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Socialization to Acting, Feeling, and Thinking as Shakaijin: New Employee Orientations in a Japanese Company

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Japanese at Work

Part of the book series: Communicating in Professions and Organizations ((PSPOD))

Abstract

In Japanese society, new college graduates are expected to acquire the new identity of shakaijin 'mature, contributing adult(s) in society' when they become full-time employees of a company. To make this major transition in life smooth, most Japanese companies provide new employees with orientation training. From the perspective of language socialization, this chapter examines the process of this culturally meaningful transition by qualitatively analyzing interactions between trainers and new employees in new employee orientations in a Japanese company. The chapter discusses different activities the trainers perform. The findings suggest that despite the world trend toward a globalized economy, in which the boundary between formal education and full-time work has become blurred, Japanese company’s new employee orientations contribute to keeping that boundary intact in Japanese society.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Fuji is a pseudonym.

  2. 2.

    As the two new employees, Satō and Waki, were initially sent to work in another company, they started to attend the orientation sessions about two months after they joined Fuji.

  3. 3.

    Cynthia Dunn kindly provided me with a sample of a survey questions concerning the differences between students and shakaijin that she asked students in an English class at a liberal art college in Kyūshū, Japan. The set of seven survey questions used in this study is a modified version of Dunn’s survey questions.

  4. 4.

    Japanese companies interview and give graduating students a contract to work a few to several months prior to April when all new employees start to work. Naiteesha kenshū is a meeting held in March for those who are hired before the actual starting date of work in April.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, JSPS KAKENHI 24652088. I would like to express my gratitude to Fuji’s employees who participated in my research project. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference in 2015 and the International Pragmatics Conference in 2015 and 2017.

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  1. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Haruko Minegishi Cook

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Haruko Minegishi Cook

  2. University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith

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Cook, H.M. (2018). Socialization to Acting, Feeling, and Thinking as Shakaijin: New Employee Orientations in a Japanese Company. In: Cook, H., Shibamoto-Smith, J. (eds) Japanese at Work. Communicating in Professions and Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63549-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63549-1_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63548-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63549-1

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