Moving desks around

人事異動 (jinji ido), or job rotation is a pretty big thing in Japan. Every year on April 1st about a third of the staff in my office gets transferred to another department. It can hit basically everyone without warning, even though you can put in requests beforehand. This happens in most major Japanese companies and organisations, apparently because the system of lifetime employment is still pretty wide spread in Japan and so they want their employees to "experience as many aspects of the company as possible while at the same time preventing corruption" (and - most handily - radical labour activism). So by the time you become the big boss, or in our case, mayor, you'll know your organisation inside out. An added effect is of course, that it keeps people from going stark raving mad. Let's be honest, who wants to be stuck filing invoices for 40 years? Everyone likes a bit of variety.

The problem that comes with variety, though, is that there is a lack of specialized personnel under 60 years old that hasn't been hired for specialized purposes. In some cases, this isn't much of a problem, as the bureaucratic processes remain the same for the whole organisation, but it could easily happen, for example, that the IT guy gets transferred to water works and replaced by a person from the school lunch centre. So for a while you'll be having your firewalls fixed and servers cleaned up by somebody who feels more comfortable ordering the right amount of sandwiches at the right time. They might become reasonably good at their new role after a while, but it feels like this process is just wasting a lot of productivity. Especially since EVERYBODY gets moved at the same time and the place is in a state of disorientation for a couple of weeks.

All in all, jinji ido is a pretty mysterious process and who gets moved where isn't announced until one week before the actual move. In our tiny town, people can't usually be moved any further than a few blocks away, but some companies transfer their employees seemingly randomly all over the country or even to offices overseas. Teachers as a rule get transferred within their prefecture, so in the case of Hokkaido, which is huge, you might get moved to the middle of nowhere a 16 hours drive away. There are different kinds of contracts specifying the extent to which you qualify for transfers, so I guess people know what they are getting themselves into, but a few still freak out about it a fair bit, especially with all the nerve-wrecking secrecy involved.

As the office foreigner, I tend to freak out about it too, to be honest. Finally you've ended up with a batch of people who know you well enough to actually trust you a little bit and then from one day to another you might get thrown right back to the "you're really good with chopsticks" (but useless with everything else) level. On the other hand, if you loathe your work environment, there's always a chance unpleasant individuals will be moved out of your sight soon.

Anyway, since all Japanese government office operate on a hierarchically structured open office plan (I may write an entry about this one day), there's usually a fair amount of desk shuffling to be done before the new people arrive. I landed a new chair this year though, so I guess it's not all bad.