Japan — the Land of Opportunity, An Interview with Tomoe Ishida
In Japan a lot of people go to university, and get a four year degree. During the last year or so of their studies, many students will ramp up their job seeking efforts, and attend job fairs, interviews, internships, hone their resumés and consider how to describe the red thread in their lives leading up to applying for a given company.
The ‘when’ and ‘how’ of job-seeking among the largest and most influential companies in Japan, has for many years been defined by the Japan Business Federation or Keidanren. However from the fiscal year of 2023, the rules will be removed, in order to open up for a more free flowing labour market. A survey (https://okan-media.jp/rule-of-job-hunting/) among students in Japan in March of 2020 by the Pasona Research Institute, the research arm of a major human resources company, found that opinions were divided amongst students on whether to keep the rules or not.
The students who would like the rules removed, pointed to the fact that they would be able to seek out the best company for them on their own schedule, while students wanting to keep the rules say they would have a hard time planning their overall student life. Finding one’s first job as a recent graduate can be a daunting task all over the world, but perhaps a loosening of the rules might just spur some serendipity in corporate Japan in terms of who starts working where — and why.
The ‘why’ is an important question in this context. When talking with Japanese people who have jobs in Japan, it can often feel like there is a disconnect between what people studied or their interests, and their jobs. When researching this a bit, I found a 2021 survey (https://offerbox.jp/company/jinji-zine/hatarakikata/) of recent graduates, which asked more than 4000 people how they felt about work and contribution. 45% of the young people surveyed, answered that they didn’t mind not doing what they wanted to do, as long as they could recognition for their contribution. This is not to pass judgement, but it is perhaps a relevant observation to have in mind when talking about service design in Japan. We will touch upon this later as well, but suffice it to say, there is less of a tradition in Japan to match employer and employee/role by a specific skillset (like service design), than is perhaps the case in other countries. Instead, there is a broad practice of general hiring, on the employers’ terms, with employees being “molded” to whatever role through on-the-job training.
Ms Tomoe Ishida connected with me on Linkedin in December 2019. I knew the company she was interning at then, and we had some common professional acquaintances, but I remember feeling impressed by the courteous proactive attitude. In Japan, where Linkedin has only 2–3 million active users, simply being on the network is an indication of a slightly different attitude than the rest. And for women, who in this country still (in 2019) only had 10% of corporate board seats, and a measly 8% of “lower level managerial positions” (https://globalriskinsights.com/2021/03/japans-glass-ceiling-obstacles-to-womens-participation-in-the-workplace/) it is a way to create new pathways in a society that desperately needs them to.
Ms Ishida studied service marketing at university, and through that got interested in design, and service design, because design offers a “good way of looking at the world; seeking to find the right answer to the question of whether we actually ‘need this or not’”. In this sense, the potential of design in Japan is perhaps exactly this: to encourage questioning and open up discussions.
In a similar vein, ms Ishida also mentioned an idealism often heard in the (global) design community, but still put it in a new light, when she referred to wanting to design a better world, but doing it be stopping, reflecting and even subtracting. She finds that she often wants to linger in the opening discussion with clients, about the role of their idea in society — and not simply jumping to a discussion of how to make it.
Sometimes client projects can be hard to come to terms with personally. Aligning personal ethics as a consulting designer is something which will most likely become increasingly important, as the gap between many ‘traditional’ businesses and the awareness of societal issues widens. Perhaps people’s minds will move faster than corporate adaptability. Increasingly putting one’s concerns and reflections into words, if not also action, like ms Ishida does, is a development that will potentially change how Japan works. For the better.
Our conversation turned to the practice of service design and user experience design, and an interesting connection was made to the link between education and work, as it manifests in client work. In Japan, you study whatever you want, you go to the most well-regarded university you can, and get the most stable job you can. People tend to lack expertise or even (initial) interest in the work they’re made to do. This impacts client work, because client teams often have difficulty deciding internally. Not only in terms of concrete design, but also more broadly on what is actually the issue at hand. This means requests are consistently more fuzzy than what is perhaps the norm in other countries, because they are internally undecided. This puts more ‘strain’ on the need to frame the question/situation.
Reflecting on my own experience of working in Japan; selling and delivering service research and design projects, this really hit home for me. Being comfortable in this phase is a key, learned ‘skill’ when entering into client relationships.
Ms Ishida has both personal and professional connections abroad, and has a distinctly global mindset, while feeling completely at ease in her Japanese perspective as well. For this, it was all the more interesting to dive into her thoughts on Japanese design in general. “Good design” in Japan is generally speaking often understood to be “fancy” stuff, ms Ishida points out. Whereas in her experience, Danish design, for example, is more about adding value to people’s everyday lives. There is a cultural dimension to this, she continues, because in Japan there is a deeply ingrained mindset of maintaining a ‘proper’ facade — tatemae, it’s called. This means you dress up more for others, and less for yourself. A lot of Japanese aesthetics is in this sense about making others feel something, whereas in Denmark it’s perhaps more about how it makes yourself feel.
As I talk with more and more people about the perception of the concept of design in Japan, it is clear that ms Ishida is not alone in her observations. People responsible for design in large public and private organizations alike will be quick to bemoan the difficulty of ‘placing’ design in the Japanese organization, with R&D or technology departments being the most common places of anchoring. Broadening the understanding of design within organizations, might entail a partial adaption of some of the values of Danish design, for example, that make ms Ishida feel like it is closer to the everyday lives of consumers and citizens. With public service delivery in particular becoming increasingly digital and direct in Japan too, an ‘everyday-value’ aesthetic might prove crucial to wide adoption and uninhibited use.
I for one am very excited to merge and adapt these different perceptions of design, in order to make a more meaningful impact on society — and I am heartened by the fact that people like ms Ishida is too!
Thank you for reading.
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