Management at all levels cannot handle non-Japanese staff
Pros
- free lunch - moving to swanky new building soon
Cons
All levels of management have zero ability to effectively manage non-Japanese staff. Everyone expects everything to be done the Japanese way and other ways of thinking are shot down immediately. Power harassment and sexual harassment are rampant and HR and internal audit committees do nothing about it. Working hours on the business side are insane. Staying in the office until the last train home (around midnight) or on weekends is normal practice in many departments and teams. People who choose to work more efficiently and go home at a decent hour are bullied and given more tasks until they are back to working overtime again. Your performance rating will also suffer. Managers are known to order staff to adjust reported working hours to get overtime under 80 hours a month (80+ hours draws the attention of HR). Speaking of HR, it's a total joke. The only HR members who are remotely competent seem to be the non-Japanese staff and none of them are management AFAIK. HR also has a habit of announcing lots of activities to help foreigners improve the working environment but nothing is ever followed up on. So they obviously know about staff morale problems but are unwilling to do anything about it. Advancement opportunities are scant and extremely slow. It's kind of understood by most staff that promotions into management can only happen to those people with native-level Japanese skills. Salary and benefits are a joke compared to comparative companies. The only way to get a significant raise is to threaten to quit. The TL;DR: ineffective management, power and sexual harassment is common, insane hours, ineffective HR, no advancement opportunities, low salary and zero benefits other than free lunch.
