Committed Times Are Hit Exactly — and “On Time” Means Early
With Japanese colleagues, any moment that has been promised to someone else — a meeting start, an appointment, a delivery slot, a submission deadline — is treated as a hard line, not a target. The working rule is that arriving exactly on the dot already counts as cutting it close; people show up five to ten minutes early so they are set up and ready the instant things begin. The same holds for what you promise: a date you give is read as a commitment you will meet, not an estimate you may revise. If you are going to miss a start time or a deadline, flag it as early as you can with a clear apology — silence is worse than the delay itself. Build margin into your own schedule and confirm timings in advance, because last-minute changes land badly when everything has been arranged to run on the agreed clock.
Start Times Are Fixed, but Duration Is Open-Ended
Here is the asymmetry that surprises people: meetings begin precisely but often do not end when scheduled, and the working day has a firm start and a soft finish. Time is not really treated as a fixed budget to be protected — when a task or a group needs more of it, the slack tends to come out of people’s own hours rather than out of the deadline or the scope. So expect meetings to run long, expect the deadline itself not to move, and expect that hitting it is achieved by putting in the time, overtime included. Junior people frequently will not leave while the room or the boss is still working. If you are collaborating, do not assume a one-hour meeting is one hour, and do not read a long day as poor planning. Duration flexes to fit the work, and finishing the task usually outranks reclaiming the clock.
The Real Work Happens Before the Meeting, Not In It
If you wait for the meeting to make the decision, you have already missed it. With Japanese colleagues the visible event is usually where something already agreed gets confirmed — the actual work of building agreement happens beforehand, quietly, one person at a time, in hallway chats, small pre-meetings, and circulated drafts. This groundwork is called nemawashi. By the time everyone is in the room the outcome is largely settled, which is why formal meetings can feel like they hold little open debate. The practical lesson is to invest your time early. Springing a brand-new proposal cold in the meeting is not just risky; it can be taken as inconsiderate, because it skips the preparation others expect to have had. Work out who needs to be consulted, talk to them ahead of time, and resolve objections privately. That front-loaded preparation is where your influence actually lives.
One Thing Is Finished Before the Next Begins
Work tends to move through stages in order, with each stage completed and signed off before the next one opens, rather than several tracks running in parallel to save time. You will see it in approval processes that pass through each level of the hierarchy in sequence, and in a general preference for doing things thoroughly and one at a time over juggling many at once. The upside is reliability and very few dropped balls; the trade-off is that the critical path can feel slow, and trying to skip a step or run things concurrently to compress the timeline often creates friction rather than speed. When you need something faster, the move is not to bypass the sequence — it is to help each step happen sooner. Respect the order, get your own part fully done before handing it on, and do not expect parallel shortcuts to be welcomed.
The Pace Belongs to the Group and the Senior Person, Not to You
A lot of how time works between colleagues comes down to whose clock everyone is on — and it is usually the senior person’s, the host’s, or the group’s, rather than the individual’s. People synchronize: you tend to stay until the boss or the team is done, you follow the leader’s tempo in a meeting, and at after-work gatherings you generally stay as long as the group stays instead of leaving on your own schedule. Setting your own pace or peeling off early can read as putting yourself ahead of the group. The practical implication is to watch the senior people for cues on tempo and timing rather than driving your own, and to treat your time as somewhat at the group’s disposal during shared activities. When you do need to leave or move faster, signal it and, ideally, get the senior person’s nod first.