Dec. 1999, Xene #13
Hokkaido. Then What?
- Putting your experience to work back home
by Carey Paterson



For a foreigner in the good old days, a spell in exotic Japan was enough to make you a Japan expert. The mystery rubbed off on you, somehow, and businesses back home vied for your unique insight. Now, decades later, greater media attention has demystified Japan, and the strong yen has made it more common to find foreigners who have spent some time here.
If experience in Japan is no longer an automatic ticket to success, it still can be personally and professionally valuable, according to former residents of Hokkaido.
In the late '80s, Lynn Fredricks came to Japan in search of cash and adventure. He found both, and parleyed his seven years in Kyushu and Sapporo into a career in business development.
"Having gotten a head start on high-tech while in Japan proved to be a great asset," Fredricks says. "It isn't often enough just to gain a language skill, but also a cultural context and how it's applied to work. I've since worked at two major U.S. software companies managing their international business development.


"MARKET YOURSELF"

He is now president of Proactive International, a company that works with software developers to launch their products around the world. He says that marketing yourself is the key to leveraging your overseas background. "The perception of [your] experience in Japan depends on how you present it. My employers were very enthusiastic about my experience."
Now that he's on the other end of the resume he says Japan expertise can be an advantage, but is not inherently a plus.

"I judge Japan expertise like any other, as it relates to the task. About 50 percent of my company business relates to Japan, so what you did in Japan is extremely important, the type of work you've done, the number of jobs held, and your present knowledge and skill in dealing with Japanese business culture or language. More recent experience is more important because there have been some changes in business practices in Japan since the bubble burst.

If the experience is over five years old and you haven't had any other experience, then I tend to not give it great value. I've known a number of people who come back and basically forget about their experience."

An international background is more commonplace than it used to be, Fredricks says, but there is still a demand for employees with such experience.

"When I returned, almost any [Japanese] experience was seen as an asset. For example, if your business experience in Japan was minimal, then you were often given ample room to 'ramp up' on it," he says. Unfortunately for the majority of foreigners in Hokkaido, Fredericks says teaching experience is of little use back home outside of the education field. The best experience is to be had working in a Japanese company, particularly in high tech. "I could use some of those [employees] in my organization," he says.


GONE TOO LONG

International workers seeking professional development can run the risk of staying away too long, as one mental health counselor learned after 12 years of teaching English in Hokkaido.

"My teachers [in the U.S.] thought my multi-cultural experience would make me very desirable to employers, but I was the last in my class to get a job," she says.
She also found herself out of touch with social trends and practices now taken for granted in her field. Her ignorance of confidentiality and the rights of parents versus those of children soon led to trouble.

"I made a mistake a few weeks ago that my supervisors said they had never imagined anyone would do, and they were shocked," she says, adding that her well-meaning attempts to protect a child had "unimaginable" repurcussions. The resulting uproar in her agency led to the departure of two supervisors who tried to protect her and has hampered her at work.

"They [management] worry that I'll make another serious legal mistake and have no clue what I did wrong. In their eyes I'm now a liability, and they don't know where to begin in training me," she says.
"The moral of the story is, if you want to return to the States to work, don't stay away too long."

Still, she says her time in Japan did make her more aware of the value of her own culture and the feeling of being discriminated against. "These were valuable lessons and are helpful in my current profession," she says.
If Japan is not as exotic as it once was, it still prompts some curiosity overseas, which can lead to opportunities.

"I found that everyone in the U.S.A. is intrigued and excited when I admit that I lived in Japan," says Pat Uskert, who is working in California as a film production assistant and boom operator. "They ask questions and want me to say something in Japanese. I wish that my Japanese was better...because I see so many ads in the Los Angeles Times seeking employees bilingual in Japanese. Damn! One more year, and I'm sure I would have it!"

Much as he once complained about teaching English in Japan, Uskert remembers his time in Hokkaido as idyllic -- after a bumpy start on Honshu.

"I'd just graduated from college and really had the desire to work in a foreign country. Japan sounded like a great idea. I'd studied two semesters of Japanese in college, and majored in English. It all fit together so perfectly that it had to be done!" His first school in Miyagi Prefecture "turned out to be a little dive, and the boss a genuine onibaba [witch]. She worked me like a slave." He had another false start in Sendai, where one school overtaxed him and another was "a dreadful scam of a place, cheating wonderful customers out of thousands of dollars and giving them poor English conversation from overworked teachers.

"I really think my love affair with Japan started the first day I landed in Sapporo to start a new life."


GAIJIN "GLASS CEILING"

One question returnees ask themselves is whether they want to work for a Japanese company in their home country.
Japan Travel Bureau interviewed Tim Callahan two months after he went back to New York. They snapped him up within 24 hours.
Callahan had spent two years on the Japan Exchange Teaching program in Nagasaki Prefecture and a year in Sapporo studying Japanese. He worked his Japan connections adroitly when he returned.

"A friend of mine who had been in Sapporo and returned to the New York area about six months before I did had compiled a list of employment agencies that had contacts at Japanese companies, of which there are a lot in New York City." This led him to JTB.
Although he has only good things to say about his former officemates, Callahan was put off by the banality of booking reservations for Japanese tourists and by the gaijin "glass ceiling."

"No gaijin had ever risen past supervisor," he says, "and the one guy who was a supervisor was a 'lifer' who had a Japanese spouse and had basically dedicated his life to preserving his link with Japan." Callahan left after two months.

He praises JTB for doing "a good job of importing the fun parts of Japanese business culture in the U.S., such as frequent enkais [parties]. Unfortunately the opposite is also true: long hours -- 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. -- and fairly poor pay.

"Although the people were all friendly and interesting, I got to use some of my Japanese, and I made some friendships that I still have, I soon realized that JTB was a dead-end job: travel itself may be fun and glamorous, but working in the travel industry is not."
He advises imminent returnees to evaluate their goals.

"I've found that most people who had a predominantly positive time in Japan but who don't have a definite career path start out going the 'Japan road' when they get back but then almost inevitably end up on the 'what I really want to do' road.

"My best advice for people who are leaving Japan and don't have a definite career path marked out is to think of themselves as starting from ground zero: The road lies entirely ahead of you, and you can do whatever you want. You're entirely free of baggage.

Before rushing into anything, take some time to ponder what it really is you want to do and then start down that path. Don't be afraid to take chances, and don't feel obligated to do something Japan-related because you think it will somehow validate your decision to go there and commit a few years of your life to living there."

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