February 25, 2010

Impressions of working in Japan: Lunch

12:00 - 13:00 Lunch break
Time stand up and go to the lunch room, take out the lunchbox and get nourished. At lunch people socialize and have friendly conversations with other employees because during work people hardly talk, and if they do it is plainly work related. This is an important hour. It breaks the almost silent office atmosphere and gives an opportunity to refresh oneself.

Almost all the men in the office do not join the common room for lunch. They prefer to eat on their desk and use computer simultaneously. I was curious to ask is the reason for this. It turned out that while eating they browse news sites. This they do because they need topics to have a lively conversation with their customers when they meet in future.

That could be efficient use of time but leads me to think of an absurd question: in their shoes, which one you would prefer to browse: A flock of office ladies at the cafeteria or news sites in the Internet?

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The internship began last week. Now, after having digested the initial information flood I'll start to write about how it is like to work in Japan. This post marks the first entry in the series of working in Japan.

2 comments (click to write a comment):

moss said...

@Lauri
This is such an interesting post indicating slight irony about the way to spend a lunch time which should literaly means "lunch time":D

I guess working surrounding pretty much consists of atmosphere at the office as well as colleague's character, and speaking of this weird lunch-time routine they have, it just seems weird for me.

As for myself, I'm working in sales and marketing section thus most of the time I'm out of the office, seldom eating together with others; nevertheless, when I'm hanging around the office, I normally eat out with co-workers to spend "relaxing" lunch time as it should be:))

Lauri said...

Hi doruko! Thank you for sharing your view and giving perspective for this quite a single minded observation.

As you told about your work, there are exceptions here too, some sleep head pressed to a desk and some indeed go occasionally out to have lunch. Generally it however a clear division of men spending their time at computer and women in lunch room.

Sorry, I can’t help but write in slightly ironical manner. Could it be a caracter of Finns... :)

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