July 4, 2005 – Finding the Salaryman in Tokyo

July 4, 2005 – Finding the Salaryman in Tokyo

I’m in the Keio Plaza Hotel in the Shinjuku District of Tokyo. I arrived late on Monday September 15, 1997 aboard Singapore Airlines Flight SQ998 into Narita Airport, boarded one of the many buses from Narita to Tokyo hotels—you have to purchase a ticket for the bus that has your hotel on its route at a special concession stand at the airport, which I did. The bus dropped me at the Keio Plaza entrance and I checked in, being greeted by a polite desk clerk who spoke English very well. He had my reservation and I was checked in within minutes, given my electronic key card, shown where the elevators were, and told that my one soft side hanging garment bag would be sent up directly. Tired from a day of interviews followed by hours of flying, I walk to the elevators, punch the up button, hear the distinctive ring tone that characterizes a Mitsubishi Elevator as distinctly as the ring of a British Telephone, then board the elevator to my room. No sooner do I walk in the door to my room than the bellman rings my doorbell and brings me my one piece of luggage.

Left alone at last with only my thoughts for company, I look out my hotel room window at the lights of Shinjuku below and marvel at the contrast between what I remember of the district in 1964 and today. Back then I had no fear of finding my way around, having gotten lost numerous times and always finding landmarks that brought me back to the train station from the movie theater, massage parlor, or bar I had been frequenting. Now, gazing at the jungle of high rise buildings that had displaced the single story buildings I remember from thirty years earlier, I realize that it would take me a week of wandering the streets to get that familiarity back. I had no appointments on Tuesday and would do a walkabout of the district surrounding the hotel hoping to acquire that familiarity in a day. My last appointment on Thursday was at a publishing company in one of the many office buildings close by. I would find the building on foot. My other appointments on Wednesday would be in Yokohama and my only concern would be finding the train platform inside Shinjuku Station, which had also grown considerably over the past 30 years.

Tuesday morning after breakfast, I begin walking all around the hotel. My first trek is two blocks to the train station, trying to find the entrance through the gauntlet of the Keio and Odakyu Department stores that hid the station from my hotel. Once inside the train station, I feel like a mouse confronting a maze, so many paths all leading to exits other than the one I entered. I’m looking for a ticket counter to purchase my ticket for Yokohama. I walk about the station for a good half-hour before locating the counter. Ticket in hand, I now try to find the platform that the train for Yokohama will be leaving from. After finding the object of my quest, I then try to find my way back to the station entrance leading to my hotel and in the process, finding the landmarks that will guide me back to the platform early Wednesday morning. My one saving grace the following day is that everyone will be traveling into Tokyo while I’ll be going in the opposite direction.

When I first came to Tokyo, I was 19 years old and I wanted badly to find my place in the world once my tour of duty in the Navy was over. For the moments I spent in Japan’s largest city, I was on leave from my day job, babysitting computers aboard a Navy ship in the Pacific. During my days off, I was instructed to wear civilian clothes so as not to give away the fact that I was in the Navy, which was fine by me. As soon as I arrived in Japan, July 7, 1965, I had two suits made at a tailor near Yokosuka Navy Base, where I was awaiting the arrival of my ship in August from its monthly cruise about the Pacific. The fact that a Navy enlisted man could afford two tailored suits speaks volumes about the strength of the dollar versus the Yen in the mid-1960s. Once outfitted in a black summer weight wool suit, I made my first trip to Tokyo and found a city teaming with men similarly attired to me. The term “salaryman” had not been coined back then but the business-suited men all around me as I walked the streets of the Marunouchi District certainly fit the description.

Here I was essentially “playing the role” of an American equivalent of the Japanese salaryman. Now, as I walked about Shinjuku in my jeans, tennis shoes, and sports shirt—attire common to tourists worldwide—I was struck by the transformation that had overcome me. Where before I had been pretending to be a salaryman, today I was one and the connotation of the term in the wake of the Japanese bubble seemed even more appropriate now. Salaryman had become synonymous with long working hours, low prestige in the corporate hierarchy, absence of significant sources of income other than salary, wage slavery, and (karōshi, or death from overwork). I was a salaryman in every sense of that definition and I had been since the day I began working after leaving the Navy and acquiring my college degree in economics. The definition fit all the way to parenthetical reference to karōshi. Shortly before turning 50 years old, I had been diagnosed with heart disease, the combination of bad genes and a stress filled life that aggravated an already bad combination of factors. About the only thing going for me was I wasn’t sedentary and my years of daily running had moderated damage from the disease. I did have some stock in the company I now worked for, but it was essentially worthless as I would find out later, when it was revealed that my stake in the company had been so diluted over time as to be worth what I paid for them—nothing. In addition, within another decade, my useful years as a salaryman would be coming near to an end.

I had come full circle from my heady days of youth pretending to be what now in old age I had become. On Wednesday after finding my way to Yokohama, I spent the morning and lunch with a company—I’ll call it M.G.—owned by one of my magazine’s largest advertisers in the U.S. They were helping make introductions to Japanese companies who might become advertisers. Two of M.G.’s young sales executives accompanied me to the customers, my magazine was trying to woo. The meetings were social calls. In Japan no business gets done without building a relationship with your customer, something that can take years for an outsider to accomplish. During the train rides between these meetings I engaged my two young hosts and saw in them a desire to transcend the confines of their salaryman role. They had shares in M.G., which turned out to have value several years later when the company was sold. Was it sufficient to allow them to live without their day job? I’ll never know the answer but I’d like to think they did. Both were just starting their lives fresh out of school with a couple of years experience and a young family.

When I returned from Yokohama, I had invited, HM, the sales representative for the old magazine I use to work for out to dinner. He said he would call for me at the Keio and we could walk to a nearby restaurant. He rang me in my room at the appointed time and I met him in the lobby. I hadn’t seen him in four years when I had made the trip to Tokyo with my boss JA and HM had toured us about to advertisers in and around city. We had dinner that night at an izakaya—a cross between a sit down restaurant and a pub—near the Keio Hotel. The name of the place was Izakaya Asahitei. HM was part owner of the small sales rep firm that still sold advertising for my previous employer, but business for the old publication was dwindling and the firm was taking on new publishers to offset the decline. HM and I were about the same age, with children who were grown and on their own—two salarymen sharing an evening commiserating about life in our different worlds.

The following morning I woke early, packed, checked out of the hotel, and left my bags with the bellman for safe keeping. I had a late afternoon flight from Narita, which gave me plenty of time for my morning meeting with the publishing company a few blocks from the hotel. I arrived on time dressed in what I thought was a lightweight suit but I found myself sweating more than normal. Was it the heat and humidity or the prospect of asking for help from an investor.? It was probably a mixture of both. When I arrived I was pleasantly surprised to see SA and SH, from the Japanese’s company U.S. Venture Capital arm. They were in town for regularly scheduled meetings and having them introduce me reduced the awkwardness between host and visitor. My hosts understood that I was a distant relative rather than a total stranger. When the meeting was over, I had lunch with SA and SH, two who were not of the category salaryman. SA the senior of the two paid.

After lunch, I returned to the hotel, collected my luggage and then changed from my suit into jeans, tennis shoes, and sport shirt. I wanted to unburden myself from the trappings of my station in life before boarding United Flight 838 back to the states.