Here are my 2 cents on “one of many” experiences about working abroad as a foreigner in Japan.

As my profile is public and I don’t hide my name, I see no point in hiding things which can be googled but less obvious details will be anonymized.

Edit: someone made a reddit thread about it.

A coin is attractive

I joined LINE in May 2018. It’s funny you know, because I’d never had expected to work in Japan. I used to be kind-of-an otaku when I was 16, making furniture out of piles of manga, even put “Japanese” in my very first resume because I watched anime way too often and thought that was me understanding japanese (oh boy was I wrong).

I joined LINE after my previous office got closed for “group strategy pivoting” ; we (15 people) were all thrown away and I realized that “well, you’re (still) young and have no strings so the world is yours to explore.” ; and just like that, I started to punch LinkedIn’s “easy apply” button like an hardcore arcade pro-gamer.

The offer came in December 2017, just like a Christmas present. Everything was a green light: a decent salary, attractive perks (including language school), and the promise to be part of the history of the company since they were opening a new office, and I’d be one of the firsts to push its doors.

A coin is shiny

The firsts months were ecstatic. Japan is such a nice country to be in, seriously! Coming from France, there’s an undeniable overwhelming sense of righteousness coming from the behavior of the population: everyone’s civilized and respectful of each other, queueing perfectly without yelling or outbursts. The outdoors are clean, quiet, and exult a peaceful feeling of security comparable to that gentle haze coming from an autumn tea cup. Japan’s sky’s blue, a blue I’ve never seen before ; the sun creates shades which are world famous and unique to the country as much as its Lego®ish architecture ; these combined forming a soothing sight to contemplate while biking through the endless number of small alleys, one-way streets, and blocks of the city. Transports are coming in numbers, often crazy, always on time, and contribute generously to make the society feel like a swiss ticking clock. On the overall, things are convenient for the most of it ; sometimes a bit old fashioned, but even though it can be annoying it’s kinda cute.

At this time, LINE had been truthfully keeping up to the promise of hospitality and pragmatism I expected from my own impressions of the japanese society: since I’ve been coding for a decade, they asked me to join a quite big project already in progress which had some difficulties. They flew me overseas to support other teams, make presentations to help getting back on track ; I received trust and responsibilities from my firsts days, which I took as some pressure and also as a sort of honor and trust at the same time.

A few weeks after, my lack of japanese knowledge started to show up. It turns out you cannot really attend meetings and throw a casual なに once in a while. I cornered myself out of the meetings, and slid away since I couldn’t keep up with the 4 hours sessions of sprint plannings. But Japan is kind and doesn’t give up ; the lead in charge still saw my value and decided to pivot my contribution into “a side project” which became the start of a design system, initiated from the need to have a component library for their big CMS project ; and there I was, alone, doing components and trying to figure out about the foundations of a design system while also discovering the dynamics of a japanese corporation’s politics.

I’ve been working in lonely environments before and I knew my tasks. I designed a plan, a roadmap, coded it, and proposed it to my hierarchy which, to my surprise, welcomed the idea… with a cheerful silence. No further actions were taken, neither to help me develop the idea or to take it down: it was a japanese silence of indecision, waiting to see what was to come.

Nevertheless, I kept pushing ; my assignment was still valid and the values of the company contain “Go Brave. No Fear. No Regrets.” which I deeply relate to. Shouldn’t I continue?

My managers were impressed by my tenacity, and after few months finally decided to help. LINE didn’t have any design system and it was honestly quite easy to evangelize and convert people to the benefits of a component library. Eventually, I was making enough noise and demands that it came up to our CTO. I didn’t meet with her, but I was told she supported this initiative and offered to meet with a bunch of designers from the company. We organized a 2 days workshop to discuss about design systems and components, and at the end of it, every one felt amazing.

A coin has two sides

After my first year at the other side of the world, I felt amazing: Japan is kind, sunny and sooo yasashii. It almost feels like a gentle cocoon never meant to be left. It’s amazing how fast you get comfortable with the feelings of convenience and security, and how much weight they lift away from your daily life.

Of course, I’ve had some problems. In Japan, most of people can only speak japanese. It can be fun when you visit a temple where you’re called out by a group of cute laughing grandmas and try to communicate with them, ending in the weirdest hand gestures conversation in history ; but it can also lead to a stressful situation when you face officials, cops, but also doctors, or hospitals, emergency situations. Hopefully, as long as you didn’t break any law, Japan is kind and forgives your little foreigner’s ass for not speaking the mother tongue ; just make sure you’ve got data and Google translate will turn into your instant god savior.

I went back from that workshop feeling like a king. “They loved it!” I said… “It’s gonna go big, it’ll be a huge success for our office!”. What a strike for a newborn office to imprint itself in bold in such a big group with such a critical project in such a short time, right?

Two days later was I surprised to receive an invitation which changed my experience for good.

“The project’s direction will be moved to an other department for logistic purposes, but you’ll still be able to maintain your part as usual. And also, we decided to refactor the project and your part is no longer active and planned for sunset (termination).”

The room went silent… japanese silent, and just like that my one year “go brave, no fear, no regrets” effort was reduced to a politically correct heap of ashes.

“なにそれ” (What the …?) – you may say. Or maybe “This happens all the time in big corporations, don’t take it personally.” …but the story doesn’t end up here.

You see, a while ago during my rush phase of conquer, I made a silent enemy. While working freely, alone on this design system, one day he gave me a mission to assert maintenance on some old project of the company.

“Could you tell me if we can maintain this repository by looking at the codebase? It’s urgent, look quickly and give me your impression by tomorrow.”

I honestly didn’t look much past the root folder. The tech stack was around 3 years old, a mix of pug static pages with optional Vue 2 micro instances built with grunt, so even if we could maintain it, I knew it was a very bad gift to whoever would be in charge.

“No we can’t. and even if we could, we shouldn’t. If we were to continue this project, I’d advise to start again from scratch.”

And so it happened ; that project restarted slowly at almost the same time that the pressure of the design system was raising, and just as expected I was the one given the responsibility to work on it. Being the only frontend engineer assigned, I said that “until specifications are stabilized, I’ll focus on the design system which will support this new project for when we start production.” My idea was “prepare the prod, nail the prod.” ; but even though my plan was clear and open from the beginning, my enemy was staring at it from the shadows.

After that terrible silent meeting which changed the course of my path in the company, I wanted to know.

– “What happened? Did I do something wrong? How’s that possible?” I said to my manager.

– “Man you pissed the big bad wolf! Why did you say you accepted the lead without asking him first? He got out of his mind!” he replied.

– “I can’t believe it omg! Could you arrange a meeting? I’d like to hear it from his mouth.”

That meeting went surreal. I got accused of letting go of my assignment, even though I kept explaining my strategy, then, out of nowhere, this happened:

– “Anyhow, I don’t believe in that project of yours, or your ability to lead it.” the wolf said.

– “So you alone don’t believe that a design system is a good thing for a company of our size even though our CTO supports us, and as you think I’m not capable of handling it, you don’t even want to let me try and help me bring this home?” I asked.

He took a pause and replied:

– “Yeah. I believe for you, it’s impossible.”

And that was it.

These words fell heavily on my shoulders. What kind of person would stop trusting his coworkers and their abilities to learn? Is “don’t hope for and support your coworkers” also part of the values of the company?

The shit fell twice this day. I was openly told that I won’t ever be no good to (learn to) hold on a project, and at the same time I also got told that my lack of focus for this new project in favor of the design system was unprofessional.

You see, as specs of the new project were not yet stable, I was still willing to go to production but under special conditions. We’d go slowly, review slowly, twice, and act as if we were walking on eggs. That’s how I learnt to deal with “poor/no-specs projects”. At each page, we’d deal with legacy/historical curiosities to a point that my project manager started to get pissed. But apparently, my burst against computing functional specifications from reverse-engineering the source code of a previous version of the project had been interpreted not as professional ethics, rather a refusal to comply to orders.

I passed through each phase that everyone would in that situation: confusion (is that real?), anger (omg it’s real!) and later on acceptance (yeah, it’s fucking real…). I tried to reach for help, but for months, no-one listened, and every-one went along.

Of course, that project took a bad turn. It was decided to stop production for a full month to write the functional specifications of our project from studying a previous codebase ; as argued, at some point the team realized that we were indeed introducing bugs as specifications, but it was an “acceptable” truth. After listing the tasks to do from this new document, the team announced a release date that we missed by 2.5 months, even though the engineers knew and explicitly mentioned we’d miss it. And everything was my fault, because I was the one pointing at those issues.

From this time, every 2 months or so, I receive different kind of shit from the big bad wolf. He’s pissed at me with the dedication of your typical expectation of “japanese obsession”.

One time, a senior manager offered me to talk to a prime quality conference because he thought I was the best pick, but had to ask for higher approval since he wasn’t in my hierarchy. He asked the big bad wolf who smoothly declined saying that I was busy on other tasks. Even though, this manager thought that disclosing me the truth was the right thing to do and we decided to let it go. A few weeks later, when I innocently brought the topic of conference talk being in my wishlist, that same wolf proposed me to attend the said event luring me into thinking he was the very one picking me.

One time, I got sick and the big bad wolf tried to force me into cancelling my winter vacation to use my remaining paid holidays to cover for my absence. If you’re not familiar with Japan, you may be doubly outraged but you need to know that in here, there’s no standard for sick leaves. Companies don’t give them automatically, and it’s the duty of the worker to show responsibility and save holidays in the unfortunate event of sickness – yeah, you read me right.

A coin as an edge

Once more, as Japan is kind, after talking with the HR department, exceptional unpaid leaves were granted along with the promise that this event wouldn’t be taken in consideration during my yearly evaluation.

LINE’s evaluation system is quite good ; you can bitch all you want, its design is fair, but as much as you can design something good or bad, nobody can control how it’s used – even a teddy bear can be weaponized.

Every single step of an evaluation is once “written” by someone and later on “validated” by a higher rank. This prevents from actions for or against someone taken by a single individual. But what would happen if you didn’t have enough people to fill in the ranks of the review?

Due to the lack of layers in my own command line, the big bad wolf became judge, jury, and executioner for my evaluation. He was in all the layers, from reviewing me, to propose a salary decrease, and later on to accept his own demand.

He claimed my communication skills were low and that for around a semester he received complains, that my entire team was afraid of talking to me, thinking that I was “authoritative” and those were good reasons to punish me.

I started doubting. I started feeling bad. Was I such the monster everyone described? One thing for sure is that, after that meeting I was shocked. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop the train of thoughts, running everything down and try to pay attention to details again, imagining other ways to interpret my actions, and see where it could have gone wrong.

Somehow along the way, members of my team were still talking to me on a daily basis. Did they know that I knew? Do I threaten them now? Should I go home? Should I come out and apologize?

If that claim was true, I couldn’t live, come at the office and work knowing that I was terrorizing my coworkers. I did what I thought was right and talk to them and explained to them that I was sorry for being authoritative in my conduct.

– “Yeah ok but,… what’s the meaning of authoritative?”

I started to realize that none of this was true. Neither my coworkers were thinking I was authoritative, but more than that they didn’t even know the word… Or maybe were they lying to me? All of them?

I went to him and confronted him. He’s a wolf, not a sheep, so he dodged all questions to the best of his agility.

“You knew things were going bad for around 6 months, but instead of solving the issue as soon as it came, you did nothing and later on target me with a salary penalty ; is it how you think you gonna solve the problem?”

“You didn’t believe in my first project ; but can you see the group pushes for conferences talk, updates and all… that it is real? that they want it?”

The wolf is keen and dodged it all. He was thriving.

If you are awaiting for a happy ending, I’d like to spare the wait and spoil you a little: it doesn’t end good.

I’ve been filing for harassment, providing proofs, screenshots and timings for all the claims I’ve been doing, both for my project related problems and company ones. The human resource department received my complains seriously, but as Japan is kind, could not and did not take any actions.

Japanese society, as kind as it is, is also built on strong unspoken rules which favors silence over outbursts, intimidation over honesty, always to keep the power away from trouble.

A coin doesn’t buy happiness

There were no other options for me than going crazy or leaving the company, making either way the wolf happy and sated.

“Life is short”, “pick your battles”. Those are stupidly hollywoodian advices you hear on Netflix everyday, and yet sometimes the dumbest sentences can knock you down whenever the time is right.

So I decided to quit.

More over, I’m quitting Japan. I will always love the country and its wonderful feeling of warm melancholy, has-been sophistication and delicacy. I will always remember the warmth of my friends there, their concern and kindness towards me, the laughters, the parties and the hangovers. I will carry along the memories of the seasons of Japan, each more different yet all so beautiful. I know for sure that I’ll be back one day, just to take a train and look at the landscape running through my eyes as the sunset goes.

If you recognize yourself in supporting me during this time, thank you. I can’t stress enough that your support kept me sane and away from loneliness ; you’re the reason why I didn’t turn like a crazy old grandpa yelling in the streets by himself. I’ll miss you deeply, and be you won’t be forgotten. Let’s keep in touch, and the traditional friends room has now your name on it.

This end is bitter. It’s like breaking up with someone because a third factor came in and you have no choice, and somehow I can’t help but thinking that my last words to this situation can’t be others than:

仕方がない。 残念。