Distaste For The Word Connections Marks You As Japanese

This article is a reprint = back number of a previous post

First of all, personal connections matter a great deal in American society. I felt that somewhat when I was in Japan, but once I came to America, the importance of it shot up. That has to do with employment structures, with organizational structures that aren’t hierarchical the way Japan’s are, and a lot of other things all tangled together, but basically I think people here just don’t dislike that kind of thing. Call it a matter of culture. Americans have long been broadly comfortable with the word “connections,” and they seem to be good at using and managing them. Connecting with the right people, building the right relationships, engaging in the right exchanges. In Japan, by contrast, “connections” is a word that tends to be received with something like distaste. The reason is basically the mirror image of what I just said — lifetime employment, hierarchical organizational structures, a kind of collectivism, all sorts of things tangled into a culture — but basically I think people here are just not good at that kind of thing. To put it simply, “connections” boils down to two things without much loss:

• whether people think of you when something comes up
• whether you can reach that person directly yourself

It comes down to whether the neural pathway connecting synapse to synapse is active. There aren’t that many ways to keep it active. Basically it’s “keep steadily reminding the other person of your existence, on a regular basis” and “when the moment comes, have the courage to reach out even if you’re not all that close.” Japanese people tend to be relatively bad at both of these. That’s probably why the image of “connections” = “calculating” has spread as a kind of self-fulfilling belief among Japanese people. And yet, in all sorts of places in the world, “it’s impossible without connections” is also often true. Some big project might start from an offhand conversation at an izakaya, and charging in through the front entrance when you’re up against a big company is a genuinely hard road. Thinking about all this, two particular cases came to mind. One was a comedy show. It was an episode seriously discussing “how to avoid being a one-hit wonder.” The main point, apparently, was this: “No matter who or which network, get at least one producer to like you enough that they’d invite you out privately.” Most shows swap out their lineup once it’s gone through a cycle. What matters is whether it occurs to someone, “oh, maybe I’ll bring that guy in.” Obviously, that’s exactly right. No matter how well you perform on a show, no matter how much the audience likes you, that alone won’t keep you surviving. The producer, and no one else, decides the show’s lineup. Once a cycle is done, everyone thinks, “well, people are probably getting tired of that guy by now.” At that moment, it’s the producer who knows you on a private level who says, “no, he’s got other sides to him too” or “he could work in a segment like this,” and pulls out some further flavor. I see, I see. This isn’t so different in our own professional world either. The people who get called in for a new project are usually the ones who popped into someone’s head as “oh, maybe I’ll bring that guy in.” HR-related factors play a role too, but that’s basically it. In America, this is extremely pronounced. The other case was also from a comedy show, one doing a segment like “Undercover at a celebrity party!” where one of the self-proclaimed celebrity CEOs, whose real name was shown, turned out, on investigation, to be someone who kept repeating a pattern of fraud-like schemes — folding companies practically in the middle of the night and running off with the money — as exposed online. (I looked into it a bit myself, and the information did seem to check out.) The student running the show as self-proclaimed “organizer” — arranging the venue and coordinating the girls (in older terminology, something like “selling party tickets”) — kept saying things like “I’m doing this to build connections.” No, no. That kid is absolutely going to end up as an accomplice to fraud someday. Just saying “connections” isn’t enough — without a clear vision behind it, you can get burned. These are somewhat extreme examples, but with connections you never know what will end up helping you, and you never know what might send your life off the rails either. Sometimes an unexpected person reaches out at an unexpected time, and sometimes a relationship you never intended leads to a dramatic encounter or a major turning point. If you went around in Japan chanting “Connections! Connections! Conneeections!” you’d definitely end up disliked. (laughs) Japanese people, as typified by “obligatory smiles” and “flattery,” tend to make the other person feel annoyed, or end up encouraging the other person to get overly full of themselves, and tend not to be very good at building relationships outside of “friend,” “family,” and “workplace.” For Japanese people like that, building connections is probably, deep down, something like: “Honestly it’s a pain, but if I think there’s some future benefit, I guess I have to do it.” It’s “that vaguely grubby thing” that exists on the same spectrum as going drinking with your boss or entertaining clients on the golf course. How dull. Americans, who have natural social ease built in, handle this sort of thing effortlessly. They’re familiar without being presumptuous, and they don’t grovel, but they don’t come off as arrogant either. Incidentally, Silicon Valley doesn’t have much of a business-card-exchanging custom. There’s no point in becoming a business card collector. A relationship that consists only of holding someone’s card is, in the terms I used earlier, a “relationship that isn’t active.” If you ever need to get in touch, as long as you know each other’s whereabouts you can somehow make contact — the important thing is simply “do you remember who that person is.” For example, say you meet B, a friend of your coworker A. Say a year ago he mentioned he runs his own company doing “some kind of service.” You had lunch together once near the office, and that was it. Then one day, for work reasons, you suddenly think, “oh, right, A’s friend was doing that kind of service — let me go ask him about it as a reference.” Naturally, you don’t need to know B’s contact information — you just ask A. It’s fine to only half-remember the name. As long as you properly remember “what kind of person he is.” That’s apparently enough, at least according to the thinking around here. To begin with, the low bar set by the word “friend” itself is probably a peculiarly American thing. Correspondingly, there’s actually no good way to translate the word “connections” into English. “A friend of a friend is a friend, and that’s enough, got a problem with that?” Maybe that kind of base assumption exists at the level of the language itself. That doesn’t mean Americans have only a shallow interest in building the kind of calculating relationship implied by the Japanese word “connections” — not at all. If anything, Americans are more aggressive about it. In America, “being liked by individuals matters more” than it does in Japan. For one thing, there’s hiring (which is decided almost entirely by individuals). Then there’s the system of raises and promotions (frankly, decided by individuals). The fluid employment system, where job hunting and project staffing are almost the same thing, probably plays a role too. (In other words, a given individual holds nearly all the power.) As I said at the start, Americans seem naturally suited by disposition to building this kind of relationship. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, but American society appears to run on exactly this dynamic.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2013/10/332/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.