Leaving the java behind

Serving a cup of coffee to her Japanese manager every morning made Yuko Sudoh grumpy.

That wasn’t part of her job description. “I wanted to please my boss,” she says, recounting the early days of her nearly decade-long career at the Japanese subsidiary of Ottawa-based company TechInsights Inc. She reluctantly decided to make it a routine after he had asked her a few times to bring him a cup of coffee.

At the time, she was the only female employee at the six-person office in Tokyo, where she worked as a sales and marketing coordinator. What irritated her even more than being a personal barista was the degrading expression he repetitively used to scold his male sales staff about their performance.

“You aren’t a woman or a child. You are a man. So you should do a better job,” Sudoh recalls him saying. She suppressed her anger and said nothing.

Eventually, though, she reached her breaking point. When he uttered those words again one day to his salesman during after-work drinks with colleagues and implicated women as inherently inferior than men, she could no longer hold back.

“You say you don’t need any women. You don’t think women are competent. But look at yourself,” she lashed out at her boss. “You are depending on me!”

“Why are you so angry?” He couldn’t immediately understand why she was upset. “I’m just an old-school man.”

Although he later apologized to her, he kept using the expression in the office. And each time Sudoh called him out and told him to stop using it. It took her five years to finally rid him of his bad habit. Needless to say, she no longer serves him coffee every morning.

Even though Japanese female employees may no longer be required to serve coffee or more traditional tea to male managers and coworkers, Japan’s persisting gender prejudice is still hindering women’s success in business. For instance, Sudoh’s company headquarters suggested she become the sales manager in Japan, but at the same time, she says: “The Japan head office was concerned that female sales managers may not be well received by its Japanese manufacturing clients.”

Still, the Japan subsidiary where she worked — where all employees were Japanese — operated based on traditional values and hierarchy. Although she corresponded with the Canadian headquarters daily and visited Ottawa once a year, she hoped for a more international office environment, one where she could have face-to-face communication with foreign co-workers every day.

By chance, she happened to pick up an envelope from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Japan (CCCJ), which her manager had discarded. Inside was a letter soliciting membership. It piqued her interest and she asked her manager if she could join, he told her to get approval from their Canadian headquarters.

With the headquarters’ permission, TechInsights Japan joined the CCCJ about five years ago. Sudoh became an active member of the chamber and served on the event committee. In 2014, she was elected to be a governor representing the chamber.

Her motivation for involvement with the CCCJ was to gain understanding of Canadian corporate culture by interacting with Canadian members, which would help her do her job. As sales and marketing coordinator, she is in regular contact with Ottawa-based engineers to arrange quotes and reports on patents for her Japanese clients.

Sudoh also wanted to become a confident communicator in an environment where information was not passed along based on hierarchy. “I call our company’s president on a first-name basis. And I can talk to him directly,” she says.

And since her Japan office received visitors from Canada every couple of months, she wanted to feel at ease with meeting with them, she adds.

While she spent six months in Toronto in her early 20s to study English and worked at a seafood trading company as a secretary for six months in Campbell River, British Columbia, her business interaction with the locals was limited. At the office, she mostly acted as a translator between the company’s Japanese owner and the community fishermen. Meanwhile, the CCCJ has also enabled her to expand her business network and meet people she would never have otherwise had the chance to meet. For instance, once she was introduced to Japan’s Ambassador to Canada and visited him with her company’s vice-president while on a business trip to Ottawa.

“I had never met the Japanese ambassador. I am glad we have joined the CCCJ,” the executive said to her.

As a CCCJ governor, Sudoh has made it her mission to recruit new Japanese members. She actively networks and maintains contact with prospective members who come to the CCCJ’s many events. She is currently in talks with two companies to have them join the chamber, she says.

At the CCCJ events, Sudoh has met many Japanese who expressed a passion and love for Canada. One of them even introduced her to the Japan Association for Canada Certification (JACC), a Tokyo-based NPO that developed Canada Kentei, or Canada Certification. This is the organization that created the exams that test knowledge about Canada such as politics, history, economy, geography and culture in order to promote understanding of Canada among Japanese.

On a previous test, for example, one of the challenging questions included naming the first Canadian recipient of a Nobel Prize, she says. (It was Sir Frederick Banting, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine, 1923, for the discovery of insulin.)

Sudoh herself has so far earned the grade three and plans to pursue the grade two, the highest grade available to date, this year. She took the test to better understand her Canadian colleagues through learning about the environment and culture in which they grew up. Many of those who take part in the exam are enthusiasts of Canada, who have studied or worked in Canada, she says. The association also organizes certification presentation ceremonies followed by an after-party where participants can mingle with fellow certificate holders.

Besides working to level up on the tests, she also attends the association’s meetings. “I go and try to recruit new members for the chamber,” she concedes. “I enjoy work that connects me with people.”

The Canadian is a quarterly magazine of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Japan, published by GPlus Media.

© Japan Today