Being Less Ghetto/Hardcore/Eccentric

I missed that you are in Japan. That changes matters somewhat. There is a greater expectation for conformity here. I'm the wrong person to make recommendations regarding a business suit, but others have made some good advice on finding a more comfortable one. For golf, it may help regard it as more of a pretext to get outside and hang out.

On the flip side, if you aren't Japanese yourself or at a mostly non-Japanese organization, there will be be definite limits on how much you can fit in. So don't drive yourself crazy trying. So it may make sense to change what you wear or where you go, but you can do that without changing who you are.

Really, really will depend on the company and the company culture. Way more so than in the us. Congrats on making moves though. 

Thanks for all the advice. To address the most common things people have brought up:

1. I'm a gringo from Nevada. I'm 40 years old. I lived in Korea for 15 years, and just moved to Japan to get this tenure-track professorship. My Korean is pretty good, my Japanese is very beginner level. This is honestly a big part of the imposter syndrome you guys correctly point out. In Korea, I was able to do anything a native could - argue about the fine print in an insurance contract, talk trash to friends, parody celebrities on TV, etc. In Japan I'm just now getting to the barest survival level. It feels super weird to suddenly have a much higher position when I can't tell my neighbor "hey, I like your garden" without the help of Google. Going back to Korea once a month or so on weekends just so I can feel competent has honestly been a godsend for my confidence and mental health. 

2. The advice to be myself is appreciated and true, but I tend to think of "who I am" as a function of "what I do." And it's also complicated by the fact that "what I did" well enough to get this job, and to get most of my opportunities in Korea, was handle dangerous and/or difficult people in such a way they didn't cause a mess. Representative example, I have been an editor for the team creating the national teacher's exam in Korea three times now. This process is very high security (people quite literally fly spy drones over the facility trying to steal exam questions) and very high stress. You basically get locked in a conference room with 9 other people, working between 12 and 20 hours a day, and you can't leave for three weeks. If the other 9 people are cool, it's simply hard. If the other 9 people are psychotic ego-maniacs, you end up with 50% of the team suffering from mental breakdowns and/or stress induced illnesses. The first two times I did it, my team was cool. The last time I did it, we had four certifiable raging sociopaths trying to mentally break everyone else so they could dominate the test making process. All three times I got high commendations from prestigious people because I was able to both function in these environments and to keep the psychos at least somewhat under control. The third time around, with the psychos, my honest feelings were that I wanted to murder about half the people in the room. The people I wanted to murder, on the other hand, were some of the same people who recommended me for commendations. All of them think I'm their "hard to read and slightly scary friend."

The person who recommended me to the Japanese university and is by far most responsible for me getting this job is a kind hearted and well intentioned woman with absolutely disastrous social skills. She recommended me partly because I've spent 10 years smoothing over the ruffled feathers that literally always trail in her wake and partly because I've spent those same 10 years making good first impressions on her behalf. I strongly suspect I got recommended for this job in particular because she wants to make a closer relationship with the president of my new university and sees me as a bridge. Before I even got to Korea, one of my jobs was making friends with the local gangsters and convincing them to stop shooting up to local 7-11, etc. Understanding and dealing with social cues is and has been a pretty central part of my skillset almost my entire life. 

I did well with teaching my classes (which is honestly also about 70% managing egos anyway), and I've published books/papers/textbooks, but there are certainly people who have published more and got passed over.  

3. There are core parts of my identity that I'm not going to compromise. My core professional goal is to publish, support, and maximize the impact of a thing I call the "overcoming justice project." I won't get into the details here, but I'm trying to do a Guns, Germs and Steel of ethics. I strongly feel that the stuff we call justice (regardless of its political orientation) is highly problematic for people in general and disastrous for young people. I badly, badly want to offer an alternative, and I think I've created the first steps on the path to operationalizing this alternative. There's no fight I wouldn't undertake to move this project forward.

I also consider it a duty to strengthen and ennoble "my people," by which I mean anyone under my protection. Close friends, valued family members, my fiance, the people who work under me - this is not open to negotiation and I will not compromise.

Then there are the things that are less core. I like racing and weightlifting. I enjoy Michael Mann films and engineering projects. I like to read philosophy and history. I really enjoy writing fiction. I don't want to compromise on these things, but I would compromise them to protect the core stuff. 

Finally, there's the stuff I barely care about. Fashionable clothes. Beer. BMWs. Luxury anything. Golf. I'm willing to twist this stuff around in any which way serves my absolutely core values or my less core values. The question you guys have helped me to answer - excellent suggestion on the used suits btw - is how to twist this stuff around effectively.    

4. Betrayals and the prevention thereof. This absolutely puts up walls between myself and others. I need to learn how to better balance snake pit survival strategies and toning it down for safe times/places. I'm not good at this balance.  

My previous job was a snake pit where everyone was trying to stab everyone in the back. The job before that was a snake pit. Even as a kid, I quickly learned that any time you show a weakness, it will be used against you. I have a procedure to manage these things.

a) Whenever I walk into a new environment or meet new people, I pay very close attention to who defers to who, and why. Understanding the social hierarchy is key to determining who is going to go after who, and when. 

b) I analyze the people around me to find their weaknesses. This helps in two big ways. First, if the person turns out to be treacherous, I know how to apply pressure. Second, if the person doesn't turn out to be treacherous, I can protect or shield their weakness in a way that makes it clear that I could hurt them if I wanted to (healthy fear), but also that I choose not to hurt them (healthy trust). 

c) I encourage people to lie to me. People lie to cover up insecurities, protect weaknesses, or distract from their schemes. If I can catch a person lying, I know exactly what they want to protect and hide. 

This system is not working so well at the new job for a couple of reasons.

a) I can't find the snakes. Most likely this is because snake pits happen when the leadership is weak, and the leadership at this new university is quite strong and dynamic. However, my gut feels like I can't find the snakes because I'm not looking hard enough. This is probably not rational and I probably need to chill, which I'm not so good at doing.

b) Finding weaknesses is mostly quite easy, but using them is not. This is the first time in my life I've found significant numbers of people who genuinely cover for each other. They don't even bother hiding their often quite obvious weaknesses because they're confident that grandma/cousin/father will cover for them. I can't stress how different this is that what I'm used to. Weaknesses in my experience have always been blood in the water.

c) Some of these people are the management equivalents of Picasso or Mozart. I'm thinking specifically of a man in leadership here. I can feel him playing the social dynamics and power games and I recognize many of the tricks he plays. He's really berkeleying good at them. Masterful. Better than me. There's a confidence and ease this guy displays I'm in awe of, a casual but incredibly effective way he not just commands but earns obedience and loyalty from very high status people. I consider this all very good, and I'm going to study the guy and learn from his techniques. But it puts me in the position I usually try to put others. This guy could hurt me, and I'm pretty sure he's figured out my weaknesses, and I need to trust that he won't use those weaknesses against me. So far so good, and he's doing amazing things to help my career and support my ambitions, but he's still better at the game that I am, and I'm playing on his terms. 

Also, while I'm pretty sure I recognize the tricks he uses to win the social dynamics game, I'm positive he's figured out my tricks. I've invited him to lie to me several times and he knows what I'm doing. There is no insecurity I've found, and the stuff that looks like weakness - he has a family member with physical and mental difficulties, he's a member of a not-very-popular ethnic minority - is simply not. 

5. Spending on status displays. You guys made some very good points about spending to keep up with the Joneses. I'm not going to buy a BMW (or any new car), and I'm not going to spend big money on shoes or suits. That said, I just did the paperwork to pick up an NB Miata that will be delivered next week. It's a really neat little car with Tein adjustable coilovers, some really sweet forged Racing Hart rims, a fart cannon, and a sparkly dildo gear shift. I am not going to hide it in shame, but I probably should replace the dildo and fart cannon. 

Thanks for all the comments. Very helpful. 

Yeah and berkeley golf. 

DaewooOfDeath said:

c) Some of these people are the management equivalents of Picasso or Mozart. I'm thinking specifically of a man in leadership here. I can feel him playing the social dynamics and power games and I recognize many of the tricks he plays. He's really berkeleying good at them. Masterful. Better than me. There's a confidence and ease this guy displays I'm in awe of, a casual but incredibly effective way he not just commands but earns obedience and loyalty from very high status people. I consider this all very good, and I'm going to study the guy and learn from his techniques. But it puts me in the position I usually try to put others. This guy could hurt me, and I'm pretty sure he's figured out my weaknesses, and I need to trust that he won't use those weaknesses against me. So far so good, and he's doing amazing things to help my career and support my ambitions, but he's still better at the game that I am, and I'm playing on his terms. 

Maybe what you need to do is reframe your understanding of the situation to something more familiar to you to put it in terms you can deal with and adapt to them.

So... you like combat sports. But you've been a talented and dedicated amateur with limited tools. You've been an expert at handling barroom brawls. Now you've stepped into the domain of a fencing master.

But many of the rules still apply. Game recognizes and respects game. This master you've identified knows what you're about. You're used to smashing bottles over people's heads and you're now in a group of aristocrats who grew up with fencing swords. But you have a *fight* in you that they don't. This master isn't threatened by you. He knows you can't touch him. But if he trains you properly, you can potentially *help* him in ways that others around can't. All he needs to do is show you how to relax and wield a precision sword instead of trying to rush in and smash.

You're in a similar game, but it's been flipped on its head. You're used to being on the bottom of the crab pot where everyone is trying to pull everyone else down and you need to sacrifice those around you to get ahead. At the apex of the game, you don't get dragged down from below, you get knocked over from the side, form people on the apex of OTHER pots. So what you do is identify and recruit the best talent to strengthen your position. This dude *knows* that. You're not a potential threat to him. You're potential reinforcement.

Dude, you are totally the main character in one of those movies where the old aristocratic warrior adopts and trains a lower class scrapper with unrealized potential - "Kingsman", "Mask of Zoro", etc.

Beer Baron 🍺 said:

 

Maybe what you need to do is reframe your understanding of the situation to something more familiar to you to put it in terms you can deal with and adapt to them.

So... you like combat sports. But you've been a talented and dedicated amateur with limited tools. You've been an expert at handling barroom brawls. Now you've stepped into the domain of a fencing master.

But many of the rules still apply. Game recognizes and respects game. This master you've identified knows what you're about. You're used to smashing bottles over people's heads and you're now in a group of aristocrats who grew up with fencing swords. But you have a *fight* in you that they don't. This master isn't threatened by you. He knows you can't touch him. But if he trains you properly, you can potentially *help* him in ways that others around can't. All he needs to do is show you how to relax and wield a precision sword instead of trying to rush in and smash.

You're in a similar game, but it's been flipped on its head. You're used to being on the bottom of the crab pot where everyone is trying to pull everyone else down and you need to sacrifice those around you to get ahead. At the apex of the game, you don't get dragged down from below, you get knocked over from the side, form people on the apex of OTHER pots. So what you do is identify and recruit the best talent to strengthen your position. This dude *knows* that. You're not a potential threat to him. You're potential reinforcement.

Dude, you are totally the main character in one of those movies where the old aristocratic warrior adopts and trains a lower class scrapper with unrealized potential - "Kingsman", "Mask of Zoro", etc.

This is great stuff, Beer Baron. Thank you. 

I definitely don't think this guy is threatened by me, which is good, because I'm not trying to harm him. I'm perfectly happy to defer to people with greater experience or ability than myself, and he has both. It's just strange working for somebody who has both earned his power - this guy navigated some seriously treacherous waters to get where he is - and puts the organization first. I really, really like the leadership at this university. 

Some of the things he's accomplished that I know about:
1. The university was a "college" when he got hired five years ago. It has been upgraded to a university under his leadership. This was a collaboration between himself, the mayor, and some regionally important industrial funding partners. The quality of student that chooses to attend this very rural and out of the way university has gone from "probably should skip college and just get a job" to "didn't quite make the cut for a prestigious university in Tokyo." We are now regular participants in big, Asia/Oceana-spanning academic associations and Pacific-rim spanning industrial/academic collaborations.  
2. He is the first person in the history of Japan from the previously mentioned unpopular ethnic minority to become a university president. I have documented sources showing that this was contentious, and the people who made it contentious just aren't around anymore.  
3. The college he took over was stuffed full of inactive, tenured, conservative professors who did the absolute minimum. I have no idea how, but those people - none of whom could be fired - are almost all gone now. They've been replaced by hard chargers and heavy hitters, almost all of whom are young and hungry. I know this because one of the few conservative, inactive types to survive this process is a friendly acquaintance, and he never tires of recounting the good old days. 
4. There's very little jealousy or backbiting. I love this, but it's weird for me. The university operates as a team, and we usually profit from each other's successes. Not only that, but I've been blown away by how quickly ability gets rewarded, and how quickly new opportunities arise. 

What you mentioned about the crab pot and pyramid really does seem to be true. I honestly think that the ability to be happy for someone else's success, rather than to sabatoge them out of jealousy, is the defining difference between the families and organizations I'm dealing with here and the not-so-successful counterparts.  It's really nice, and I need to stop being paranoid. :P

In reply to DaewooOfDeath :

Sounds like you could write a current day Sun Tzu Art of War. It is also interesting that what you are describing of your friend/acquaintance who is socially awkward is doing something that many in high education do in the USA, as many professors have social awkwardness, but try to leverage themselves into positions.

I will hit to home again the attire, I had a surprise meeting with a provost and he didn't approve of the shoes (later my boss, told me the provost had commented). I have two different suits/shirt/shoe combo, one in which I would meet the upper level (President, Provost) and entry level suit that can be worn daily, knowing your audience is important, people know the difference between cheap or not. I am by no means a expert in style, but the cheap walmart shirt and tie combos were never worth it. My boss always wore them and would be lucky to get a year out of them. A co worker of mine used to buy cheap suits and shirts but would just go to a tailor to make the fit look nice, but you could always tell they were cheap. I typically would just buy from Marshals/TJ/rack and get the expensive shirts and ties at a discounted rate. When I asked for raises my attire came up as a point, I changed my attire, only to go 100% remote where I wear sweat pants and t-shirts now .  If one day I become VP or director I would get a suit at Nordstroms or suit supply and go to a local tailor and get it fitted, I don't think I can be a Tom Ford guy and splurge that much.

I cannot fathom working in a profession where someone would comment about the quality of my shoes, at least not once you got past the level of "decently presentable".

In reply to Duke :

Little more context, I switched shoes and would take walks and had running shoes still on and didn't notice until I was in the meeting.  

In reply to trigun7469 :

OK, that makes a little more sense.

Duke said:

I cannot fathom working in a profession where someone would comment about the quality of my shoes, at least not once you got past the level of "decently presentable".

 

I do feel like there is additional context to this though, in that Asian Professional culture is very different than that of North America.  Status is just so immeasurably important in that region, that every opportunity to improve one's social/professional status is maximized... Right down to designer shoes (and the contempt or sheer confusion of colleagues not understanding why 'YOU' don't partake in the same pathways)...  

I worked in Asia for 3 years, and it took a great deal of getting used to on the front end, and a great deal of readjustment when I came home.  The best advice I can give you is that you need to know that you belong, regardless of your personal tastes or (in your words) unconventional ideosyncrasies.  I also found doing my job got much easier when I stopped taking things that colleagues would say so personally too.  Asians are direct and blunt, to a degree that Westerners may find offputting or downright insulting.  They don't mean it like that in any way... again, it's just simply a different culture.  It was really hard for me to understand that at first...  

Don't change who you are. It got you where you are today.Also never forget where you came from. And lastly you are at work for the money. Having friends at work it's a benefit not a priority. 

Leave your leather shoes at work.

Walk to and from work in cross trainers.

Hot, Sweaty?  Baby wipes in the restroom, wipe down stinky parts.  Antiperspirant, cologne optional.

Keep a fresh clean shirt in your office as backup.

In reply to DaewooOfDeath :

I have to say I'm impressed with your knowledge of self and likewise the social structure you're involved with. I can't offer much except that the social puzzle was never a high priority for me and I suppose that steered me towards the puzzles I liked and was intuitively good at solving. Inanimate things that were not moving and intangible targets. My affinity to that kind of thing probably limited me in terms of career path, but it suits me and I am grateful for the recognition of where my joy is derived. Mostly retired now so less of a concern. Life is a sort of puzzle where we have the opportunity to find our strengths and joy if we choose to nose around, yeah?  Carry on, my friend!