For Harmony and Strength: Japanese White-Collar Organization in Anthropological Perspective [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520341296

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Published under the auspices of T H E CENTER FOR JAPANESE AND KOREAN STUDIES, University of California, Berkeley

FOR HARMONY AND STRENGTH

THOMAS P. ROHLEN

For Harmony and Strength JAPANESE WHITE-COLLAR ORGANIZATION IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1974, by The Regents of the University of California ISBN: 0-520-02674-8 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-91668 Printed in the United States of America

FOR MY THREE

FAMILIES

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1.

T H E BASIC F O R M O F T H E C O M P A N Y

2 . SONGS, CEREMONIES, AND THE UEDAGIN IDEOLOGY

ix 1 1G

34

3 . ENTRANCE, DEPARTURE, AND " L I F E L O N G

4.

COMMITMENT"

62

T H E OFFICE GROUP

93

5 . A FRIEND A T COURT

121

6 . GETTING AHEAD

135

7 . WHO GETS WHAT, WHEN

156

8 . T H E BANK'S UNION

176

9. CREATING T H E UEDAGIN MAN

192

1 0 . DORMITORIES AND COMPANY APARTMENTS

212

1 1 . MARRIAGE AND T H E F A M I L Y

235

CONCLUDING REMARKS

255

REFERENCES CITED

271

INDEX

28l

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My interest in investigating a Japanese company predates my interest in anthropology by some years, and the number of people who have guided my studies, introduced me to Japan, and encouraged me in this undertaking is commensurately large. I wish to thank Marius Jansen, Eleanor Jorden, Francis L. K. Hsu, Anthony F. C. Wallace, Ward Goodenough, Igor Kopytoff, and Teigo Yoshida, under whom I have studied. T o Ezra Vogel, Robert Cole, Keith Brown, James Donohue, and my colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I am most grateful for much helpful encouragement and advice. I also gratefully acknowledge the support provided me by an NIMH Predoctoral Fellowship (No. 5-FO1-MH-36190-04 CUAN) and by two faculty research grants from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The Uedas, with whom I lived for a year during my earlier studies, I count as my own family. For their gracious hospitality and warm friendship I am grateful beyond words. If my opinions of Japan are oversympathetic, the Uedas are most responsible. Hitoshi Ueda, a fellow anthropologist and a close friend, shared his own fieldwork and his perceptive grasp of Japanese society with me throughout our years together. Jun Katada, Koichi Maruyama, and others too numerous to name also contributed greatly to the pleasantness of my stay and to the excitement of my work. A good friend from another bank, Takashi Kondo, has been a most cooperative teacher on the subject of Japanese business. My greatest debt of gratitude is owed to the people of the Ueda bank. Without their cooperation, tolerance, and good will this study would have been impossible. They took the time to answer my naive questions and to share an evening or two with me during their very busy lives. During the preparation of the several drafts of this book, Patti Rahm, Phyllis Halpin, Charlotte Cassidy, Pam Fusari, and Wanda Jett have cheerfully assisted with the typing. Patiently supporting me during the trying process of writing and rewriting have been my parents, my brother and sister, my wife, and my children. I hope this book in some measure redeems all the sacrifice and trouble they have so willingly endured.

INTRODUCTION

"Harmony and strength" (wa to chikara) is the official motto of Uedagin, a Japanese bank I studied for eleven months in 1968-69 using the participant-observer approach. 1 A study of a large, modern bank is not the kind of research normally undertaken by cultural anthropologists, yet our discipline's central concern with culture and cultural variation must be extended to the study of modern organizations particularly as they assume more significance in the non-Western world. Japan is one obvious place for this kind of study, since it is the non-Western nation most characterized by industrial development, urban concentration, and modern organization. It is safe to estimate, for example, that more than half of the working population of the country is employed in a company of one kind or another. Uedagin is one such company. It is considerably larger than average, employing three thousand people, and its commercial rather than industrial nature places it in the category of a white-collar organization having more in common with government bureaus than with factory situations. There are many reasons why one would decide to study such a company. T h e extraordinary vigor of Japan's economic growth has generated a good deal of general interest in Japanese companies, and scholars from a variety of disciplines (primarily business management, sociology, and industrial relations) have in the last decade been studying the subject with growing intensity. 2 T h e major social science focus, however, has been blue-collar workers in industrial firms, and there is an obvious need for more information on the kind of company Uedagin represents. White-collar workers, white-collar work, and companies in which these predominate deserve greater attention, and this case study of a bank will hopefully reveal many new avenues of inquiry and comparison. My intention here is primarily to demonstrate the general applicability of the anthropological perspective to the study of modern or1 An account of my fieldwork methods appears in the last chapter of this book. 2 The list of significant studies is too long to include here, but in the course of this book most will be mentioned in footnotes at the relevant juncture.

8

FOR H A R M O N Y AND S T R E N G T H

ganizations. I began my research with the conviction that what scholars in other fields have labeled, and often dismissed, as "traditional" Japanese patterns of thought, organization, and interrelationship would be readily found to be integral and lively aspects of contemporary organizations, if, that is, a fieldwork approach was coupled with a concern with grasping the inherent meaning of organizational structures, official explanations, daily events, and all the other material that constitute the social life of a company.3 This is a most common intention of anthropological fieldwork, and I can make no claim to theoretical innovation except in the application of old techniques and insight to the questions of modern organization. Although some scholars (especially Abegglen, 1958; Ballon, 1969; Brown, 1969; Nakane, 1970; and to a degree Whitehall and Takezawa, 1968) have used cultural continuity as an explanatory device in discussing Japanese company organization, none has offered detailed documentation of what is being specified as particularly Japanese. What they point to seems vague, and often it is interpreted by them and their critics as "values" that can be readily measured by attitude surveys and the like, a point of view unacceptable to contemporary cultural anthropology. The meaning of cultural patterns cannot be reduced to discrete opinions or beliefs that are easily measured, and when such an approach is taken the results have been a gross oversimplification of the problem. The development of a polarity within social science between those emphasizing "cultural factors" (under rubrics such as values, religion, traditional world view, etc.) and those emphasizing "functional" ones has grown in this context, and in Japanese social studies this has resulted in something of a split between those advocating and those eschewing the use of cultural factors in explanation. The former group, of course, emphasizes continuity, while the latter focuses on change, and the twain seem to meet less and less. In this account I seek to circumvent this impass by the strategy of examining my empirical data without the intent of proving one particular explanation. The reader will find in this regard that I purposefully adopt no single vocabulary of description. In large measure my goal is to explore, illustrate, and interpret the vocabularies of daily, particular reality as found in the company's organization and as given 8 T h e t a i n meaning has enjoyed great currency in anthropology lately, and it is one focal concern of numerous theoretical proposals and debates in the field. I assume that other anthropologists will intuitively understand my use of the term, but for others who have doubts, Geertz (1966) is suggested reading. Berger and Luckman (1967), in sociology, attempt to clarify the relationship of cultural meaning and institutional form and their work would also serve as a good introduction.

INTRODUCTION

3

in the explanations and actions of Uedagin people. Functionalist perspectives are not forsaken, for they are common among Uedagin people, but the universal dominion of the functionalist vocabulary and world view is denied. Instead I chose to view the life of organizations as informed by a multiplicity of points of view, interpretations, and contextual-specific realities, some of which are indeed universal in nature. The bank is a business and a large administrative structure, and as such it shares certain realities with all such organizations. Uedagin people, like mathematicians who can converse internationally without each other's language, are fluent with the more or less universal languages of finance, economics, and administration. They find concepts like efficiency, the maximization of returns in business, or the workings of a market to be perfectly logical, yet in details of practice and, more importantly, in many spheres of company life dominated more by human relations than by the flux of economics, there is clearly a world of difference between Japanese and foreign understanding. It is here that foreign management in Japan has either failed miserably or feared to tread, and it is here that an anthropological approach is most revealing. The Mayo or human relations school of industrial studies had one great virtue. It illustrated decisively that within any organization, the "rational" interpretations derived from abstract organizational logic are laid down over the same situations for which rather different common-sense interpretations already exist. The two (or three or four) may make strange bedfellows, but coexist they do. People can view any event in a variety of lights, and complex organization preserves and even sponsors variety while it seeks to control the consequences. I will follow this basic insight in the following account and extend the field of inquiry beyond the work group alone to a wide variety of levels, subsystems, and separate contexts within the organization. My primary effort is to comprehend and express the particular, local aspects of human relations and organization, and to do so I have assumed a familiarity on the reader's part with many universal aspects of business and administration. Each reader is encouraged to establish his own dialogue with the material in these terms. Furthermore, since I have directed my attention to basic and taken-for-granted matters, it may seem that I have been overly eclectic in my approach to data collecting and interpretation. Everything from company ceremonies to briefly observed interactions find a place in this account. While strict social scientists may object to a lack of proper methodology, it is my understanding that the meaning of any observed phenomenon derives from its place in one or more larger configurations, and this

4

F O R H A R M O N Y AND STRENGTH

traditional idea in anthropology is my justification for casting a wide net. Rather than a lexicon I hope to provide photographs, and even these are far inferior in texture and dimension to the enveloping experience of Uedagin life gained in fieldwork. BACKGROUND INFORMATION

In order that the bank remain anonymous, not only its true name, but its location, and a few other features cannot be included. T h e statistical information presented has also been disguised by making small but consistent changes in magnitude. None of the changes is great enough to alter the nature of the data. Large figures have also been rounded off, but again without any significant distortion. Throughout this description the present tense will be used, although the actual date of the fieldwork was 1968-69. On an average day approximately three thousand persons work for the bank. The actual total varies according to a regular annual pattern. In April, when some three hundred new recruits enter, the total increases above this figure, and during the rest of the year it gradually decreases to below three thousand due to retirements and other departures. Of the total, two thousand are men and one thousand are women. The profile of age and sex distribution within the bank is presented in Figure 1. It is estimated that an additional six to seven thousand people are related to Uedagin as members of the families of men working in the bank. The number of stockholders in 1969 was around 7,700. This figure includes institutions as well as individual persons. The ten largest stockholders are all institutions, other banks and insurance companies. They hold about one-third of the total stock. Many men in Uedagin have bought stock in their own bank, invariably in small amounts. Uedagin's stock is neither concentrated in the hands of a family nor controlled by a few individuals. Nor is it held by a set of interlocking companies. The largest single interest (10 percent) is held by another, much larger, bank. The other major institutional stockholders have 2 to 3 percent each. Only one individual, a person not part of the bank's administration, has a considerable amount (2 percent). T h e stock owned by the president and directors does not alltogether equal 1 percent of the total. The role of stockholders today is of little direct significance. T h e law presently requires banks of the Uedagin type to pay 10 percent of each year's profit as dividends, and it is the common practice of Ueda-

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