Punctuality in Japan: Lessons No Business School Teaches

"If you are on time, you are already late. If you are five minutes early, you are on time. If you are thirty minutes early, you have become somebody else's problem." — Anil Raj .Three decades of doing business between India and Japan taught Anil Raj plenty of hard lessons. But this small one about punctuality stuck with him the most — because it wasn't really about time at all. It was about consideration: showing up in a way that never inconveniences anyone else's day.

By Anil Raj

I arrived in Japan in 1998 expecting to stay a year, perhaps two. Twenty-one of the twenty-eight years since have gone into running my own businesses across India and Japan, in restaurants, education and IT consulting. That is long enough to have made most of the mistakes available to a foreign founder here, and a few I suspect were original.

This is the first of a series on what those years taught me that no classroom did. I am starting with the smallest lesson I know, because it turned out to be the one everything else was built on.

The arithmetic of five minutes

The first half of that will sound familiar. Some version of it is repeated in every culture that takes time seriously, and it is usually meant to say that earlier is always better. What Japan taught me is that the line has a ceiling, and that going past it costs somebody else something.

If you are on time, you are already late. A ten o'clock meeting in Japan does not mean you arrive at ten. It means that at ten o'clock, the discussion begins. Your coat is off, your bag is settled, your cards are out, and you have already exchanged a word about the weather with the person beside you. Walking in at ten is not really the offence. Being unready when the meeting should begin is.

Japan has a name for this habit: 五分前の精神, the "five-minutes-before spirit," which the Maritime Self-Defense Force still teaches its officer candidates today. Five minutes before a scheduled duty, complete your preparations and wait at your position. The tradition is said to come from the old navy, where the gangway was drawn in five minutes before a ship sailed, though I have not been able to confirm that origin from an official source.

What I find most useful is the reason the navy gives for the rule. Partly it is operational, so that nothing is delayed when something goes wrong. But the school also describes it as a way of producing 余裕, a word that means margin, composure, the capacity to think one move ahead. The punctuality is only the visible part of it.

If you are five minutes early, you are on time. Five minutes is the width of the buffer. It is enough time to be ready, and not so much that anybody has to look after you.

And if you are thirty minutes early, you have become somebody else's problem. This is the line that surprises people, and it is the one I care about most.

Thirty minutes early may feel like diligence, but consider what it sets in motion. The receptionist has to decide what to do with you. A meeting may end awkwardly early because you are visible through the glass. You have taken thirty minutes of your own time, which you were free to spend however you liked, and turned it into a low hum of obligation for people who invited you for the meeting.

The thirty minutes nobody mentioned

My own example is an embarrassing one, and it is the reason the third line of that quote is mine rather than borrowed.

In my early years I made a habit of reaching very early, twenty minutes and sometimes thirty, because what I feared was arriving late and the disappointment that would cause. Nobody ever told me there was anything wrong with it. Not once, in years. I was received warmly every time, shown to a seat, offered tea, and I left each of those meetings quietly pleased with my own diligence.

It was a long time before I understood what I had actually been doing. If the person I was meeting had another meeting running immediately before mine, my early arrival became his burden. He had seen me through the glass wall of the meeting room, or somebody had gone in to tell him that his next visitor was already waiting, and from that moment he was managing two things instead of one. Perhaps he cut the previous conversation short. Perhaps he simply sat there carrying the small weight of knowing I was outside.

I had been congratulating myself for a courtesy that was costing my host something, every single time. I had become somebody else's problem while believing I was being considerate, and in all those years, not one person mentioned it.

Nobody will tell you that you got it wrong

That silence is the part that traps foreign businesspeople, and it took me years to see clearly.

In my experience, you will not be told that you were late. You will be told that the traffic in Tokyo is terrible today, isn't it. You will be told not to worry at all, please, please sit. The meeting will proceed with complete warmth. You will walk out believing it went well, and you will be right about that. It did go well. Nothing was ruined.

Something smaller happened. An impression was formed.

Nobody writes it down. In all my years here I have never once seen anyone make a note of such a thing. It simply stays in their mind. One late arrival is nothing at all, and twice is a coincidence, but by the third time you have quietly become the man who keeps people waiting, and that is a very hard reputation to shed, because nobody will ever tell you that you have it.

As I have come to understand it, the correction never comes because saying it aloud would embarrass you, and the embarrassment would be the greater discourtesy of the two.

For someone who grew up doing business in India, this takes real adjustment. In the partnerships I have had in India, a relationship gets argued into shape. Somebody who is unhappy with me will usually tell me so, often at length, and that friction is itself a kind of closeness. Here I lost that instrument, and I was left to work out from silence alone what I might be doing better.

So what do you actually do?

You will often have to leave early. There are the trains, the transfers, an address you have never visited before. Nobody plans a journey to land on the exact minute.

The distinction that matters is between reaching the location and presenting yourself to your host. Reach the area as early as you like. Present yourself five minutes before the appointment.

Wait outside, not in front of your host. If I arrive thirty or forty minutes ahead, I sit in the nearest coffee shop until it is time. The early arrival was for me. It was never meant for them.

Then adjust for the building. Five minutes is a good default, but what you are really estimating is how long it takes to get from the front door to the chair.

• Small office. The person you are meeting will usually come out to receive you himself. There is no process between the entrance and the handshake, so five minutes is right, and anything earlier is an imposition on somebody who is probably still finishing something.

• Large office with a proper lobby. Here there is a process. You sign in, you are given a badge, somebody telephones upstairs, and a person is sent down to collect you. None of that is free. A lobby is a public space, so sitting there costs nobody anything and does not announce you, but I approach the reception desk about ten minutes before the appointment, so that I am at the meeting room door at five minutes rather than scrambling out of a lift at two past.

And when the delay is genuinely outside your control, telephone before the appointment rather than explaining afterwards. Apologise briefly, give a realistic arrival time, and then keep to the time you gave. Japanese visitor guidance says the same thing, and it works because the lateness is rarely the real issue. Being left to wonder is.

The principle underneath all of it is the same. Your buffer is your responsibility, and it should be spent somewhere that costs other people nothing. Punctuality here is not really a measure of your effort. It is a measure of your consideration.

It was never really about meetings

The lesson goes well beyond etiquette, and this is the part that took me longest to see.

In Japan, every promise with a time attached is the same promise. The delivery date you quoted. The revised drawing you said would come on Thursday. The quotation you promised by month-end. The callback you offered without thinking about it, because offering it made the conversation easier.

I used to treat dates like those as estimates, and I assumed the other side understood them the same way. Here they are commitments, and they are remembered with the same quiet precision as your arrival time. When a supplier is four days late with a sample, the delay itself is rarely fatal. What shapes confidence in him is whether he told me before the date passed or after I asked.

Which is the useful part, because nobody keeps every promise across twenty-one years. I have missed dates myself, more than once. The recovery is almost entirely in the timing of the message. Tell them while the date is still ahead of you, give a new one, and keep that. A promise renegotiated in advance costs very little. A promise that expires in silence costs a great deal.

Reliability in this market is not built by large gestures like the discount, the trip or the dinner. It is built by a long run of small commitments kept, and honestly handled when they cannot be. That run is the actual product you are selling. Everything else is a brochure.

This is the first of several. Still to come: why you are never really selling a product here, the hiring mistakes I made twice, the month I learned that a profitable business can still die, and the ventures that did not work at all. I have not fixed the order, and I would rather not fix it alone.

About the Author

Anil Raj is the Founder and President of RAJ GROUP, Tokyo (www.rajgroupglobal.com), which he established in 2005. The group operates across hospitality, education and IT consulting, including the Nirvanam group of North and South Indian restaurants (www.nirvanam.jp), Nehan Technologies (www.nehantech.com) and Star Kids International Preschool (www.starkids-japan.com). He serves as President of the India-IT Association Japan (IITAJ) and is a co-founder of the Indian Restaurant Association Japan (IRAJ). He has lived and worked in Japan for twenty-eight years, and writes on the India-Japan business corridor.

Source: (5) 21 Years of Business Across India & Japan: Lessons No Business School Teaches | LinkedIn

Views expressed here are personal.