The monthly EA-Tokyo seminar.
This time, it was this gentleman who started this IT support company. It was kind of weird that I sat up in front of the podium, facing him – it was him who taught me how the “Gaishi-kei” corporations (foreign companies) work through his book.
I read this book in the year 2000, when I was thinking about what step I should take next after quitting the company I worked for 5 years. Yes, it is a Japanese company. I was frantically looking for some advise – mostly from books. Now I can laugh at and advise to me then, why didn’t you look for a real life-story by networking? But I was naive enough to daydream(or escape) that every answer to every problem can be found by reading books….
I found that book at a huge bookstore in Nagoya when I was looking for some way to leverage my English skill, my only asset which I was confident of (compared to average Japanese – I didn’t have the nerve to compare it with native speakers). Working at a foreign company or do some translation seemed like two promising career paths, but despite the massive number of books & magazines about translation( more than 20 I guess), I could see a very small number of books on “Gaishi-kei” (3 to 4). And there was only one book(this book), which I thought was telling the guts of life in Gaishi, inside-out without putting too much viased filter. The other books were more of the auther’s personal opinion rather than a report like that, in the other books they were either predicting that the “Gaishi”s will someday take over Japanese corporate soceity (I bet the same auther might now have written a book by merely changing the word “Gaishi” to “China”) or telling & critisizing the lucrative lifestyle which the top-dealers in the investment banks enjoyed.
Eventually I took a position in one of the “Gaishi”s, and it wasn’t because I read that book but reading it definetely helped making my decision – it not only gave lots of positive & negative stories which balanced my view, but also shed lights on both sides of one story, by saying a particular environment can be heaven or hell by how you act on it – it encouraged my will and my decision. More than being optimistic or negative toward “Gaishi”, I think I got attracted to the author’s message – I felt as if he was saying “Come on, join the party!” – something never came out from Japanese-written business books.