COLUMN ONE : The Rule of Work in Japan : The nation's youth are supposed to be a new breed. But despite government efforts, they are being molded into 'organization men'--just like the old breed.

By LESLIE HELM

March 17, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TOKYO — In college, Masaaki learned to love music. He played percussion in a school concert band and hung out at music halls to hear classical favorites from Brahms to Bernstein. He played soccer and joined friends for weekend driving trips.

As one of Japan’s shinjinrui , or new breed, Masaaki and others like him were expected to break the nation’s workaholic habits and usher in a “progressive” era in which leisure and personal fulfillment are valued.

But Japan’s new breed is beginning to look like the old one. Since joining a prestigious Japanese insurance company four years ago, Masaaki, who does not want his full name used, has felt himself pulled deeper and deeper into corporate clutches.

First, he found himself giving up weekends, then music. Today, at 26, he usually leaves the office after 9 p.m., then continues working past midnight in the cramped quarters of his six-tatami-mat (about 108 square feet) company dormitory room.

True, Japan’s young are changing. Unlike their elders, they know how to have fun. They organize regular weekend trips for tennis and skiing. More unmarried couples live together. Teen-agers can be seen with their hair dyed pink and pins through their cheeks in a classic punk fashion statement.

But in the large companies that make up the backbone of industrial Japan, the nation’s best and brightest are still being molded into “organization men.” Despite the hopes of many American business executives, the shinjinrui are not likely to slow down the Japanese industrial machine.

“Put the shinjinrui in a suit and keep him in the company for 10 years,” Honda Motor Co. chief executive Nobuhiko Kawamoto said with a laugh. “He becomes just like the old breed.”

To summon up the energy for long working days and three-hour, round-trip commutes, many young employees are turning to drug-like potions--vitamin mixtures that contain nicotine and caffeine. One such “mini-drink” challenges in its ads: “Can you keep fighting for 24 hours?” The market for such drinks shot up to $700 million last year, triple the level in 1986.

At some companies, 10-minute breaks from work have a different twist: A tired worker lies down in an enclosed capsule, surrounded by darkness and soothing music. When time is up, his face is blasted with cold air and he is sent back to work.

Many young people, just like their elders, are working themselves literally to death.

Despite a well-publicized government campaign to rid Japan of workaholicism by urging companies to slash work hours, Japanese work longer and take less vacation now than they did 10 years ago.

In 1989, Japanese received on average 15.4 vacation days but took only 7.9 days off, one day less than 10 years ago, according to the Ministry of Labor. Working time in 1989 totaled about 2,150 hours, compared to about 2,100 in 1980. By comparison, Americans work an average of about 1,900 hours a year.

Officials argue that the Japanese numbers are skewed because Japan is currently at the end of an economic boom when most factories are running at peak capacity. But Japanese work hours are grossly understated. It is not unusual for men to clock 3,000 hours a year--the equivalent of 60 hours each week without a day of vacation all year. But few report all overtime.

Japanese companies regularly instruct employees to doctor time cards to meet government work-reduction goals. One salesman selling milk products to hospitals said he is allowed to report and get paid for only 30 hours overtime each month even though he typically works 80. His wife complained about the overtime’s effect on their relationship; now he tries to get home earlier--by 10 p.m.

Union leaders have made shorter working hours a key demand in negotiations with employers. The only way to reduce hours, they argue, is if everybody does it at once.

Cutting back on work hours has been tried before with little effect. Many companies decided early last year to give their employees two Saturdays off each month. The result? More overtime. Japanese companies, particularly those in the inefficient service sectors, have found they must do more work with fewer bodies if they are to boost profits.

“No matter how much you squeeze them, Japanese workers will keep working obediently, so companies raise profits by reducing the number of workers they have,” said Ryo Katoh, a management consultant. Some companies are being forced to make do with fewer workers because of a worsening labor shortage.

“Like the kamikaze pilots,” company employees will drive themselves hard enough to ruin their health before taking the socially unacceptable move of quitting, said Susumu Oda, professor of mental health at Tsukuba University. “They have a difficult time establishing an identity that is separate from the company.”

With the status of women usually based on their husband’s position in the company, wives also push their husbands to work harder, Oda said.

The enormous power of the company over its employees is demonstrated by the numerous cases each year of karoshi , death from overwork. Dentsu--the giant advertising agency that represents to many Japanese the essence of the shinjinrui era of creative, service-oriented work--had 16 cases of workers dying on the job in 1989, many from stress-related diseases.

While most karoshi cases involve workers in their 40s and 50s, many young employees also feel the pressure to keep working until they collapse.

Yoko Oba, a 29-year-old worker at a publishing company in Tokyo, committed suicide Thursday by jumping off a five-story building. She left a note saying she was exhausted from work.

Sakae Iwato, an employee of Fuji Bank, was a vivacious young woman until the company began to computerize operations in her department a year after she started. Her work hours steadily increased until her childhood asthma symptoms recurred.

Although she complained to her boss of the heavy load, she kept working the long hours. If she quit, she told her parents, her customers and her colleagues would be inconvenienced. In the summer of 1989, at 23, she died of acute asthma.

“I could understand the hard work if she were a man,” said her father, Dakien, who blames the death on the bank for requiring her to work long hours. “But she was doing all this even though she had no plan to build a career there.”

The training in self-discipline begins at an early age. At home, youngsters are forced to study long hours to get into the junior high school that will set them on the track for the right college.

In school, Japan’s young are still forced to obey dozens of detailed rules and defer to elders in an almost military atmosphere. One electronics executive attributes Japan’s success to the weekly morning school assembly during which even 8-year-olds must stand at attention for 30 minutes straight, often in freezing weather.

As teen-agers, some youngsters seem to break the mold, crowding the streets of Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park on Sundays wearing wild clothes and dancing to be-bop and disco. As college students, they crowd drinking establishments even on weekdays, sleep late, skip classes and drive crowded Tokyo streets in new four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Complaints about the indolent young are as loud here as anywhere. Sekio Sakagawa, a popular columnist on economic issues, compares the new breed to the small liquid-crystal television sets popular in Japan.

“They are packed with difficult-to-understand functions . . . and are so dark they’re difficult to read,” Sakagawa said. “But if improved, they will be useful in the 21st Century.”

Some complain that today’s college graduate does not take work seriously enough. “He picks companies like he picks clothes,” said Takashi Hasegawa of the Japan Management Assn. “If a girlfriend says a company is dasai , or uncool, he won’t join the company.”

A few years after joining a company, these youngsters undergo a rapid metamorphosis. They become kaisha senshi , corporate warriors, the modern-day equivalent of feudal samurai willing to sacrifice personal desires to serve their lords.

Japanese companies “are probably the best in the world in shaping our young workers,” boasted a senior executive at Hirata Industrial Machinery, which supplies assembly lines to such major corporations as Matsushita and Sony. “Within three years they are completely different.”

It is no idle boast. Look at the results of a recent survey of local employees aged 18 to 27 by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Asked if they would be willing to work overtime without pay, 59% of first-year employees said no. All second-year employees said they would work overtime without pay.

Asked if they would do overtime when they had a date with a girlfriend, 64% of the first-year employees surveyed said they would refuse. Only 36% of the second-year employees said they would refuse.

“Once you are assigned clients, you have to work hard to keep them satisfied,” said a 27-year-old advertising executive who usually works until midnight and spends at least one weekend day at the office each week. “If the client says on Friday he wants a report by Monday, he assumes you will sacrifice your weekend to do the work.”

An American advertising executive might do the same. The difference? In American firms it is the handful of executives on the fast track who burn the midnight oil. In Japan, a majority of the employees in the company, including many non-career clerical workers, are willing to make such sacrifices.

The process of socializing new employees begins by stamping out the bad habits students learn in their freewheeling university days.

While Japanese students work hard in elementary and high school, once in a university few demands are made on them and discipline unravels. “We would be better off if they went straight from high school to work,” said Hasegawa of the Japan Management Assn. The association, a quasi-government organization that played a key role in introducing quality-control techniques to Japan, recently began offering a special video and comic book package to help companies train the new breed.

The message to employees: Don’t stick out. Get to work 15 minutes early after having read the paper, eaten a three-minute breakfast and gone to the bathroom. Learn the proper way to bow and to answer the telephone. Women should smile with their eyes as well as their mouths.

“Practice in front of the mirror,” the video advises. When going out with a group to a karaoke bar, do not hog the microphone and do not sing the boss’s favorite song.

Paper-doll sketches give pointers on dress and personal care. Women are advised to look at the others in the office to see how to do their hair.

Corporations have been snapping up these videos. “You are dealing with unfinished humans,” said the manager of one of Japan’s largest travel agencies, who asked that his name not be used. “Learning proper etiquette is the first step.”

The manager described his process for training new recruits. “At first you give them just candy: visions of travel,” he said. Employees are then reminded that they are no longer in school and must work for their pay. They are forced to stay late every day for months at a time, often spending the night in a nearby hotel at company expense. “It is made clear that if they leave early they will become murahachibu (outcasts).”

It is the long hours and the after-work drinking sessions that make them “company warriors,” he said. “You have to make the steel red-hot to shape it.”

A new recruit is generally assigned to a sempai , an employee slightly his senior, who acts as his on-the-job instructor into the company culture.

Under the lifetime employment system, which remains embedded in most major corporations, failing to adapt to the company culture can mean everything from a ruined career to a less-favorable marriage. Finding partners for their male employees is considered a key function of Japanese corporations, and the most prestigious companies stock their offices with pretty, well-educated and well-mannered women.

“Japanese companies have very powerful mechanisms for socializing people,” said W. Mark Fruin, visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo, who is spending time at a Japanese factory studying how Japanese companies train and nurture employees by using numerous “group” activities.

The biggest challenge to Japanese corporate culture is the labor shortage, which for the first time offers many youngsters a chance to escape what can be an oppressive environment.

In 1986, for example, 24 new employees at Fuji Bank quit in unison, taking jobs at foreign banks and brokerages. Some complained that they were expected to work up to 120 hours a month of overtime. It was a surprising turn of events in a country where employees have long had little choice except to stick to their first jobs.

Personnel officers have moved quickly to stem the outflow by introducing new recruits more gradually to the heavy demands of company life. Some companies, to make themselves more attractive, hope to permanently reduce work hours. Toyota and Mitsubishi Motors are experimenting with three shifts instead of two at their smaller factories to cut down on overtime and attract workers increasingly reluctant to take jobs at production sites.

Tough training sessions are being eased. “Companies ask me not to be so strict or their employees will quit,” said Yasuo Motohashi, who runs the infamous “hell training camp” where hundreds of corporations send their employees to be humiliated and reduced to tears. Motohashi believes this state is a prerequisite to recognize one’s shortcomings and become a good company man.

Companies are also investing heavily in employee amenities to attract and hold on to new recruits. Kawasaki Steel has budgeted $385 million to spend on company dormitories and housing over the next five years, about a quarter of its capital spending budget. Most large companies offer single male employees a bed in a company dormitory for a nominal rent. Wealthier companies offer married employees subsidized housing.

But while job hopping has increased, alternative job opportunities do not give employees leverage in negotiating better working conditions. Each company provides its own distinct training, and firms seldom value each other’s programs. Job transfers usually mean a step down to smaller, less prestigious firms offering less pay and less security.

Masaaki, like many other young Japanese, would like to change jobs. But he does not know much about what else is available.

“When you’re in the company, it is like being in a spaceship,” he said. “The only people you meet are from your own company.”

After five or six years at a company, an employee may have some misgivings about how much it dominates his life. But he will often admit that he is more comfortable in the workplace, where he develops a strong support group, than at home where relations with his wife and children may have deteriorated.

“Over time, there is less resistance to organizational demands,” Fruin said. “You get the business school ideal: a high congruence between what the individual wants and what the organization wants.”

Masaaki said he has no intention of sacrificing his life to the company. He said he will stay with the company another six or seven years to see if things get better, then look for another job. “But by then I might have a wife and kids and be in company housing,” he admitted. “It might be difficult to quit.”

THE MOLDING OF JAPANESE YOUTH

The following instructions, appearing in materials developed by the Japan Management Assn., are used to instruct new Japanese workers on how to behave in corporate life.

PROPER GROOMING (for men)

Your hair clean cut like a freshman.

Dandruff is a symbol of dirt.

Watch for dirty teeth and bad breath.

Don’t use the same handkerchief as yesterday.

Let’s be careful of how we tie our neckties.

It is not fashionable to wear a gaudy necktie.

Are your shift cuffs worn?.

Fashionable clothes are of no use if they aren’t clean.

Are your pants well pressed?.

Beware of the smell of your socks.

Are your shoes dirty?.