did you hear about me before I arrived?”
“Mr. Higuchi told us that a young American woman would come to work with us. He didn’t give us many details, but everyone was very curious,” Ms. Shoji said.
“Since we had never worked with someone from America we were all a little nervous,” admitted Ms. Ogi. “Mr. Higuchi said you could speak Japanese but we didn’t know how much. Since we don’t speak English well we were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to communicate.”
“Also, some people thought that maybe you would be a big, pushy American career woman who would take over!” Ms. Shoji said and laughed.
“When we saw you for the first time and you smiled and greeted us in Japanese, we thought ‘She’s so nice, just like an American OL,’” Ms. Ogi said.
“An OL?” I asked. “An office lady.”
I remembered the term from college. Office Lady was the Japanese version of a Kelly Girl—young and semi-educated, lacking specific skills. OLs usually joined a company after graduating from high school, and worked for three to five years before retiring to get married and have children.
For many women in Japan, this stage of life was the high point of financial freedom. Since most women live at home until marriage they have few expenses. Most of an OL’s income is saved for her wedding day, but a regular portion is used for her own enjoyment—expensive restaurants, stylish clothing, and overseas trips.
I looked across the table at Ms. Ogi and Ms. Shoji and noticed their designer leather wallets sitting on the table. They fit the OL description, as did the others in our group—they were all unmarried, most of them lived at home, and they had disposable income to buy nice things like expensive jewelry and designer handbags.
I had imagined myself as something very different. I carried a backpack, my wallet was made of nylon and Velcro, and I had no plans for early retirement. Even though before coming to Japan I’d had very little idea of what kind of work I would be doing, I expected to be more than an OL. But since I had never been hired for a full-time job before, I hadn’t questioned it when Mr. Yoshida was vague about my job.
Asking too many specific questions had seemed unnecessary and even petty. I wanted to act like a professional. I had high expectations of myself, and I thought Mr. Yoshida did too. Why else would he have sent me to work on the assembly line in Ohio for a month and on a two-month tour of the North American offices with a company car and an expense account?
Only a few months earlier I had been asked by the dean of my college to give the commencement speech at graduation. In her introduction to my speech, the dean had proudly told my peers that I had been hired by Honda to study various methods of production in Japan. I’m sure no one in the audience that day, including myself, pictured me with a group of office ladies who wore polyester uniforms and served tea to Japanese executives.
The OLs’ workday began and ended in the same place—the pantry. It was hidden behind a one-way window that looked out onto the tenth floor. It was a place for women only—a place to drink coffee, reapply lipstick, and look at fashion magazines. In the mornings the pantry had a relaxed atmosphere, but once work started, the pantry functioned like a factory, with workers assembling teacups and saucers, washing utensils, and generating refreshments.
The rectangular pantry was the size of a suburban American kitchen, with cabinets above and below a counter that circled the room. On one side of the room there were two sinks and two smooth-top stoves. The opposite counter held coffee makers, thermoses, shelves for wooden saucers, and a heating appliance for hand towels. In the corner was a full-sized refrigerator, something I had never seen in a Japanese kitchen. The cabinets were filled with cups and pots for Japanese and English tea. There were stockpiles of tea and coffee, and cans of low-calorie Coke Light and Florida orange juice. In the center of the room was a narrow table with two stools.
In the morning the women arrived on the tenth floor already dressed in their uniforms. Carrying petite designer purses, they would walk into the pantry and chime, “Good morning.” Greetings and gentle nods were passed around the room like neighborly handshakes at church.
Even though work didn’t officially begin until 8:40 A.M., the women immediately started to organize the pantry. They filled large thermoses with mugicha (barley tea) that would be used throughout the day. Others put away dishes and got cleaning rags ready in a bucket.
Through the darkened one-way window I could see our work area, the hishoshitsu, which literally means “room of secrets.” “Executive secretariat” was Tom’s translation. He told me he thought it sounded more impressive than “secretarial office.”
Our workspace was set behind a beige reception counter. Desks were clustered in groups of four to six desks, pushed together to form shima, or islands. The desktops were completely clear, with the exception of a phone on each desk. There was a rule at Honda that everyone had to clean off his or her desk before going home every night, so all desk supplies and paperwork were stored away in cabinets and on chair seats.
I watched the secretaries retrieve their supplies from hiding places. Each woman had some type of pastel-colored box filled with pencils, glue, heart-shaped note paper, scissors, erasers shaped like animal crackers, and sometimes a pen that had lemon-scented ink or an automatic pencil with a pink charm dangling from the end. Each island shared common supplies, usually in a cigar box covered with stickers. There were no personal items: no family pictures, no mugs or flower vases. The desks were devoid of character; if a secretary wasn’t sitting at her desk I couldn’t identify whose it was.
For ten or twenty minutes the chores in the office were attended to. The women used white cleaning rags to wipe the desktops and clean the receivers of each of the two-dozen telephones. They sharpened pencils from the desks in the executive office and made sure that all the cabinets were unlocked. After each OL had organized her desk and taken care of her chores, she would return to the pantry for a communal cup of coffee or tea. Because there were more than two people, the two stools would remain unused. Instead, everyone stood or squatted next to the table while they talked until 8:35, when the jingly morning exercise music started playing over the public-address system.
“All right, everybody, let’s begin by swinging our arms over our head,” instructed the peppy recording in Japanese. The secretaries ignored the directions but hurriedly emptied their cups and washed them. “Touch your toes, one, two, three, four!” The women scurried from the pantry to the executive office and back to their desks, aware only of the minutes remaining until the music stopped.
By this time the buchō, or manager, would be sitting at his island in a cloud of his own smoke. The other men usually arrived later in the morning because of late-night responsibilities to the executives. Tom and the other men took turns staying late until all the directors had gone home. Because some of the directors had responsibilities in countries halfway around the world in different time zones, it wasn’t unusual for at least one of them to stay at the office until after midnight.
At 8:40 A.M., when the official work bell sounded, all eleven secretaries were obediently sitting in their assigned seats, hair freshly combed, vests buttoned up, and smiles caffeinated for the day.
“Ohayō gozaimasu,” said the buchō.
“Ohayō gozaimasu,” a chorus of sopranos replied.
The morning meeting began with a recitation of each executive’s schedule. The chairman’s secretary Ms. Mori, started. “Today the chairman will have a meeting with the Belgian ambassador at 2:00 P.M. At 4:00 P.M. he has an appointment with the accounting manager. This evening he has a dinner meeting with the president at the Advisor’s Building.” Down the line, each secretary read her schedules aloud so everyone would be aware of the day’s events. The buchō often made administrative announcements and then concluded the meeting.
The directors started arriving after 9:30. One by one they filed off the elevator and passed the reception desk to get to the executive office. They were quiet, slight figures in dark suits. Sometimes they acted as though they didn’t want to be noticed, but that was impossible. As soon as one was spotted