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Got totally scared off from the idea of working a normal job in Japan
by watching the movie ブラック会社に勤めてるんだが、もう俺は限界かもしれない, or "I work for a Black Company and I think I'm at my limit". (I think "Shady company" would be a more appropriate English translation, but they literally named the company 黒井 in the movie...)
So, this movie is about a guy named Masao, but he ends up being called Maotoko the entire movie thanks to a typo early on. Masao was a wimpy kid in high school who got bullied to the point that he basically became a hikikomori, which sort of means "kid who never leaves the house and just depends on their parents to support them forever and ever". In his case, he didn't leave the house for 8 years and taught himself programming... then his mother dies and his father gets sick and suddenly, he finds out that it is very difficult to find a job in your mid-20's when you have absolutely no work experience AND dropped out of high school.
After getting laughed out of several job interviews, eventually this one kindly-seeming CEO of a small IT contracting firm takes him in... and immediately he gets thrown into a one-room work office with a whole bunch of fucked-up coworkers: the "leader", who is a ridiculous jerk who doesn't actually do any work and just spends his whole day yelling "BAKA" at everyone else, Hide, a total otaku who also doesn't really do any work and mostly sucks up to the leader dude and/or tries to mess with Masao, Uehara, a hikokomori of sorts himself who instead never leaves the OFFICE and infact sleeps there most of the time and can't actually seem to speak or interact with other human beings, an older female programmer whose name I forgot but who you don't even realize is female for the first 20 minutes of the movie, who also basically tells Masao to fuck off, and then this dude Fujita, who is... wonderful! The guy is smart, nice, he takes care of Masao and sticks up for him and is the only person who ever stands up to the "leader" who abuses everyone, etc. Naturally, Masao is wondering what the hell such a great guy is doing working at such a lousy company that keeps spending all of its time on "death marches", working 20-hour days to fill ridiculous deadlines.
Two more characters come in later, who provide all kinds of fun extra drama, but the thing is... this movie is basically about Masao going from being a doormat who is brought to the verge of quitting in tears, to becoming a project leader himself and managing to actually get people to work together. Although I have to admit that I have no clue how the hell they can sustain this workplace, even after the happily-ever-after ending of sorts where they all kind of learn to deal with each other -- this movie shows them basically working around the clock, every single day, including weekends... I just don't buy it. Though if that really IS what the jobs are like for IT people here, then I am really glad I'm not doing it.
I mean, the entire thing about being a "Black Company" supposedly refers to a type of company that pays low salaries and works their employees to death, somewhat outside of the theoretical Japanese labor laws about overtime and whatnot. In this case, the people who end up there are basically all a bunch of losers who are either there due to personality problems, or due to education issues (like our hero Masao, and as it turns out, our subhero Fujita, although his story is a hell of a lot more complex than expected and I don't want to ruin it for anyone who may watch the movie), who simply can't get a job anywhere else.
One thing that bugs me: I had read something somewhere hailing this as being the next generation of Densha Otoko. And well, it really truly isn't. Densha Otoko is a genuine comedy and love story. This is neither, really. I mean, it's a comedy, but much like its title, it's a super-dark comedy. And there's no real love story here unless you count the friendship between Masao and Fujita. The only real thing that makes this anything like Densha Otoko is that the main character is a reject computer programmer who spends a lot of his time babbling on 2ch, so the movie itself is interspersed with "chatroom" lines denoting his thoughts and the responses from other people to his plight. I will say, however, that Koike Teppei succeeds a HELL of a lot better at being a nerd than Yamada Takayuki (the original Densha Otoko in the movie) did. I mean, he's enough of a puppydog wimp kind of guy anyway that it isn't too far out there for him to play an antisocial geek wimp here.
Also, for a supposed comedy, NOBODY in the theater was laughing. At all. I kind of snickered at a few scenes (particularly one where Hide accidentally spills coffee on his computer and it fizzles out and everyone's like "Did you back up your data?" and he's like "Backups are for wimps!") but that was about it.
Anyway, I would actually recommend this movie to computer nerds who can understand Japanese... you will be intrigued and/or frightened by the workplace in the movie.
So, this movie is about a guy named Masao, but he ends up being called Maotoko the entire movie thanks to a typo early on. Masao was a wimpy kid in high school who got bullied to the point that he basically became a hikikomori, which sort of means "kid who never leaves the house and just depends on their parents to support them forever and ever". In his case, he didn't leave the house for 8 years and taught himself programming... then his mother dies and his father gets sick and suddenly, he finds out that it is very difficult to find a job in your mid-20's when you have absolutely no work experience AND dropped out of high school.
After getting laughed out of several job interviews, eventually this one kindly-seeming CEO of a small IT contracting firm takes him in... and immediately he gets thrown into a one-room work office with a whole bunch of fucked-up coworkers: the "leader", who is a ridiculous jerk who doesn't actually do any work and just spends his whole day yelling "BAKA" at everyone else, Hide, a total otaku who also doesn't really do any work and mostly sucks up to the leader dude and/or tries to mess with Masao, Uehara, a hikokomori of sorts himself who instead never leaves the OFFICE and infact sleeps there most of the time and can't actually seem to speak or interact with other human beings, an older female programmer whose name I forgot but who you don't even realize is female for the first 20 minutes of the movie, who also basically tells Masao to fuck off, and then this dude Fujita, who is... wonderful! The guy is smart, nice, he takes care of Masao and sticks up for him and is the only person who ever stands up to the "leader" who abuses everyone, etc. Naturally, Masao is wondering what the hell such a great guy is doing working at such a lousy company that keeps spending all of its time on "death marches", working 20-hour days to fill ridiculous deadlines.
Two more characters come in later, who provide all kinds of fun extra drama, but the thing is... this movie is basically about Masao going from being a doormat who is brought to the verge of quitting in tears, to becoming a project leader himself and managing to actually get people to work together. Although I have to admit that I have no clue how the hell they can sustain this workplace, even after the happily-ever-after ending of sorts where they all kind of learn to deal with each other -- this movie shows them basically working around the clock, every single day, including weekends... I just don't buy it. Though if that really IS what the jobs are like for IT people here, then I am really glad I'm not doing it.
I mean, the entire thing about being a "Black Company" supposedly refers to a type of company that pays low salaries and works their employees to death, somewhat outside of the theoretical Japanese labor laws about overtime and whatnot. In this case, the people who end up there are basically all a bunch of losers who are either there due to personality problems, or due to education issues (like our hero Masao, and as it turns out, our subhero Fujita, although his story is a hell of a lot more complex than expected and I don't want to ruin it for anyone who may watch the movie), who simply can't get a job anywhere else.
One thing that bugs me: I had read something somewhere hailing this as being the next generation of Densha Otoko. And well, it really truly isn't. Densha Otoko is a genuine comedy and love story. This is neither, really. I mean, it's a comedy, but much like its title, it's a super-dark comedy. And there's no real love story here unless you count the friendship between Masao and Fujita. The only real thing that makes this anything like Densha Otoko is that the main character is a reject computer programmer who spends a lot of his time babbling on 2ch, so the movie itself is interspersed with "chatroom" lines denoting his thoughts and the responses from other people to his plight. I will say, however, that Koike Teppei succeeds a HELL of a lot better at being a nerd than Yamada Takayuki (the original Densha Otoko in the movie) did. I mean, he's enough of a puppydog wimp kind of guy anyway that it isn't too far out there for him to play an antisocial geek wimp here.
Also, for a supposed comedy, NOBODY in the theater was laughing. At all. I kind of snickered at a few scenes (particularly one where Hide accidentally spills coffee on his computer and it fizzles out and everyone's like "Did you back up your data?" and he's like "Backups are for wimps!") but that was about it.
Anyway, I would actually recommend this movie to computer nerds who can understand Japanese... you will be intrigued and/or frightened by the workplace in the movie.
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It is possible that you have to live in Kyushu, however.
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"...pays low salaries and works their employees to death" <- Yeah, sounds a lot like many of the Tokyo IT jobs I have worked at/worked with/interviewed at.
They act completely surprised when I turn down a job offer of 155k/month at 70~80 hours a week because I think that is "unreasonable". "But we pay a lot" <- No, you don't.