Japanese people flinch at the word connections

This article is a reprint of an earlier post — a back number

First of all, connections matter a lot in American society. I sensed that a little even while still in Japan, but once you actually get to America, their importance jumps way up. It’s tied up with things like the employment structure, or organizational structures that aren’t hierarchical the way Japan’s are, and various other factors, but basically, people here just don’t dislike that kind of thing. Call it culture. Americans have long been broadly familiar with the word “connections,” and they’re good at using and managing them. Connecting with the right people, building the right relationships, having the right exchanges. In Japan, by contrast, the word “connections” tends to get received with a certain distaste. The reason is basically the mirror image of what I just described — lifetime employment, hierarchical organizations, a kind of collectivism, and various other factors woven into a culture — but basically, people here just aren’t good at that kind of thing. To put it briefly, “connections” boils down to two things without much trouble:

• Will they think of you when something comes up?
• Can you reach that person directly yourself? It’s about whether the neural pathway connecting synapse to synapse is active. There aren’t that many ways to keep it active. Basically it comes down to “keep reliably and regularly making your presence known to the other person” and “when the moment comes, have the courage to reach out even if you’re not that close.” Japanese people tend to be relatively bad at both of these. So I think the image of “connections” as “calculating” has spread among Japanese people as a kind of self-fulfilling answer. And yet plenty of things in the world are impossible without connections. Some big project might start from an offhand conversation at an izakaya, and charging in through the front entrance when courting a large company is an uphill battle. Thinking about all this, two examples come to mind.

A comedy show made the same point

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 members once they’ve gone through a full cycle. What matters is that the thought “hey, maybe I’ll bring that guy in” pops into someone’s head. Obvious, but true. No matter how good your performance is or how well the audience receives you, that alone won’t get you through. The producer, and no one else, decides the show’s lineup. Once a cycle ends, everyone assumes people are probably getting tired of that guy. That’s when the producer who knows you privately pulls out some further flavor: “no, that guy’s got other kinds of funny too,” or “he could work in this kind of segment as well.” I see, I see. This isn’t so different in our own professional world. The people who get called in for new projects are usually the ones who popped into someone’s head as “hey, maybe I’ll bring that guy in.” HR processes play a role too, but that’s basically it. In America it’s extremely pronounced.

The other example was less flattering

Also from a comedy show: a segment called “Undercover at a Celebrity Party!” One of the self-proclaimed celebrity CEOs who appeared under his real name turned out, once people started digging, to be someone who’d repeatedly run fraud-like schemes — shutting down companies almost like skipping town with the money, according to what got exposed online. (I looked into it myself, and the information seemed to check out.) The self-proclaimed “organizer” who planned that party — handling the venue and coordinating the girls (what an older era would have called selling “party tickets”) — was a student, and he said things like “I’m doing this to build connections.” No, no. That guy is absolutely going to end up an accomplice to fraud someday. Just saying “connections” without a clear vision is asking for trouble. 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 in the wrong direction. Sometimes an unexpected person reaches out at an unexpected moment, and sometimes a relationship you never intended leads to a dramatic encounter or change. If you went around Japan chanting “Connections! Connections! Conneeections!” you’d definitely get disliked. (lol) Japanese people, as typified by forced smiles and flattery, tend to make the other person feel annoyed, or end up encouraging the other person to get too full of themselves, and generally aren’t very good at building relationships outside of “friends,” “family,” and “coworkers.” For Japanese people like that, building connections is probably, deep down, something like: “Honestly a hassle, but if there’s a benefit down the road, I guess I have to do it.” It’s that vaguely grimy thing that sits on the same spectrum as going drinking with your boss or playing entertainment golf. How dull. Americans, who come by that sociability naturally, handle this sort of thing effortlessly. They’re familiar without being overly familiar, and they’re not obsequious, but they’re not arrogant either.

In Silicon Valley, nobody bothers exchanging business cards

Becoming a business-card collector gets you nowhere. A relationship that amounts to nothing more than holding onto someone’s card is, in the words I used earlier, a “non-active relationship.” If you ever need to get in touch, as long as you both know how to find each other, you can manage it somehow — what matters is simply whether they remember who you are. 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 that. Then at some point, in a work context, you think: “oh right, A’s friend does that kind of service, maybe I should ask him about it for reference.” Naturally, you don’t need to know B’s contact info; you just ask A. It’s fine if you barely remember his name. As long as you clearly remember what he does. That’s apparently enough around here. The very fact that the bar for the word “friend” is set so low is itself distinctly American. Correspondingly, English doesn’t seem to have a good word for “connections.” “A friend of a friend is a friend, and that’s enough, got a problem with that?” Maybe that’s the kind of foundation that exists at the linguistic level. That doesn’t mean Americans have little interest in building the kind of calculating relationships the Japanese word “connections” implies — not at all. If anything, Americans are more aggressive about it. Because in America, being liked by individuals matters more than it does in Japan. For one thing, that’s true of hiring, which is decided almost entirely by individuals. It’s also true of the raise and promotion system, which, frankly, individuals decide. The fluid employment system, where job hunting and project staffing are practically 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, by temperament, this kind of relationship-building seems to suit Americans. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, but American society seems to be built this way.

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