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The Blue-eyed Salaryman

Niall Murtagh

Profile $263

Have you ever been stared at? I mean ogled just because you're different, gawked at to the point that you knew exactly how  it must have felt for the Brazilian parrot that found itself up a fir- tree in a Mongolian snowfield. Take a local bus ride across the Sudan. You'll get my gist. Kilted bagpipers on the MTR might incur a similar notion.

It's into this enigmatic, international, inter-cultural miasma that Irishman Niall Murtagh tenderly ventures in a quest to interpolate his physical, psychological and intellectual place as a tiny cog in a giant Japanese corporation.

Joining Mitsubishi Electronics as a laboratory technician, he  rises to become a  salaryman (white-collar manager class), the first westerner of this rank in the company's history.

The opening words of his 13-year working diary - 'So you're gonna be an ant' - alert one to  the monolithic pedantry that the swashbuckling globe-trotter has endured. But Murtagh's intent isn't corporate critique, boss-bashing, snide asides or one-upmanship. He's content to  paint a loose social record of  what he considers quaint and curious foreign work rituals. He doesn't, however, forgo his own ancestry, and displays an impish humour throughout.

He soon learns, from the Guidebook for New Employees, the philosophical implications of the de rigueur greeting ritual: 'I have  a business card, therefore I exist.' Next, the Employees' Song, 'to be sung in marching style',  which ends '... Mitsubishi wu wu wu'.

Murtagh is automatically granted a subsidised rail pass,  but needs to apply for  permission to cycle to work because he  lives beyond a 4km  range. Permission denied. Appeal. Permission granted. 'The personnel department wants  you to come to work the safest way. If there's an accident on  the way to work, the company  will have to pay compensation.' Logical? Indubitably, inconceivably anal? Absolutely.

The author confirms the  global stereotype held of Japanese corporate hegemony: if you enter into the ranks of jobs-for-life,   you must also embrace a  tightly woven weltanschauung of benevolent patriarchy.

Individual thought processes seem thoroughly frowned  on.  His colleagues drum into him  that middle managers don't say anything their bosses won't like or they won't go far. 'If we tell them what they want to hear, then life will be easier for us all ... everyone is satisfied with lukewarm water ... the way things are.'

Although the author takes  pains to paint a kindly picture,  the underlying premise is persistently one of a stranger  in a sometimes strange land -  a quixotic land, he intimates, of xenophobes and caricatures.

When he's abused by a policeman, he muses that 'in  spite of having a native wife and kids at the local schools, in spite  of being a Mitsubishi salaryman and being polite when I asked  for directions in fluent Japanese from the policeman ... I am still  an immigrant and that policeman thinks immigrants should be kept in their place.'

During a compulsory annual medical check-up, he's told there's something wrong with his eyes. After some weeks, a worried Murtagh is called in. 'Sorry, there are no problems with your sight. In this country all eyes are dark brown or black. I'm afraid the checking system doesn't consider other possibilities.'

Of course, he's reminded, real salarymen don't have blue eyes.



The Blue-eyed Salaryman