A salaryman is a term commonly used to describe any white-color worker in Japan. Naturally, then, there are salarymen in every country around the world. Nonetheless, something about the Japanese salaryman seems to set them apart from their counterparts in other countries. (At least, Wikipedia thinks the Japanese version of white-collar workers warrants a separate article. I certainly couldn’t find a similar page for French salarymen.)

Having grown up in America, and faced with the prospect of working for a massive Japanese corporation after learning enough Japanese to do so, I jumped at the opportunity. I would be the only American out of thousands; I would be working and doing things completely different from my peers in the US. Perhaps out of a sense of pride or a simply a desire to be different, I found myself in Japan.

Typical stories about Japanese salarymen written by non-Japanese tend to take the “outsider-looking-in” approach, commenting on how different and strange everything is compared to the “normal methods” of business, or how everything is so bewildering when one does not understand the local language. But here at White Salaryman, as a fresh new recruit able to work entirely in Japanese, this is your chance to see how things operate from the ground up.