How I Fought Power and Won Big

This one has been simmering for a while. It’s a difficult subject to approach. I am after all just an anonymous, amateur writer on the internet, not an expert (or even an expert™) with a reputation at stake. As such it would be irresponsible for me to just start doling out advice like some lifehacker.com intern or obese pink-haired apparatchik. Rather I will just share my experience and what I learned from it so that anyone who reads might take home their own lessons and be helped as a result. If you didn’t catch my drift: the below in no way qualifies as any kind of legal or other advice. It’s just a story that I hope the reader may reap some benefit from, especially in times such as these.

I was always a rebel, right from my primary school days. I always fought power. Sometimes I won. Sometimes I lost. Always it was stressful though mostly I enjoyed it. My parents were supportive: “Your teachers aren’t god,” they would say. I agreed, and thus had more than my fair share of run-ins with faculty throughout my school career. Then I got out into the real world and it turns out that kind of crap isn’t tolerated by employers or police. During one incident in New Zealand, I fought to receive a pay rise that had been promised to me previously in writing. Performance was not the issue and they had acknowledged this plenty. At first, they delayed, then they denied, finally they relented and gave me it to me… along with a notice that my contract was not going to be renewed anymore and I was out the following month. D’oh.

This brings us to a company in Japan where I was to learn that there is more to it than “don’t rock the boat if you’re on a fixed-term contract”. Things were fine for a long time because I am good at my job (yes even despite slacking to write a post like this now and then). Then one day the wind changed. I started experiencing weird behaviour and complaints from my team. I was told that the Osaka dialect of Japanese that I used was suddenly “scaring” people. Others became sarcastic and snippy, then denied anything was wrong when confronted in chat, only to admit they had a problem when confronted face to face. My work was suddenly up for public scrutiny and changed without my consent or even notice.

It all culminated in a meeting where the higher-ups went over my head and gave instructions to my team that embarrassingly contradicted my managerial decisions and I had a meltdown. By meltdown I mean I left the meeting without saying anything, my chair made noise as I abruptly stood up and I may have shut the door a bit harder than necessary.

That was all it took to really kick things off. From then on I was persona non-grata. I had become a victim of a very old yet not very well-known tactic called “kick the dog until it bites you, then call it a mad dog (and deal to it accordingly)”. I was stripped of my managerial position and put in what the Japanese call the “oidashibeya”. The oidashibeya, or expulsion room, is a room where employees are isolated and assigned zero work or meaningless work such as waiting to answer a phone that never rings. They do this in order to get the employee to quit of their own volition out of frustration. We call this “constructive dismissal” in New Zealand. Some employers use it because labour laws are tough in Japan and firing people is hard. The practice is illegal but enforcement is another story, which I’ll get to.

In my case, I wasn’t put into a physical room, but I was kicked off my team and assigned to wild goose chases. Even when I found the wild geese (I told you I am good at my work), I only earned more of their spite and they stopped assigning me any work at all. Despite being assigned no work, they asked me, and only me, to begin writing daily reports on how I spent my time every day. They demanded I sign disciplinary letters falsely admitting to misconduct under vague threat of penalty if I didn’t. In the end, they presented me with a final ultimatum: if I didn’t sign a contract agreeing to quit within a month they would not support my upcoming VISA renewal. This jeopardised my very existence in the country. For someone like me who takes a lot of pride in their work, this was all very demoralising and degrading treatment, and there was no safe word to make them stop either.

Before you break out the tiny violins, don’t worry: I won. I was able to move on to greener pastures on my schedule, suffering no losses to myself and making them pay dearly. I got everything I wanted, all they got was my departure after a long delay and at great cost. Don’t think me an ogre either, I extended an olive branch many times during the conflict and it was always refused. In the end, they did it to themselves.

So how did I manage it? There’s nobody you can just call who can fix a situation like this for you. Certainly, luck brought me job offers at convenient timing later on, but other than that, all I could do was endure. So that is what I did. For about six months. Six months of not knowing if that month’s paycheck would be my last, what they would throw at me next to test me, whether I would have to fight a legal battle I might not be able to afford or even be able to stay in the country at all.

Not only did I have to endure, but I couldn’t fight back aggressively either. In other words: I endured the kicking without biting them so they couldn’t call me a mad dog. I had to. Any aggressive retaliation on my part would have been used as grounds to fire me and muddy the waters in any ensuing legal battle to make me look bad. As much as it would have been morally justified for me to act out, refuse to do as I was told and threaten retribution, I couldn’t. It wasn’t easy. Many days I thought about giving up, just to make it all end. Somehow I managed not to. If I wanted to keep getting paid and stay in the country, I had no choice but to suffer.

It wasn’t just suffering though. With the help of a friend, I waged a long, passive campaign against them. When they demanded I stop coming into work (another common tactic of Japanese companies who want to get rid of you), I carefully argued them into making it a temporary paid holiday. For any instances of poor treatment, I prepared detailed and polite requests that asked them to confirm the facts and resolve the situation. Naively innocent in tone, they were collections of evidence of bad behaviour, such as screenshots of communications, accompanied by context and citing the applicable Japanese laws. They of course would always find no wrongdoing, but that was okay.

I kept copies of their disciplinary letters and signed only one after forcing them to edit the lies out. When I was assigned work outside my job description, I politely pointed this out in a written protest but did the work anyway so they couldn’t get me for insubordination. When I was assigned no work I politely requested work, then when they didn’t give me any I would spend my day studying materials relevant to my job and wrote that in the daily reports they wanted. I kept recordings of conversations of me trying my best to resolve the situation amicably. When they finally presented me with the contract I had to sign saying I would quit or they would not help with my VISA, I smiled, took a photo of the contract, told them I would think about and then ignored it.

None of this served to change any of their behaviour. That’s fine. It wasn’t supposed to. What I was doing was building a case. Not for them, but for a third party sometime in the future. I made sure I remained a loyal and dedicated employee, despite my treatment. I was on the record telling them I was not happy with my treatment so they couldn’t claim I had consented with silence. Every move they made against me, I took it on the chin and recorded it and kept it. I did this so that if at any time they decided to pull the trigger and fire me, legal consequences be damned, I’d be in the best position to take them to the cleaners. A week of ignoring the CEO’s “final” offer to me and he approached me for an answer, like a desperate teenager hassling his crush via text about that date he invited her on. Had I considered it? What was my answer? Did I even LIKE him?

The time had come. I delivered my reply, which was an offer of my own. I told him I did not want to quit, but if he really wanted me to that there were some conditions. Fair, but expensive conditions. Conditions that I proposed because I expected him to haggle over them. To his credit though, he was must have realised his position wasn’t great. He took my offer as it was. It was finally over. I had won a big victory and learned a bunch of life and Japanese legal lessons along the way. So much alcohol was drunk that weekend in celebration, I’m surprised I remember enough to write this post.

Before I conclude, I want to point out a few things that I did that I think were instrumental in my success. When someone in power treats you unfairly, you can feel threatened and it is natural to become indignant and aggressive. For the first time in my life, I avoided this. I worked to maintain my cool appearance even when everything was on the line. When I thought something was off, I would them ask a question: “is this okay?” as opposed to stating “this is not okay”. Asking questions you know the answer to has the fortunate effect of putting your opponent into a tough position without you seeming overly aggressive or accusatory. They either admit fault and are obliged to address the problem or you have them on the record fibbing. It also guards against you being wrong with your statement. It’s a triple win.

I also never escalated. I never made any threats of legal action or the like. I never stated my strategy. When the CEO would ask for casual agreement to a premise in a conversation such as “Whittaker’s chocolate tastes good, don’t you think so?” I would, after a pause, just ask him to “please continue” without answering yes or no and risking a sidetrack in the discussion or some twisting of my answer later on. I tried to be as inscrutable as possible and maintained an official position that I wanted to work, I did not want to quit but I wanted the issues that I perceived resolved. Evidently, this approach worked.

Pointing out that some corrupt authority is in the wrong to that same corrupt authority hardly ever generates the kind of response we are looking for. Often, they know they are in the wrong and are either behaving that way on purpose to pursue some hidden agenda or wish to escape accountability for their mistake. You can even make yourself into a target by doing this and power has no qualms about using any rules you break against you, no matter how irrelevant. Maybe they even throw in some other rules you didn’t break either just to really screw you. As my experience shows though, it is possible to fight power with patience, persistence and sacrifice by hanging in there, keeping it up and not giving them any rope to hang you with. This story may have come too late for some but I hope it can help everyone in the future.