Lee's Office and Desks

The average Japanese professional office and the average American professional office are not terribly similar. In an American office, you'll get in general more space, more privacy, and better hardware. It would be expected that you personalize your space at least a little. Unless large stacks of disorganized paper count as personalization, that is less common in Japan. I can't say that I've visited a large number of Japanese offices, but I account ours as fairly clean and well organized compared to some that I have seen, despite there being several design elements I would have done very differently had I been in charge - like leaving up the six walls that were torn down to make sure that everybody could see everybody else at all times and that your coworker's phone conversation four rows away is clearly audible. Anyhow, I went in early one morning and snapped some pictures before everyone else got there to show you the before and after for my working space and a few shots of the broader office.

First, I show you a recreation of what confronted me when I started working here. A single half-height cube wall, steel desk from before computers existed, a few extra beige drawers, too-small but moderately comfortable office chair, and a 13 inch laptop computer from before time began.

A few words about the computer. In the US, 13 inches is considered a size pretty much exclusively for portability - OSHA and your employees would both lynch you if you tried to make people work on it full time - but here if you wanted Windows XP that is the only kind of computer the school would give you, and several people in this office do all their work on computers of that size, usually by committing serious and prolonged crimes against ergonomics. Incidentally, I had to check the minimum and suggested system specifications for XP, because the laptop they offered with Vista on it did not meet Vista's minimum system requirements. I chose XP and meeting minimum specs over Vista and not enough RAM. Basic clockspeed / thread math says that that laptop has less than 5% of the power of my current home computer. Despite coming out in 2004, the laptop's CPU has about half the power of the CPU I used when I built my first computer in sophomore year of high school in 2001. The laptop they gave me works, and I did manage to get it with an English operating system instead of a Japanese one, which was very helpful. It was, however, the kind of situation where opening Word or Excel might take 15 seconds. I'm sure most people don't care about the computer but it is such an egregious example of hiring expensive people and wasting their time and your money by giving them underpowered tools that I felt the need to comment at length.

And here we have my newly completed desk setup. I managed to get my spot moved to the other side of the room, away from the shredder (it's loud) and into a cube with two half-height walls, giving me a lot more space to hang papers and lists on the walls. My new computer, provided by a generous co-worker with excess grant money that I was working with on a paper with, is far more current and powerful - I'll spare you the details and just say that it is a specialized engineering build and I don't spend nearly as much time waiting around for the computer to catch up with me as I used to.

The dual-monitor setup with stand means that I can look at more than one thing at the same time (for instance, a paper being written and the data needed for writing it) and even in addition to that I can spread out papers on my desk because my laptop isn't smack in the middle of it taking up all the space. The laptop dock allows for hot docking/removal so if I need to get up and take the laptop to class I don't have to turn it off, just press one button and then pick it up and walk away, and I don't have to fiddle with plugging in/out the monitors and keyboard or anything like that. The full-size keyboard and the mouse really speed up the computer interface process when at the desk.

The chair I had shipped in from the US, because I could get it there and then ship it in for 1/3 the price of buying the same chair in Tokyo. The noise-canceling headphones help to lessen the distraction-factor of being in a room with 25-30 other people, who are not necessarily being quiet, while trying to work. There are a couple other tweaks - I took the center desk drawer out because I couldn't fit my knees under it, hid the phone in the set of side drawers (rarely rings, usually a wrong number), ran cables all through the desks for tricky things like USB hubs and the audio connections, and managed to hide most of the cables from view. All in all, major improvement from the beginning, though I always had a much larger and more adjustable desk and FAR more space and privacy even as just an intern in the US.
Anyhow, now that everybody is really sick of hearing about my desk, here are a couple of pictures of the office itself. There is one row behind me so the room goes about 20 feet back behind where this was taken. This open format is quite common in Japan. Apparently, it enhances group feeling. I might value productivity (or even, you know, actually being friends with your co-workers) over "group feeling", but then I'm not cutting the checks (which is a crappy way of saying it here, because checks don't exist in Japan).