Services Help Newcomers to Japan : Culture: Courses help head off relocation blues for business people and their spouses. Returning Japanese also must readjust.
Frances Lotochinski has been in Japan only three weeks, is having a hard time getting around and, for the life of her, she just can’t make chopsticks work.
“How do they come together?” asked Lotochinski, a Tennessean married to an American Telephone and Telegraph Co. executive, as her fingers contort around the unfamiliar utensils.
Kazuko Iwatsuki eases Lotochinski’s hand into the correct position and assures her that learning new skills, while not always easy, can be done. “Just be patient,” said Iwatsuki, who learned Western ways as a student at San Francisco State University.
Iwatsuki is bicultural, bilingual and infinitely patient. She understands that for many newcomers, getting the hang of Japanese life can be a challenge. Shopping, commuting, paying the bills--all the things that were so easy at home--are suddenly so very difficult.
That is where Iwatsuki’s company, Culture Shock Ltd., comes in. This and numerous other cross-cultural training programs have sprung up here in recent years to relieve some of the headaches of relocating abroad. It is all part of the important, often prickly trade alliance between the United States and Japan.
None of it comes cheap, however. The cross-cultural coaches charge a daily rate of $300 to $500 a person. Some programs last only a few days, others for weeks. With some, the instruction ends as soon as the seminar is over. Others provide follow-up training and advice by telephone.
For Western executives and their families coming to Japan, and for Japanese businessmen heading overseas, these companies can make the difference between successful adjustment or being a stranger in a strange land.
“One of the aims of such training is to increase self-confidence so people will take more risks,” says Michiko Achilles, a consultant with the Fuji Xerox Learning Institute here. “Many people need a safe atmosphere in which to open up.”
“For a person who is afraid to mess up, it’s a wonderful reassurance to know there’s someone they can talk to,” said American-born Diane Walsh Sasaki, co-founder of Culture Shock, who married a Japanese man 16 years ago. “For many people, it’s easy to feel isolated.”
Or baffled. Sasaki recalled the time one of her clients, a Western businessman, telephoned about midnight from a Tokyo nightspot. He was drinking with Japanese colleagues and didn’t know how to extricate himself from the nonstop revelry without committing a cultural gaffe. Her advice: Politely explain that you have to go home to your family--and leave.
“We handle everyone on a case-by-case basis,” Sasaki said. “The point of the training is to learn how to get out there and use Tokyo’s resources. You can’t vaccinate against culture shock, but you can teach people how to broaden their experiences.”
The same goes for Japanese embarking on overseas postings. Many corporations here have in-house training programs to help employees function abroad. Others turn to outside consultants.
American Shelly Westebbe of International Communications Inc. said that one of the most important programs offered by her company is re-entry training--helping Japanese businessmen and their families readjust to their own society after a prolonged stay abroad.
For returning Japanese who have become accustomed to speaking their mind or feeling less socially constrained, coming home can be painful, even career-threatening. Westebbe teaches clients to make the most of their experiences and to volunteer in teaching others how to survive in strange cultures.
