Customer Reviews

The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveller to Lifer at Mitsubishi

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Niall Murtagh is an Irishman who came to Japan to study the language. He ended up working for the Mitsubishi corporation for 14 years. Murtagh was a world traveler who did not stay in any one place for to long. So how is it he stayed with one company, a japanese company at that, for 14 years? This book attempts to answer that perplexing question. Though Murtagh has led a varied life, he devotes most of his book to his 14 years with the Mitsubishi Company as a Japanese kaishain, or salaryman.

Murtagh rose to a middle-manager position, almost unheard of for any gaijin (foreigner) in a Japanese corporation. He was always the only gaijin in the room. Because his Japanese was flawless he was always looked at askance. The Japanese feel that their language is to difficult for gaijin to learn let alone speak fluently. He tells of his daily commute to work on a bicycle, his unpaid overtime, company uniforms and he even the company song.

He says little of his personal life. His courtship and marriage to Miyuki is a good example of this. He sums up this chapter of his life by saying Miyuki's parents approved of their marriage because of his Mitsubishi credentials.

Murtagh keeps the story moving in a conversational style. He has an eye for the irony of the cultural differences between the west and the east.

I have a friend in Tokyo who is also a salaryman. I got this book for that reason. I wanted to see some of the things that he had to go through. He said that many of the experiences that Murtagh went through are quite common for a gaijin salaryman.

It is an entertaining book and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who has friends or family working in Japan. And for those of you who don't, it is still an interesting read to compare the cultures.

"The Blue-eyed Salaryman" is a book written by Niall Murtagh, an Irishman, and is based on his real life experience as a salaryman at Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan.

The story starts when he joins the R&D department at Mitsubishi in the early 1990. At the beginning he was a contract worker, but eventually he became a normal lifetime salaryman. He was also the first foreigner to be promoted to management level in Mitsubishi in Japan.

His book is very interesting, because it is based on his experience over a period of more than 10 years. So he really got to understand deeply about Mitsubishi's culture and way of working. He also experienced the end of the bubble area, and the following crisis years.

Later on, Murtagh-san was transferred to Osaka, which allowed him to compare between Osaka and Tokyo working culture. His finding was that people in Tokyo cared about big visionary research projects, whereas in Osaka all research needs to have a practical application to get accepted. He did enjoy living in the Osaka area, and eventually enjoyed working here.

The final conclusion of his book is that for foreigners, as change agents, it is not meaningful to join traditional Japanese companies from the bottom; because the only way to drive fundamental change in large Japanese traditional corporations is top down. According to Niall, Carlos Ghosn would never have been able to impact to Nissan if he had joined them from the bottom...

Working as a foreigner in a large Japanese corporation in Japan, I really identified strongly with Niall's writing. It gave me a sense of comfort, making me believe that I still haven't lost my common sense....

Content is accurate, well-observed, and recounted with sensitivity and balance; happily, it's very well-written and flows beautifully. Certainly worthwhile reading for foreigners working with (or for) the Japanese. Hopefully, this work will appear in a Japanese edition as well, and I'll bet it would be a best-seller in Japan. Like the author, I have worked in a large Japanese company, married a Japanese national, and make my home in Japan.

From the first opening sentence, this book is a page turner. The writer provides a simple but deep insight on working in a major Japanese company. The events presented are sometime caricatural, looks too bad/good to be true, but I can attest from my own experience they're quite real.
A must reading material for people thinking of working at a major traditional Japanese company.

Niall Murtagh gives us an understanding of the real(hone) underbelly of Japanese corporate life. The book is well written entertaining and accurate. I have the same roots as the author and like him have endured 14 years in a large Japanese corporation. So I can verify his accuracy. He deals with the frustrating an oppressive aspects of salaryman Japan life in a very Irish way - he uses humour. He tries hard to fit-in but soon learns that foreigners, even Japanese fluent ones with a Phd., never fit in. or become totally accepted. He could have expanded on the psychological impact of salaryman life on foreigners. For those with a work link to Japan, read this book.

Over the past 20 years, Japan's corporate giants have gone from walking tall to staggering a bit, to finally lying supinely on the floor. What is surprising is not that the country tripped--we all have our bad days--but that it has never really found its feet again. This insightful book helps you see why.

Before the collapse of its economy in 1989, Japan's manufacturing might had amassed Croesus-like wealth, fueling a spending spree that famously included the Exxon Building and Rockerfeller Center. However, the years since, the main thing Japanese companies seem to be acquiring is foreign CEOs (Nissan, Sony). While Japan still boasts champions in a number of fields (Canon, Toshiba, Toyota), there is no Japanese version of Microsoft or Apple, of Cisco or Oracle, Nokia or RIM, Allianz or AXA, Pfizer or Bayer.

Mr Murtagh was another international acquisition of Japan Inc., and although his book is not written as an analysis of the country's economic malaise, the symptoms are all there in his account. Through his plainly told, straightforward account of his graduate studies in Tokyo, recruitment by the Mitsubishi Group--one of Japan's largest and oldest conglomerates--his growing disenchantment and final resignation from the company, you can start to get a feeling for how myopic and parochial Japanese corporate culture can be. His final, damning analysis is that "The fundamental problem is that the managers making the decisions have no experience of anything other than the company they work for ... they don't even realize their decision-making leaves much to be desired".

After working for 10 years in both the public and private sector in Japan, including a term at another one of Japan's largest companies, I can attest to the accuracy and universality of much of Mr Murtagh's observations, from corporate daddy-cultures that have managers admonishing staff not to walk with their hands in their pockets, to meeting minutes that focus solely on the lofty pronouncements of senior executives.

If all this sounds rather heavy-going, the book itself is a surprisingly light read. Mr Murtagh's style is understated and simple, if a little heavy on sarcasm. It's not exactly sparkingly funny; the tone lurks just beyond the penumbra of wit, exuding a sort of black humor born of corporate cupidity and indifference. The book is at its best when it has management in its sights. A bit like Dilbert, minus the cubicles and punchlines.

The book is not all overalls and overtime, which is a pity, for the bits that aren't about work are easily the book's weakest. In between meetings and business trips, Mr Murtagh details his neighbor troubles and love life--none of which is especially insightful. I'd suggest readers looking for a better treatment of an outsider's life in Japan read Bruce Feiler's "Learning to Bow" (somewhat dated) or even Dave Barry's "Dave Barry Does Japan" (also dated, but hilarious). For the insider's look on daily life, try Alex Kerr's polemical "Dogs and Demons", Karl Taro Greenfeld's "Speed Tribes" or Michael Zielenziger's "Shutting Out the Sun".

As someone who spent a year as a salaryman, I went into this book curious to see how Murtagh would reflect on his experiences. Would he portray himself as the brave and noble foreigner who revolutionized stagnant Japan Inc.? Would he rage against the machine which creates an army of salaryman soldiers (such as those on the cover on the book)? No, he actually gives what from my experience seems to be an admirably balanced account of the life of a salaryman. I think for many people who do not have much experience with Japan, this will be a very eye-opening book; for those who are familiar with Japan--and especially corporate Japan--this will remain interesting yet eerily familiar (Japanese speakers will also be amused by the pseudonyms). I think that even for people familiar with corporate life (but not necessarily corporate Japan), one would be surprised that for all the differences, many of the problems with plague large Japanese companies are not that different from those which plague large American companies. To be fair, I think Murtagh would have been equally frustrated at GM as he was at Mitsubishi.

Murtagh does make for an interesting and ironic protagonist, however, because he is a self-described non-conformist who engages in perhaps the most conformist job possible: that of a Japanese salaryman. And for all the passive aggressive activities he engages in (pushing back his start date, not saying "hai" when called upon, engaging in "radical" bicycle activities), he more or less goes along with the system for over a decade. And it is partially for that reason that he does actually climb the ranks to some degree. While there were definite cultural elements at play as well, one wonders whether Murtagh would've climbed much further up the corporate ladder in the West anyway: he strikes me as fitting in more with an entrepreneurial, start-up company than as top management material for a massive, multinational conglomerate. But particularly for Japan, some of his antics make it somewhat amazing that he was promoted as far as he was. One proverb which was curiously omitted from the chapter headings ("curious" because it sums up much of Murtagh's experiences, and Japan in general): Deru kui wa utareru (the stake which sticks up gets beaten down). As Murtagh noted, no matter what his rank, how long he lived in Japan, or how prestigious his employer, he would always be the immigrant: the stake waiting to be pounded down into its place. In the end, although it had its very humorous moments, what will remain with me is Murtagh's sense of frustration and isolation in his life as a salaryman. Even the funny and paradoxical moments turn bittersweet when one remembers that Murtagh spent 14 or so years in this situation.

Because of its topic, this book is never going to be a best-seller (in the US at least) and will appeal only to a niche market ... but for readers like me in that market, it was quite fascinating. Having worked in Japan for a Japanese company, I wanted to show this book to my friends and family and say "Read this! THIS is what my life was like!" because it sums up an experience so well that is extremely difficult to convey to others who think of Japan only in terms of sushi and samurai, or gadgets and geisha. As an educator, I think it would be a fascinating text to work into a class. As a reader, I highly recommend it to others!