Japanese salaryman’s life too rigid for this Irishman

The Irish pride themselves on their informality, while the Japanese live by complex codes and rules that often confuse outsiders. Beyond a fondness for whisky, they have little in common.

Those stark differences make Niall Murtagh's The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveller to Lifer at Mitsubishi, just published in Britain, a fascinating and engaging book.

Murtagh, 48, is a pinstriped Marco Polo who ventured to the Far East, lived among its people and emerged to tell his story.

Lots of Westerners have written about Japan, but few have worked for one of its giant corporations for more than a decade, then written openly about what it was like (mostly very dull).

After graduating from Dublin's University College in 1979, Murtagh spent several years travelling around the world and doing odd jobs. He ended up studying Japanese in Tokyo and was hired as a software designer by Mitsubishi Electric.

He was the first Westerner employed by Mitsubishi as a regular salaryman - one of the legions of loyal white-collar workers who helped to make Japan a postwar industrial giant.

"I'll be an ordinary employee - the same conditions, the same ups and downs as all the others," Murtagh writes.

He was immediately struck by the regimentation of corporate life in Japan. His fellow workers checked their personalities at the door every morning, did their jobs without fuss and tried not to stand out from the crowd.

The monotonous routine was strictly prescribed by rules.

"Beside the exercise music, there are the bells and chimes telling us when to start work, when to take lunch and when to finish," Murtagh writes. "I try to ignore them because I don't like being controlled by bells and chimes, but it's not easy."

Murtagh also had to adjust to the seemingly outdated role of office ladies, known in Japan as OLs. "Their official role is to carry out simple clerical tasks and make tea, but their real task is to add colour to the office," he writes.

Nothing annoyed Murtagh more than the company song.

"Did I really leave behind my non-conformist adventurous past, wandering through almost half the countries in the world, and come to this faraway place, struggle with the beautiful but terrible language, study my ass off through graduate school, to end up working for an organisation with an anthem that goes 'oh-oh techno-life Mitsu-bishi wu-wu-wu'?"

For most of his colleagues, life away from the office was just as rigid. The first time Murtagh was invited to a co-worker's home, he was given a precise written itinerary that allowed him to catch the 9:04 train home.

In time, Murtagh adjusted. He got used to the rules and regulations, married a Japanese woman, had two children and moved a couple of times at the company's behest.

After a decade, he started wondering why he had not climbed further up the corporate ladder and considered doing something else.

Murtagh took time off to write his book and eventually left the company. He now works as a consultant and translator in Yokohoma. His book provides a rare inside look at corporate life in Japan, one that's worth more than a dozen business-school studies.

- BLOOMBERG