Well, leaving has its benefits. As a farewell gift, I received 2 Christofle photo frames (very coincidentally, I love their products although the givers did not know) and 1 iPod Touch - 16 GB, no less! Ah, I now have only wonderful memories of my old workplace! :-)
In Japan, on the last day, at the end of the business day, a "farewell ceremony" is organised. The company will appoint a person to say a few words of thanks followed by a presentation of a huge bouquet of flowers. Then the leaving person has to say a few words in return. I am very happy to say that I managed to go through that whole ceremony without crying, even when I was giving my little speech. For the past few years, K, as the administration partner, will be that representative. In my case, they got another admin partner to do that speech. And then K gave a speech. He gave a very nice speech and said, amongst others, that he hope I will regard this firm as my Japanese home (I am moving on to a non-Japanese firm) and that I am welcome to come back to visit them anytime etc. He also said I am welcome to go back and join them anytime and that is good to know for me as although this place may have its cons, it also has its pros.
In private, many of the partners have also said that to me, so it is very comforting to me to know that this door is not shut and it is not only K who takes that position. And indeed, a few of the current partners have in their earlier days left to explore other places only to return later. Which I think at the end of the day, does benefit the firm as it gains from the experiences of those who have left. What really surprised me when I said my personal good-byes to some of the partners, their eyes started watering too!!! I think it is not so much that they will miss me, but they all heard my reasons for leaving at the partners meeting and I think many of them had guilty pangs (and hence why some partners were apologising to me, as per my earlier post).
There is no one single reason why I am leaving. It is just an accumulation of many things. Many of the push factors were already there when I first joined. I did not act on it earlier as I was busy producing 2 kids which did not make it a good time to move. Also, there is no perfect workplace. Some days, I am happy to tolerate those push factors. Other days, they roil me. So for the past few years, depending on which week you ask me, I am either ready to stay on or prepared to leave.
Many of you who read this blog know how difficult it is for foreigners to penetrate Japanese society. From the media, when crime rate is talked about, foreigners are also mentioned. When it is being discussed in Japan whether the country should let in more foreigners, the number one issue is how the crime rate will go up. Although statistics have shown that this correlation is not true, that is how we are perceived. And it does not stop there. There is a lot of discrimination against foreigners. The first apartment which Tomo and I applied to rent when we first came to Tokyo, we were rejected because I am not Japanese even though Tomo is. Even though my FIL was to be our guarantor and showed his healthy finances and that his main clients were big, publicly listed Japanese companies. On a more personal level, it is difficult to be friends (as in truly friends) with the Japanese people, and not for lack of language as I know many foreigners who speak Japanese like a native and are still not integrated into Japanese society. In short, I am living half a life here, outside of the work place. That is difficult on its own already. It is made more difficult when I am treated like an outsider too by the people I work with on a daily basis. Take lunch for example. My Japanese colleagues will come into my room to invite my Japanese roommates out for lunch, but seldom extend the invitation to me. (It it not just me, it happens to all of us foreigners, so it is not personal.) Likewise after-office hours socialising. When our firm started growing exponentially in the last few years, the firm started this new lunch programme last year whereby Japanese lawyers from one corner will lunch with Japanese lawyers at another corner (at the firm's expense) with the objective being for lawyers to get to to each other better. Foreign lawyers were left out of that programme. I can't understand why we were left out. Especially if getting to know each other better is supposed to translate to working together better. So socially, there was no or little integration.
For work too, there was little integration. K totally integrated me in his projects, so I really like working with him. But with others, especially the associates, I felt that they did not consider us foreign lawyers as a part of the team. An example would be a due diligence report I was working on in early 2007. It was a large due diligence, about 20 lawyers or more involved. We were very close to the deadline and were working almost round the clock. The night before the deadline, I worked on the draft at night and overnight. Slept very little and got back in to the office at 8.30am expecting the Japanese lawyers to have left their revised drafts in my inbox. I was surprised there was nothing. Waited till about 11am and still nothing. Started chasing people up and that was when I found out that the night before, clients called off the project, the whole team except me was informed. Why was I not informed? I guess they just never saw me as a part of the team. I (and my foreign colleagues for that matter) are just there for their use and disposal. Likewise, another major due diligence I was working on at the end of 2007. When it ended and an e-mail was sent out to the whole firm to announce that our firm had assisted the client on this matter and the client has successfully acquired a business, that e-mail listed out the names of all the lawyers who had worked on the matter. As is usual. It listed out the names of all 28 Japanese lawyers. It did not include my name. It included the names of 10 new graduates on that matter who joined our firm only 2 months before and certainly did much less than me on that matter. The irony of this is that this e-mail was sent in December, after I had given the reason of not being made to feel as part of the team as why I am leaving and the various partners were speaking with me to get me to stay. This e-mail certainly helped me in deciding it was the right decision to leave. As an add-on to that, the partner in charge of that project decided to host a thank-you party to all the team members and asked the associate-in-charge to organise it. I received my invitation separately from the group invitation. I was curious and quietly asked around. Yup, they had forgotten that I exist and contributed too until another associate (an ex-roommate of mine and a good friend - who also happens to be in the midst of interviews and will leave too) on that matter voiced that I should be invited too.
Another incident that majorly pissed me off involved a Tom Cruise movie. This was some time back. The entertainment partner asked me to help out and said he thinks he will get tickets to the Tokyo premiere of Mission Impossible 3 which he will give me. I would help out anyway and the promise of the tickets did not influence that at all. In fact, I never thought much about it after that and just assumed that I was not given any tickets because he was not given any in the end. No big deal. Well, a year later, we were at a little party to welcome the new lawyers when I overheard a new lawyer asking him what the perks of his job were. And he mentioned that he received premiere tickets to Mission Impossible 3. I was only 2 seats away and he immediately realised, from my expression I guess, that he should not have said that. He started making excuses for why I did not get the tickets. I asked him who went. He did, so did the senior associate who worked on that matter. The remaining 4 tickets went to secretaries and paralegals. I was furious as I am pretty sure there was little use of the secretaries and definitely no use of any paralegals for that matter. Total disregard for the contribution of foreign lawyers again. To score with the secretaries and paralegals? If he had given those 4 tickets to his mum, dad and siblings, I would have had absolutely no problem with that and in fact, would applaud such a move.
In addition to the lack of integration socially and work-wise, many of the young associates often give the foreign lawyers work at 5 or 6pm, for work that has to be sent out that day. It could be a 5 page memorandum. They will tell us, it takes only 20 minutes for you to review. It really pisses me off as (i) it never only takes only 20 minutes and (ii) do they think that what we do is so simple that it only takes 20 minutes? What an insult and lack of respect for what I do. And because of that, the foreign lawyers are usually sitting around with little or no work until 5 or 6 pm each day. If we take on and work on that memo till 9 pm, we can bill only 3 to 4 hours which is not reflective at all of the late nights we are putting in. And for me as a mum, that is totally not satisfactory at all. Why should I be working late just because some young punk is so disorganised with his working time and has no respect for me and my time?
So the above is in short, the main reasons why I am moving on. On the flip-side, one pro for staying on in this place is that I have lots of time to surf the internet until 5 or 6pm!
Oh, I should also mention that unlike Japanese lawyers who automatically get a pay increase every year, we foreign lawyers have a fixed salary. So my salary was fixed for the last 5 years. When I asked for a pay review at the end of 2006, I was told by my "immediate boss" that it is very difficult as if they increase my salary, they will have to increase my hourly billing rates and if they do that, no partners will want to include me in their projects as I will then be very expensive to use. Although when I finally plucked up enough courage in summer 2007 and asked K (in his capacity as admin partner) for a pay increase and was given a fairly substantial one, the words of the "immediate boss" continue to ring in me. I can see to a certain extent why he said that. Although they agreed to a pay increase, I could be fixed at this new rate for the next couple of years and I really don't like the idea of asking for a pay increase every few years, And the firm is such that if I don't ask, nobody will see to it that I get one. (Only because no one really thinks of the foreign lawyers.)
The very day after my previous post, I found out that at the partners' meeting (which was on a Wednesday night) where I was dicusssed, me and my reasons were discussed for more than 1 hour. In a meeting that lasted for no more than 2 hours in total. I was also told (inside sources) that this meeting was very different from other in that my issues struck a chord and it truly engaged the partners and a lively discussion ensued as to how to improve things. What struck the chord was my "complaint" that foreign lawyers are left out socially. Most of the Japanese lawyers have spent 2 years outside of Japan, including 1 year in a law firm outside of Japan. For many of them, they were also treated as "outsiders" and they were quite upset about it and at that time, they realised that that was how they have been treating the foreign lawyers back in Japan. Although once back in Japan, they did not do anything to change our lot. So, there was quite a lot of guilty conscience (and hence the reason for all those apologies to me). Close as we are, even K is guilty of this. I have seen their action list of what they intend to do from now to include foreign lawyers and it is impressive for now. (Yes, foreign lawyers will now be included in those lunches on the firm's expense.) As mentioned before, partners are usually very good about including foreign associates fully involved. The problem arises when matters are delegated to senior associates who don't fully involve us and this actually affects the quality of work to our international clients. The partners were very concerned with that and came up with another action list as to how to rectify this problem which affects quality standards. (Although for this, as Jen pointed out in her comments, I am not sure exactly how much will change as we all know Japanese are slow to changes which is the reason why I am not sticking around to see if the changes will happen and blowing away my chance with a new firm.) Lastly, the partners agreed that some foreign lawyers should be better paid and they will identify who they want to stay on long-term with them and offer them a better salary.
So, if those changes actually take place, will that be my legacy at the firm???
Anyway, as I said, that partners' meeting was on a Wednesday night. On Thursday night, it was our firm's x'mas party and since it was at the newly-opened Ritz Carlton (as opposed to the dull Hotel Okura where we have it every year), the whole firm including the partners turned up in full force. I just could not face any of the partners after learning how extensively I was discussed at the meeting. I spent most of the night avoiding eye contact with them. I could feel, as could my fellow foreign lawyers that I was hanging out with, that many of the partners were trying to make eye contact to start a conversation with me.
And to top it off, I won a prize at the xmas raffle! I got a huge humidifier in the shape of a frog. One of the younger partners whom I did speak to said this to me, "In Japanese, frogs are called "kaeru". "Kaeru" also means "come back/return home".
So how's the new workplace? Hope that you're settling in well.
Got back to Tokyo two nights ago and currently down with an awful cold :-(
Z.
Posted by: Zasha | January 09, 2008 at 02:55 PM
*sigh* Those are exactly the reasons I left, and I see that absolutely nothing has changed. It might seem that you are being petty or over-sensitive, but these things wear you down, day after day, and you cannot live like that.
I remember to this day how upset I was when a female associate that I worked a lot for and sat next door to me came in and invited all my Japanese room mates for drinks in her room, then just to rub it in even more invited my secretary as well and left me sitting there in the corner, totally ignored. I cried my eyes out when I went home that night. Even worse was that she knew I understood Japanese so knew that I understood perfectly well what was going on.
I am glad that you were honest with them about the reasons you left and they recognise that there is a problem, but honestly, I do not think that anything will change.
Posted by: Bibi | January 16, 2008 at 09:34 PM
Hey Z, the new workplace is working out pretty well so far. Next thing I need to find out is to what extent they monitor employee's internet activity, what with it being an American company and all. The good thing about working for a Japanese company (although things are slowly changing) is that they don't do that stuff unless you have done something for them to fire you. Not that I am into porno stuff over the internet, but it won't be a good reflection on me if they see that I am always surfing Pagesix or E-Online! Or keeping this blog, although I by and large don't blog about workplaces. Too dangerous.
Hi Bibi, yes I did tell them the reasons. Although to the Admin partner I emphasised more on the lack of work integration, including how the way they work with foreign lawyers is affecting me as I can't control my time at all. And also because of the way they use us, I am not learning as much as I would like to and therefore not growing professionally. I mentioned the social stuff like being left out of lunches thing (I mentioned only the firm-organised lunch, and not the personal gatherings, although he immediately picked up on the personal lunches given his prior experiences as a foreign lawyer in a US firm) to the partner in charge of foreign lawyers, who also spoke to me and tried to get me to stay. I thought that was more appropriate to be addressed with him. I did not mention the Tom Cruise movie thingey at all only because (i) the offending partner can easily be identified as we only have 1 entertainment lawyer and I don't want that to happen and (ii) the Japanese lawyers may not understand how incidents like that can make us feel very excluded and therefore I may come across as being whiney. I mentioned other things that the firm can do to improve things for foreign lawyers to him. The problem is that we have so many seconded lawyers from other law firms outside of Japan. Although most of them are upset about the way foreign lawyers are being treated (being left out of lunches always being the 1st complaint), and are bitter about it, none of them can say anything because of the secondment relationship. They are here to build a bridge between the firms, not break down the ties. We had 1 guy last year who was not a secondee and was very upset. He was ready to say everything when he left but unfortunately, he left within 3 weeks when something came up in Hong Kong for him, so he had no time to voice his views. And since I am probably one of the few who can do it since I am not a secondee, I thought I should do it.
You are right, it sounds petty, but because it is so systematic, it really affects you. Besides for me, being transplanted to a new country with no social support that I grew up with, a big part of working is building up that social support. I don't expect to be good-old buddies with workmates, but some level of connection at a social level would be nice. So at the old place, the structure/attitude that they had did not make this happen easily. The foreigners who have long-terms plans in Japan and who stay there adopt the attitude (which is sort of like a self-preservation/defeence mechansim in response to the work culture) of I come here only to work and collect a pay-check, I don't want to socialise at all. Whilst that may work for them, it is very hard for me to live a life like that.
It's funny isn't it, how a simple thing like being excluded from lunches or drinks after work snowballs and affects so many of us foreigners there. I hear this being complained about so often, as does our Japanese teacher whom everyone confides in. I actually told our Japanese teacher - half-jokingly -that I should get the partners to speak with her if they are serious about finding out the problems facing foreigners. Going for Japanese classes is like lying down on the psychiatrist's couch - we tell her everything and she is the one who keeps us sane!
Posted by: Heidi | January 17, 2008 at 02:33 PM