Japanese way of organizing events

This article is based on my personal experience, so it’s not necessarily the same with all the Japanese.

I’m a MBA student of Aoyama Gakuyin University(which is famous for our school’s marathon team), class 2017. After I entered the school, I decided to utilize my experience of event organizing in MBA, so I joined the event planning team of the student association of our business school.

The “幹事会 KanJiKai”（board of governors).

We have more than 40 people(including 1st-year and 2nd-year student) and divided into different departments such as accounting, charity, event planning, equipment managing…etc. Each department has a leader, on the top of them, there’re 2 presidents (since we were in the period of transition), vice president and a professor as an adviser. As you can see, it’s way “systemed” than in my college which only has 8 people in total.

So the first event we were going to organize is the 夏祭り(Natsu Matsuri, which means Summer Festival)

Because it’s a party for the students, professors and the alumnus from our department, so “I thought” it’s going to be an easy job.
However, it wasn’t like what I’ve imagined…

The date of the event is 5th, August. From my experience in college, this kind of party takes around 1 month to prepare. Thus now we have 40+ people, which is 5 times more than the student association in my college, I expected the whole preparation will be shorter and more efficient.

“Our first meet up of the event will be at the end of May!” the president informed all of us in the LINE group, which is a most popular messaging app in Japan.

Okay, that was a little bit early than I expected. But hey, since this is our first event, maybe 2nd-year students have some information to hand to us, which could make every new member get into the situation sooner. So I didn’t complain and attended the meetup.

Yeah, I said “meetup”, not “meeting”

Basically we were just introducing ourselves to each other about why we want to join the 幹事会. And the president only briefly introduced the event and things might need to be done very ambiguously. Then the meet up was over. After the meet up was over, there’s a 飲み会(NoMiKai, means drinking party, which Japanese loves and 3 or 4 times a week is normal) in the 居酒屋(IZaKaYa, Japanese style restaurant), and the purpose was to let the members know each other better.

Because for Japanese, maintaining a good relationship in the group is very very important.

So, one week after the meetup, we started to plan the event under the instruction of 2nd-year student.

In the first meeting, the 先輩(SenPai, means the seniors) told us how they organized last year’s summer party and how good it was. For this year, they hoped that the party could bring up the communication between international students(like me) and Japanese students. And they give us 2 weeks to think about the content, games or performances or anything fun. Me and other members which are all international students, we tried to bring up the cultural variety of our department by setting few game corners and each will represent one country.

While we thinking this plan is perfect, however….

After we proposing the plan to the department leader, the leader told us that our plan is good but to do it or not, will be decided by every member at the next meeting of the 幹事会.

At that moment, I was very confused, because we are the event planning team and also we are the people who execute the plan. So why we couldn’t decide to do it or not by ourselves?

At the next meeting, our plan was rejected by more than half of the members, because our plan required a performance that needs everyone to join it, and they felt bothersome although it’s very short and simple.

So after president discussed with leaders of each department, they decided to exactly the same plan as last year, which will be very safe because it succeed once before.This is just like Hofstede’s analysis, Japanese people really don’t like risk so they will always choose the safer way.

Yeah, basically the 2 weeks of planning turned out to be just a waste of time.

Well, so our plan was rejected and since the plan was exactly the same as last year, we don’t really have many things to do. Only things like to contact with the performers and ask them to do the same thing this year, or like packing awards for the party king and queen which didn’t take too much of our time to finish them.

Thus, before the event, I’m basically observing how the Japanese work.

The Ho-Ren-So 報告、連絡、相談（REPORT, CONTACT and CONSULT)
*it pronounces like Spinach in Japanese

Every Japanese knows these 3 words, which are also the typical procedure that the Japanese taking care of problems.

Report- report to your boss and people who should know when something went wrong or update the status
Contact-get contact with the people in charge or someone who can fix the problem
Consult- discuss the solution to the problem

Japanese spend most of the time on 報告, telling people what he or she have done no matter it’s important or not. And the people who report or the people they report to, they will act very politely. Unfortunately, that is just very inefficient and slow down the whole organization.

Also, Japanese organization has too many levels of hierarchy, so the reporting process will take way longer.And that’s why this simple event would take 40 people 2 months to prepare while only takes a month with only 8 people in Taiwan.

Anyways, the event ended just like last year, people are not disappointed but also not surprised.

In my opinion, Japanese people are definitely very very responsible for their job and duties, however, you could barely see their passion for the event. And maybe that’s the reason they don’t want to take any risks because they were just doing what they were told to.

So this is my experience of organizing event in Japan, and once again, this is just my personal experience, it’s not necessarily the same with all the Japanese.

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