" (OLs) or "flowers of the workplace." Largely nameless, OLs serve tea to the men and type and file their reports. They are exempt from the traditional lifetime employment and have few opportunities for promotion. In this engaging ethnography, Yuko Ogasawara exposes the ways that these women resist men's power, and why the men, despite their exclusive command of authority, often subject themselves to the women's control. Ogasawara, a Japanese sociologist trained in the United States, skillfully mines perceptive participant-observation analyses and numerous interviews to outline the tensions and humiliations of OL work. She details the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that OLs who are frustrated by demeaning, dead-end jobs thwart their managers and subvert the power structure to their advantage. Using gossip, outright work refusal, and public gift-giving as manipulative strategies, they can ultimately make or break the careers of the men. This intimate and absorbing analysis illustrates how the relationships between women and work, and women and men, are far more complex than the previous literature has shown.

Download or read book Reworking Japan written by Nana Okura Gagné and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reworking Japan examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of "salarymen" came to embody the "New Middle Class" family ideal. However, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring and brought new challenges to employees and their previously protected livelihoods. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, Gagné demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes. Gagné explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of "companyism" to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic transformation with an ethnography of work and play, and individual life histories, Gagné goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' subjectivities, and family relations. Reworking Japan, with its firsthand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.

Download or read book Blue Eyed Salaryman written by Niall Murtagh and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why on earth would anyone give up a life on the open road for the regimen of a vast Japanese conglomerate? And is it really so different in Japan from everywhere else? Niall Murtagh spent years as a world traveller - hitchhiking to Istanbul, bussing to Kathmandu and crossing the Atlantic in a home-built yacht. In 1986 he closed the door on his adventurous life and settled down in Japan, eventually joining Mitsubishi as a Salaryman - a man in a shiny suit with a shiny attache case in a conglomerate with 100,000 employees. And what happens when you give up the Salaryman life? The book follows life after the corporation, giving fresh perspectives on the nature of Japanese business culture and the problems faced by outsiders in Japan.

Download or read book Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro Japanese Cultural Production written by William H. Bridges, IV and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, and cultural borders.

Download or read book The Factory written by Hiroko Oyamada and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they've been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work—days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while—it could be weeks or years—the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here? With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, The Factory casts a vivid—and sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.

Download or read book Eat Work Shop written by Marcia Iwatate and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eat. Work. Shop. presents a striking collection of cutting-edge commercial sites in Japan. Vibrant color photography and compelling text make this the ultimate guide to modern Japanese life. Seven of the country's foremost architects showcase their ideas in 34 shops, restaurants, salons, bars and spas. The architecture and interior designs are uniquely Japanese and will add a distinctive flair to any retail, office or retail design project. In collaboration with a new generation of entrepreneurs, these designers are reshaping basic concepts of how contemporary Japanese eat, work and shop. Beautifully illustrated with over 250 photos, the locations in this book reflect everything from postmodern industrialism to suggestive eroticism. A whole new language of design, propelled by the Japanese penchants for innovation, has given this generation a carte blanche to redefine Japan as the world's next cultural superpower, unhindered by the barriers of tradition.

Download or read book Women Work and the Japanese Economic Miracle written by Helen Macnaughtan and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how, during the period of the Japanese economic miracle, a distinctive female employment system was developed alongside, and different from, the better known Japanese employment system which was applied to male employees. Women, Work and the Japanese Economic Miracle describes and analyses the place of female workers in the cotton textile industry, which was a crucially important industry with a large workforce. In presenting detailed data on such key issues as recruitment systems, management practices and the working experience of the women involved, it demonstrates the importance for Japan's postwar economy of harnessing female labour during these years.

Download or read book Japan s Emerging Youth Policy written by Tuukka Hannu Ilmari Toivonen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1960s onwards, Japan's rapid economic growth coincided with remarkably low youth unemployment. However, since the 1990s the ease with which young people have historically moved from education to employment has ended, and unemployment is now a real and growing problem. This book examines how the state, experts, the media as well as youth workers, have responded to the troubling rise of youth joblessness in 21st century Japan.

Download or read book Behind the Japanese Mask written by Jonathan Rice and published by How To Books Ltd. This book was released on 2004 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title concerns the Farnham Castle Centre for International Briefing, widely acknowledged as the world's leading provider of intercultural management training and briefing. It has an unmatched reputation for helping individuals, partners and their families to prepare to live and work effectively anywhere in the world. CONTENTS: 1. The Japanese Mask 2. The Japanese Archipelago 3. Japan Past 4. The Cultural Values of Japan 5. The Japanese Language 6. The Japanese Economy 7. The Business World 8. Negotiating with the Japanese 9. Experiencing Japan

Download or read book The Salaryman written by Michael Howard and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous memoir featuring more than 70 full-color manga illustrations from a Tokyo American who tried and failed to fit into Japanese office culture for almost a decade. The Salaryman is an immigrant's story from a land where there are few immigrants, with even fewer being crazy enough to do what the author did: become a real train-cramming, brow-wiping, late-night overtime-working, passed-out-drunk-on-the-train-ride-home salaryman. A working-man consumer's take on the U.S.-Japan culture gap, the book hums with authenticity, delivering deep middle-class insights between its illustrated punch lines.