Fukuzawa Yukichi
If your coworker gets naked in front of the boss’ wife
Thinker | 10 January 1835 – 3 February 1901

Around three years ago, I was at a house party of this person who always looks after me, and I made a blunder.

I forgot that it was someone else’s home, and I had too much to drink. Unable to even properly sit in a chair, each time I stood up to go to the toilet I always sent the chair flying. As someone who happens to urinate frequently, I get the feeling I wasn’t a fan favorite of anyone there.

Every time, I would fall off the chair and crash into the table like I was a bowling ball, knocking down people’s glasses in perfect rhythm. My articulation was mumbled; a repetitive, slurred mess of “I’m fiiine, I’m fiiine!”

I was not fine.

Eventually, I was ordered to sit down on the sofa. The one thing I do remember in striking detail is the wife’s fed-up facial expression. I even vaguely remember her saying something to me, but by that point I was gone, so unfortunately I do not recall what that something was.

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Rikidozan
If you feel you have to start up a new business
Pro wrestler | 14 November 1924 – 15 December 1963

In every community, there’s always that one person who acts without any consideration for others, making trouble for everyone around them. And yet, for some reason, you just can’t seem to hate them.

Loved by their seniors and trusted by their juniors, they act with reckless abandon. Even so, it’s impossible to dislike them. You don’t love them, but you also can’t help but be drawn to them.

This time, we will be covering a national pro wrestling star of the postwar period: Rikidozan. Some of you might be going, “Who’s that?” Let us thus first take a brief look back at this man’s journey to becoming a wrestler.

Born in 1924 in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, his real name was Kim Sin-rak. He was later adopted, thus becoming Momota Mitsuhiro, and by the time he became a national star he was fully Japanese, “born and raised” in Nagasaki. While today it is pretty much self-evident, back then it was considered the biggest of taboos in the media to mention his Korean origins.

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Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu
If you devote yourself to wining and dining
Politician | 775 – 30 August 826

“Wow! You’re the man, boss!”

It has been some time since one could hear people uttering fake-sounding compliments the likes of these in public. And yet, for every salaryman out there, the act of buttering up continues to be an indispensable survival skill.

“Buttering up to someone.” It doesn’t have a nice ring to it. However, even if you personally feel like that’s what it is you’re doing, as long as the other party doesn’t get the sense that someone’s only trying to flatter them, that in and of itself turns what you’re doing into “hospitality.” It would be no exaggeration to say that your future depends on whether or not you can successfully walk that thin line with proper discretion.

Now in 2019, people are clamoring for work-style reforms. Companies are scaling down the late-night meetings, banning after-parties, and requiring special permissions for wining and dining after 10 PM. It might well be that we now find ourselves in an era where even if it’s some important-looking gentleman giving their whole spiel about how “history is made at night, you know” (all while exuding that unmistakable “old person smell”), the young people of today would just be staring at them in complete bewilderment.

Be that as it may, the truth is that history is, in fact, made by “hospitality.” And if one was to trace back the history of Japan, surely it would be Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu who shines brilliantly as the country’s first-generation Hospitality Man.

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Minamoto no Yoritomo
If you’re told that it’s “anything goes tonight”
Samurai | 9 May 1147 – 9 February 1199

“Tonight, it’s no-holds-barred! Just drink away!”

Even if it’s your superior telling you so, you would do best not to end up so zonked that you’re smacking them on the shoulder, looking all disheveled as you’re going, “Hey, boss! Boss! Booosssss!!”

More than ten years ago now, I was a new employee at this company. Just a few days after I’d started there, someone uttered the phrase “no-holds-barred.” I took those words literally.

That evening, I drank and I drank and I drank, and I ended up falling asleep on the last train of the night. I was lying there, spread-eagled on the floor of that crowded train, not concerned in the least about how I might be perceived by my boss who was also on that train making his way home.

When I got to work the next day, I was instantly being treated like I was somehow this unstable “guy who sleeps on the floors of crowded trains” type. (By the way, isn’t it interesting how in Tokyo trains, even when it’s totally crowded, if someone who looks like trouble walks in it’s like suddenly there’s this free space opened up for him out of nowhere? Like he was splitting the ocean or something? What’s the deal with that anyway?)

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Prince Shirakabe
If you’re dragged into a factional dispute
Politician | 18 November 708 – 11 January 782

The absolute biggest cause of concern for your average salaryman has to be changes in personnel.

The number of posts in the workplace is fixed, and consequently some of them are agreeable while others are bound to be much less so. “Relative evaluation” doesn’t exist even as a concept, people’s hopes and expectations are but dust in the wind, and it’s not at all uncommon for there to be personnel changes that make you question the decision makers’ sanity.

And the bigger the organization, the more complicated and bizarre its inner workings become. All salarymen are forced to live in that world of evil spirits of mountains and rivers.

You could even go so far as to saying it’s a matter of “erase or be erased.” In actual fact, it’s a world much like that of Golgo 13 unfolding behind the scenes of these April personnel changes. People erasing others or getting erased themselves, and people sensing that they’re in danger so they try to keep themselves out of harm’s way, running about in a frenzy while neglecting to do their actual job.

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