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So people are getting fired for blogging.
Many of us are criticized for spending time "saving Japan" or blogging instead of working. "How do you have time to blog so much?" people say. Well, I get up at 4am and blog in the morning. I usually eat lunch at my desk and blog. The most important thing is that I have stopped going out drinking with Japanese businessmen. I do dinner, but I find that there is a point of diminishing return after dinner and that drinking and carrying on and calling it businesses is basically crap. If you need to get inebriated to "bond" you've got a psychological problem. (This is my personal opinion.) So, if you took all of the drunken businessmen in the 75,000 bars and restaurants in Tokyo (I saw this figure many years ago in Time Magazine.) and made them go home and blog, the revolution in Japan might happen much more quickly.The RegisterMan sacked for blogging
By Tim Richardson
Posted: 28/01/2003 at 12:11 GMTA Brit living and working in the US has been sacked from his job for running a blog.
If they're not firing you for the time you spend on your blog, then they are firing you for the content of your blog. Remember that "the press" when the US Constitution was written meant individuals with printing presses printing their opinions, not big media companies. Freedom of the press is about the right to blog, not about the rights of some media conglomerate.
Thanks for this link Dirk!
"Inebriation leads to bonding" pretty well decribes the philosophy of about 90% of the Japanese adult male working population. Hence the lovely phrase "nomu-nication".
I'd love to see how a US-based substance abuse counselor type would evaluate the average salaryman's drinking habits.
I don't think it's limited to Japanese business culture. Taiwanese and Souther China business culture is similar. You just don't have as many good bars to go to in south China. Nomu-nication is cool slang, btw.
Joi! What happened to your patriotism? Don't you realize that the entire Japanese economy, fragile enough as it is post-bubble, would completely collapse if businessmen stopped drinking after work? My observation of life in Japan is that businessmen having "business dinners" is the only thing more ubiquitous than rice or white cotton driving gloves!
Japan and England have so much in common :)
It's an old phenomenon... Remember what the romans said as well:
in vino veritas...
Of course, I don't drink. ;)
Joi, aren't you wasting a valuable opportunity by eating lunch at your desk rather than using lunch for smoozing?
The comment about dinner rather than drinking is right on. Drinking has no set end and it seems that unless you miss the last train you have left too early and been rude and all the time spent up until then is for nothing.
With dinner, you are only tolerated in the restaurant for so long, and I also often give prior notice to the people I am eating with that I need to get to my gym after dinner, which means I have a deadline to meet.
Well, blogging during lunch is the best schmoozing you can do. I meet all of you here!
nomu-nication also leads to getting yourself in trouble.....so i find it a pretty retarded thing to think that its the only way you can bond with ppl.