JonathanKurumi

Japanese companies have a baffling knack for internal innovation that kind of transcends the overwhelming management style.

All the overtime and useless meetings produce a lot of decisions by consensus that balance out the random “maverick” ideas a VP might come up with. This creates a bizarre balancing act that sometimes produces decently market-synced products.

Also the just crazy amount of seasonality in Japan makes even the slowest moving company make large pivots at least four times a year. New season? New product, even if it’s weird and nobody wanted it, they figure out how to sell it and get 1500 workers to all shift left at the same time.

This actually isn’t a requirement unless you’re in the national pension system. When you’re below a certain number of employees you don’t have to join the national pension and many of those worker protections also don’t apply to you.

Me and my girlfriend are lucky(?) enough to live in Saitama so we have an extra room that we’ve converted into an office. Most of my colleagues/friends don’t have this space and had to slap their computers on top of their Kotatsu’s before summer rolled around, now because this doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon they’re all buying desks or “floor office chairs”