Contrast is Clarifying.
Sometimes the best way to make sense of a confusing environment is to go to one even more foreign.
I recently returned from a trip to Japan and Thailand. It was my first time visiting both countries and I came back changed. Which is always a good thing.
I’m hearing from a lot of people they feel lost now, which is understandable. A new world is struggling to be born while the guardians of the old are battling to the end to keep the status quo intact. It’s exhausting and destabilizing.
While it might seem counter-intuitive in times like these to flee your home base for someplace even more unknown, I think it’s the exact right prescription. Turning your focus to the foreign shifts your mind into a higher gear. During my first hours in Tokyo I was like a child on her first day of school.
They drive on the other side of the road!
WOW — there’s Mount Fuji!
What do these street signs mean?
Everyone wears a uniform with a jaunty cap and epaulettes!
This hotel toilet is heated…and plays music!
Why are there so few birds?
I had practiced a few key phrases and tested them out on my cab driver. New sounds in my mouth. New gestures to make myself understood. A stranger in a strange land, in the best possible sense.
Once I got settled, I had the unique opportunity to meet with many advertising leaders from Dentsu, Apple, TBWA, Wieden+Kennedy, Google, and Facebook.
Here are some of my takeaways from those various conversations, as well as some of my observations. In no particular order:
Overwork is under reevaluation.
The ad world prides itself on working around the clock. Yet the dangers of extreme burnout are real. In Japan, they even have a word for death due to overwork: karoshi. After a high-profile death of a young female creative in Tokyo in 2015, Dentsu’s CEO resigned and a new rule went into effect barring anyone from being in the office past 10 p.m. Seven years have passed, but it’s still a topic of conversation and a point of demarcation for the Tokyo creative community.
It feels connected to conversations happening at home. I’ve got a post on the topic of time in the works, but for now let me say this: time is a construct being exposed as rooted in white supremacy and capitalism. I recently read “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto” and “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.” Then I attended a webinar from Whiteness at Work called “Time Isn't Neutral: Power, Time and the Workplace" which explored the reality of who decides the speed of our lives, why we live in a constant state of time famine, and why doing is more valued than becoming. My brain was so lit up by these concepts that I have pages of notes to turn into a future post. Or possibly a series. This is THE big issue because time is what we’re all grappling to address in remote work realities.
Caring for most, but not all.
One of the first things to strike me in Japan was that 90% of people were masked, even outside. I almost couldn’t make this visit to Japan at all due to a very strict visa rule that was lifted just weeks before my arrival date.
82% of people in Japan have received at least one vaccine dose, and 77% are fully vaccinated. As a result, the country has done a good job of protecting its people from the virus. Sometimes strict regulations and customs really come in handy.
Yet I also talked with Japanese colleagues about how the country lags in its support for mental health issues. The stigma of mental illness, including a rash of celebrity suicides (and copycat suicides) during lockdown, belies a deep problem. The Japanese value of “gaman” — which means "enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity" — can recast mental health issues as a character flaw instead of a sickness. This is when global campaigns like #sicknotweak can offer a safety net to people left behind by their own countries or cultures.
During a conversation I had about mental health in Tokyo, I referenced the short film “The Wind Phone” which tells the tale of an unconnected phone booth opened to the public after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed over 15,000 people. 30,000 visitors have held one-way conversations with deceased loved ones from this wind phone. I was amazed my colleagues hadn’t seen the film which, to me, illustrates the need for grief to find an outlet, even in a country that prizes endurance.
Google Translate is a game changer.
Seriously this cannot be overstated. One of my meetings was with two Japanese creatives with good English (and my ridiculously limited Japanese.) Yet we had a deeply meaningful conversation about mental health, abortion, motherhood, and more. Google translate allowed us to “speak” to each other when words escaped us. I left that meeting deeply grateful for the technology that instantly enables conversation. I wonder how many global companies, universities and communities could unlock deeper connections among its people through this simple, free tool. Mind-bogglingly promising.
The messy work of diversity.
All of the women posted in the photos above are my heroes. They’re pushing back against confining gender norms, pay inequities and other workplace realities. Many of them have lived overseas and very few of them have children. Together they’re finding sisterhood and support in reimagining how their companies can invite more talent to the table. While they treated me like a special guest, I was in awe of their tenacity and bravery. Satoko Takada, GCD for Apple in Japan and Korea, is a special kind of Super Glue. I had the good fortune to meet Satoko at The 3% Conference, again at Cannes, and once more during this trip where she rolled out the red carpet for me and gathered together women for a “Meet Kat” dinner.
A few days after I dined with “The Rockstars” as I will forever think of them, I had lunch with Chris Iki, COO of TBWA Japan.
My conversation with Chris led me to my biggest conclusion of the trip. Chris was born in Japan but raised and educated in the U.S. He returned to Tokyo to support the Nissan business almost two decades ago, thinking he would stay for just a few years.
It is this insider/outsider viewpoint that gave our conversation such a rich complexity. We talked about how the Japanese culture prizes excellence and perfecting things more than inventing them. About how Japanese artists become famous elsewhere before they’re revered in their own nation.
The benefits of this striving are everywhere: a city with more Michelin stars than any other, trains that run on time, cars that never quit. Yet women are still vastly underrepresented in the ad community, and expected to choose between marriage/family and work. I wondered aloud how a diversity crusade like 3% would work in Japan. Diversity is messy, imperfect work. It’s deeply human and not formulaic. It’s more test kitchen than culinary showcase. More improv than Broadway. And I couldn’t quite see how this spirit of trial and error would translate inside a culture so committed to perfection.
Unless…
I shared with Chris that only if and when the Japanese ad market sees how they’re being left behind as other countries lap them with inclusion might they be willing to see the upside of trying things a new way. And I know just the women who will lead the way…
Until next time, remember that culture is the new creativity.