or a blue book for an English exam. I loved learning to read all over again like a child stringing together syllables and discovering new, recognizable words.
I signed up to spend my junior year at Waseda University in Tokyo. But before going to Japan I got a summer job working at the Honda manufacturing plant in Ohio. I wanted to be a translator, but after only two semesters of Japanese I could barely read a sushi menu. The only thing I was qualified to do was to be a lifeguard at the Honda Sports Center. It was there that I met Mr. Yoshida, who was both an alumnus of Waseda and Honda’s vice president in Ohio. He took an interest in my study of Japanese and encouraged me to get a part time job with Honda during the exchange year.
After that summer I arrived in Tokyo with a list of people Mr. Yoshida had suggested I call, and was hired as a weekend Welcome Lady at the Honda headquarters showroom. I worked with ten glamorous Welcome Ladies who maintained flawless manicures and taught me to humbly say “Please accept this stupid gift” as we distributed complimentary pens to potential customers.
During that year everyone called me Kiki. It was a nickname that I made up for myself before going to Japan. My given name, Laura, would have been all right, but I rationalized that it would be good to have a name without the “L” sound that in Japanese sounds more like an “R,” turning my name into “Rora.” The truth is that I wanted a cute, attractive name. Laura sounded so boring, but Kiki sounded full of energy and fun.
The year at Waseda was a year of discovering new territory. I joined the university judo team and, with bruised shins and a broadened back, earned my brown belt. Seaweed-covered rice balls and hot canned coffee from vending machines became staples of my diet. When I finally learned to read train maps and station signs, the geography of Japan suddenly opened up into an inviting web of well-marked paths that took me all the way from the northern mountains of Hokkaido to the beaches of Okinawa. I found a Japanese boyfriend and some days spoke Japanese exclusively. Japan became my playground, a place where I was safe to fearlessly explore and reinvent myself.
After I returned to Ohio for my senior year, Mr. Yoshida hired me to work at Honda as an intern for a month. This time I had more to offer than lifeguarding skills and worked as his assistant, translating press releases and writing articles for the company newspaper. On the last day he offered me a job working at Tokyo headquarters, to start after graduation. It would be the first time an American woman would be sent to headquarters for a long-term assignment. I couldn’t believe his offer, and accepted without even asking about the salary.
He explained that I would go to Tokyo for two years, after which I would return to the United States and continue working for him. The first year in Japan would be spent working in the executive office of Honda Motor Company as an assistant to one of the senior managing directors, Mr. Chino, who had just been promoted after seven years as president of American Honda in Los Angeles. Mr. Chino had requested a bilingual assistant because part of his new responsibilities included all of Honda’s North American operations. My second year would be spent rotating through various departments at the headquarters—sales, public relations, and finance—to help me understand the organization and prepare me for work back in America.
From the beginning, Mr. Yoshida emphasized that I was joining the company, not just starting a job. After I had accepted his verbal offer, he sent me a half-page letter confirming my start date and salary. He wrote that Honda was pleased that I would be joining the company and that they hoped I would find my career with Honda both challenging and rewarding.
Mr. Yoshida set up an orientation schedule beginning a week after I graduated from college. He wanted me to be prepared when I arrived in Tokyo, so he decided that I should spend the summer studying the operations in America—starting with a month on the assembly line in the Ohio factory. After that I traveled to the offices in New York, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., and then spent six weeks in Los Angeles.
During the three-month training period I met with Mr. Yoshida regularly to talk about the company and its theories of business. He asked me to write daily reports about all the different departments I visited, not just to make sure I had learned something but because he was interested in my observations. He wanted to know my opinion about what I saw and how things worked. When we were in different cities I would fax him my reports and he would respond the next day, writing his comments in scrupulous English with the penmanship of a calligrapher. He treated me as the adult I aspired to be.
I knew very little about what it would be like once I arrived in Tokyo—the company, the job, and where I would live. Mr. Yoshida assured me that Honda would help me get settled. I sent a list of questions to the manager of the executive office, who replied with a vague, one-page letter saying that we would talk about things more after I arrived. The lack of information didn’t bother me too much. What I didn’t know I filled in for myself, relying on my memories of life as an exchange student and as a Welcome Lady, when strangers had asked to take my picture and invited me to their homes for dinner because I could speak Japanese.
Mr. Yoshida had been grooming me and I’d been grooming myself: I straightened and styled my unruly red hair and bought suits and matching high heels. A prim gold-plated watch replaced the leather thong and beaded bracelets I had worn around my wrist for the past four years. Two local newspapers interviewed me for front-page profiles, and my head filled with glamorous images of my job as the first American woman to work at Honda’s headquarters.
Working at Honda was my dream job. Although I knew almost nothing about manufacturing, I did know Japanese. I knew that words would be my passport to understanding the company and Japan. What I didn’t know then was the geography of this unexplored language—the phrases of assimilation, the words of compromise, the messages of rebellion and acceptance I had yet to learn.
Note: For this book I have relied on journals I kept while in Japan, letters I wrote home, and my memory. Some of the conversations recorded here are re-creations. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals concerned.
1
Uniform
ON MY FIRST DAY of work at Honda’s headquarters in Tokyo, I walked into the seventh floor Administration Department and stared into a black-haired sea of Honda employees. The Japanese men were dressed in dark business suits, but the women wore blue polyester knee-length skirts and matching vests. I was shocked to see only women in uniforms. They looked like tall Girl Scouts, missing only merit badges and knee socks.
More than one hundred desks and at least as many people filled the wide-open office space, and considering the number of people there the room seemed suspiciously quiet. Two women approached me looking like paper cutout dolls in blue uniforms, white blouses, and black, shoulder-length hair. Nothing about them seemed particular enough for me to grasp; if they were to turn back into the crowd of people I felt sure I would never find them again.
In polite Japanese one of the women asked me to follow her. We walked down a long, empty hallway. No one spoke. We stopped in front of a closed door and one of the women knocked timidly. Then she opened the door which led into a small, dingy storage room; brown cardboard boxes stood along the windowless walls. The women effortlessly slipped off their shoes before stepping up onto a low landing. I imitated their actions.
Without saying a word, the two women began digging around in the boxes; when I realized what they were looking for, a shiver ran up my spine. The boxes were full of uniforms. All I wanted to do was run away from the room; but I had to stand there, pretending not to hear them discuss my waist size.
I was wearing a new cream-colored suit—a light wool, tunicstyle Liz Claiborne design I had purchased just weeks before at Nordstrom with one of my first paychecks.
A pretty beige briefcase was slung over my shoulder, a graduation present from Grandma Mozelle, and I wore matching beige pumps. I had tried to mold myself into the image of an international corporate woman—an image that did not include polyester.
I hadn’t minded wearing a uniform when I worked on the assembly line in Ohio. Everyone there, including the president, wore the same white coveralls with a red name patch on the front. The only problem I’d had then was that the newness of the