Error #6

Beware the Wrong End of the Food Chain
This one seems trivial, but it was actually more problematic than being female. In Japan, the company you belong to is so important that it often takes priority over your own identity, as in "Hello, I’m Mitsubishi’s Yamashita" rather than "I’m Mr.Yamashita from Mitsusbishi". The first thing that Japanese businessmen do when they meet is to haul out and exchange business cards. This allows them to immediately calculate who is higher in the hierarchy – an extraordinarily complicated algebra of what company you work for, what your position is within that company, what piece of real estate that company is sitting on (a downtown Tokyo address helps here), and so on.

I am not an employee of a large corporation. I knew early on that this was going to be a problem so I applied tons of window-dressing to my business card: lists of corporate sponsors, down to the guys who had offered me a pair of shoes three years ago; prior affiliations with National Geographic and PBS; president of Firelight Productions, Inc. (which at the time was a cardboard box at my parents’ home full of unanswered mail).None of which managed to hide for a minute that I was a (relatively) young Caucasian woman with no handler, no Japanese affiliation, a rural Virginia address, and no letter of introduction from even a moderately respectable American corporation. Right down there on the food chain with the sea slugs. For a while I tried chatting up my last job as a producer for National Geographic, and perhaps allowed my tenses to slide around a bit, until I went to get filming permission from the Sumo federation. I discovered that Geo had had a falling out with that esteemed institution some five or six years ago, and that such things are not forgotten.

Be careful whose footsteps you’re following in. You might step in something.

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