Thomas P. Rohlen was one of our most important anthropologists of Japan during the decades in which he was professionally active, the 1960s through the early 2000s. Your reading assignment draws from his first book, which is an ethnography of Ueda Bank, a regional Japanese bank in southern Japan (whose position was a bit like People’s United Bank here in southern New England). The book is a revision of his 1971 Ph. D. dissertation, which in turn was based on extended fieldwork in the bank for 11 months in 1968-1969. The bank had about 3000 employees in a headquarters office and about 120 branches. About 2000 of the 3000 employees were men, and his focus on the male “salarymen” of Ueda Bank allows us an instructive comparison with the female workers that Jeannie Lo studied. The years of his fieldwork were crucial for Japan because they coincided with the rapid acceleration of the national economy, and banks led the way in generating savings and in providing the investment loans for this “national project” of economic growth.
For your assignment, I have made a selection of sections that give you an overview of the bank and Rohlen’s argument about the organization of work within it. The pdf that is available at the v-2 site bundles those pages as a single document.
Pages 1-7; 9-11; 13, 16-20; 24-33; 34-35; 46-47; 63-66; 70-73; 88-92; 92-101; 105-108; 116-117; 192-209; 212-210; 225-228; 242-243; 248-251; 255-259
This analysis of a Japanese bank is fascinating in its own right, but as I have said in class, it gains particular interest for us when we read it in juxtaposition to Jeannie Lo’s study of Brother Industries. Some of the differences are obvious—banking versus manufacturing, male workers versus female employees. Some are more subtle. To get started, here are a few issues you look for and reflect upon in your reading are the following.
1. Think about the book’s title, “For Harmony and Strength,” which is in fact the motto of the bank. The phrase signals to Rohlen the bank’s efforts to balance (social) harmony and (economic) strength. This sounds admirable, but it is hardly inevitable and, we must presume, rather difficult for any company to pull off. What do you think? Does Ueda Bank manage to have both harmony and strength? If so, how does it accomplish this feat? That is, what is the evidence for this?
2. The bank seems to depend on both rituals (the president’s speeches and circulars, the formal seasonal parties, the songs, the entrance ceremonies, the work uniforms, etc.) and routines (the ways that work is done and people connect to each on a daily basis in their bank branch offices or headquarters sections). What is the relationship between these rituals and routines? Do you sense that one is more important than the other?
3. What does the Table of Contents tell you, not only about the topics Rohlen is covering but also about the case he is making to us, the readers, about how Ueda Bank works.
4. Lo versus Rohlen: so what difference does gender make –in shaping relations in the workplace and in the work conditions of the employees? Is gender THE most important distinction that is made at Brother and Ueda?
5. As with Lo, Rohlen focuses on the workplace and the work day, but both of them connect work to marriage and the family. How is this the case for the men of Ueda and the women of Brother?
6. The final few pages of the reading assignment are about “the limits and biases of my fieldwork” (252-259). How would you compare the conditions and methods of his fieldwork with those of Jeannie Lo?