- ...your salary includes 30-40 hours of overtime (meaning if you work 43 hours of OT in a month, you get paid for 3 of them). But in some of the sub-companies, if you ever arrive a minute late, you have to consume half a day of PTO. Which is a part of...
- A petty, pervasive frugality, with cost-cutting disguised as energy-saving. Indoor temperatures of 28°C; elevators only stopping on certain floors which rotate each month; a PTO system where paid time off is hard to take.
- The company's biggest obsession: Rules. Other reviewers have described the rules about nametags, clean desks, locked drawers, and other things in great detail: they are all true and the system will try your patience.
- The other obsession is with KPIs and ‘kaizen’ (incremental improvement). Every employee must set five to seven measurable goals every six months and then complete them. And because everyone around you is constantly having to come up with goals that can definitely be completed, there will be barely-meaningful changes made to your workflow around you. Get an inexplicable demand to, forevermore from this point, copy-paste some data into a second spreadsheet before saving, to prevent a 1% chance of fat-fingering something? Probably someone's KPI/kaizen requirement. These requirements do not decrease with time; you will have to set new goals at the same rapid pace in your twentieth half=year as in your second half-year.
- Lots of intimidation and "power harassment" and overworked middle management taking their frustrations out on their subordinates. Assuming you are not a local, even if your Japanese is *excellent*, you might struggle to deal with these situations. A screaming Japanese boss can *destroy* your self-worth; do not discount this. And with turnover so high, you can never settle in with a boss with whom you have good rapport. Odds are he’ll be gone in 12-18 months and you will be back at the starting line trying to impress a new boss who may or may not have expected to have a non-Japanese subordinate.
- With that in mind, there are *very few* non-Japanese in management roles; even middle management. The amount of paperwork and documentation demanded of middle management probably means you don't want to rise to that level, unless your Japanese is native-like and effortless. Those things, unlike "Asakai" morning meeting presentations, are not done in English.
- Salaries, while normal by Japan's standards, basically never go up unless you're in management or one of the top 5-10% of performers. Tremendous pressure on middle management to cut costs in every way means that no matter how hard you work, you probably won't be rewarded. Software engineers in particular could make much more in the USA. You would also have enough vacation to visit Japan once a year and still come out far ahead financially.
