Customer Reviews

Inside the Japanese Company

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Don't ask how I came to be reading this, as I know nothing about Japan, anthropology, or business studies. But I was hooked from the start. It's a fascinating trawl through life in a large Japanese company, which makes "Lad's Army" look like Butlins: if the employees survive the brutal totalitarian discipline of the training centre, the "voluntary" weekend working hours, and the "entirely non-compulsory" karaoke outings, they'll probably succumb to the imaginative bullying of their peers. Yet all is not well in the company as Japan's economy crumbles, and for the first time in a generation the samurai-like code of the white-collar worker is in serious jeopardy. All this could be fearsomely academic, but the author illustrates everything with anecdotes of her own experiences as an employee at "C-Life", and also with extensive quotes from the other employees - in which we see their habit of repeating the "company line" ("How I love this company! I love it even though they have asked me to "voluntarily retire!") breaking down in the face of their need to say what they *really* think. It's written in an interesting and lively style with a minimum of jargon. Although this book is doubtless of great interest to anthropologists, business students, and those interested in Japan, I think it should also be fascinating to practically anyone who likes real stories of ordinary people caught in a bizarre Kafka-esque world of bureaucracy, jargon, and perverted values - a world that is all the more poignant for its transience.

I would be interested to read this book, but priced at $180 for 225 pages...is quite expensive! What is so special about this book to cost about $200 ?...