[In this series of posts, I want to share with you how Human Experience Specialists (HESs) work with cross-cultural clients. To learn more about becoming a Human Experience Specialist, please visit here.]
Kenji was forty-six, married, the father of two teenagers, and employed by the same Japanese manufacturing company since graduating from university.
His professional life had followed a recognizable pattern: long hours, conscientious performance, modest promotions, and an unwavering commitment to the organization.
He had rarely questioned this arrangement. Work provided structure, status, income, and a sense of participating in something larger than himself. Yet during the previous two years, something had changed. He had begun experiencing his workplace as a place where he was slowly disappearing.
The immediate problem was a new supervisor who demanded constant availability, publicly criticized employees, and treated personal obligations as evidence of insufficient commitment. Kenji had always accepted that work required sacrifice. What troubled him was that sacrifice now seemed to be the entire point.
His evenings belonged to the company, his weekends were frequently interrupted, and his family had learned not to expect much from him. He found himself fantasizing about opening a small bicycle repair shop, an idea so improbable that he had mentioned it to no one.
An outsider might describe Kenji’s predicament as a failure to establish boundaries. That description would contain some truth, but it would overlook the cultural meanings attached to his behavior. Kenji had been raised to value perseverance, harmony, responsibility, and the avoidance of burdening others. These were not merely externally imposed rules. They were virtues he genuinely admired. His distress arose partly because qualities he considered admirable had become instruments of his own exhaustion.
A Human Experience Specialist would begin by taking those virtues seriously. The goal would not be to persuade Kenji that his cultural inheritance was mistaken, nor to romanticize Japanese workplace culture as inherently noble. Rather, the HES would help him distinguish between values and the particular institutional arrangements that claimed to embody them.
Was loyalty necessarily unlimited availability? Did perseverance require accepting humiliation? Could responsibility to his family sometimes justify disappointing his employer?
Such questions might initially feel disloyal. Kenji had little practice evaluating his company’s demands from a position outside the company’s own expectations. The HES could help him develop that capacity through reflection, practical experiments, and careful examination of feared consequences.
He might investigate other employment possibilities, discuss finances with his wife, or begin repairing bicycles for acquaintances on weekends. These steps would not constitute a commitment to resign. They would create information where previously there had been only dread.
Reality testing would be especially important. Kenji’s family depended on his salary. A bicycle shop might fail. Changing employers in midlife could be difficult. His wife might prefer financial security to his dream of independence. The HES would help him consider these realities without allowing them to become an automatic argument for remaining exactly where he was.
Perhaps Kenji would eventually change jobs. Perhaps he would remain at his company but negotiate a less punishing arrangement. Perhaps the bicycle shop would remain a private dream. The deeper work would involve helping him recognize that cultural virtues are not self-interpreting. Loyalty, duty, and perseverance require judgment. A person may honor the best of a cultural inheritance while refusing the uses to which that inheritance has been put.
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