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If you've worked with agile and lean practices, you may be familiar with some concepts that come from Japan, like Kanban or Kaizen. Both originate from the world of Japanese manufacturing and have since been applied around the world in software development. Kaizen is about making constant small improvements and empowering individuals to discover and make those improvements. Kanban, originally a system used to monitor assembly lines, has grown into a method that helps teams prioritize work, manage flow, and uncover obstacles.
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The term I want to introduce you to today is Omotenashi, which describes Japanese customer service and hospitality. The application of Kaizen and Kanban to software work has evolved over time. My goal in this presentation is to share some thoughts on how Omotenashi might provide similar value for us. We'll explore how we might adapt concepts from it to our work and evolve beneficial practices.
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Kaizen and Kanban are concepts from management and Japanese manufacturing, and so they aren't really part of everyday life for most people in Japan. In contrast, Omotenashi is very much a part of everyday life in Japan and is a significant aspect of Japanese culture. In Christine Takagawa's presentation to the International Olympic Committee in 2013, she made Omotenashi the key theme of Japan's successful bid to host the 2020 Olympics. She highlighted Japanese hospitality as something that set Japan apart from the other contenders.
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She began her speech by saying, 'We will offer you a unique welcome.' In Japanese, I can describe it in one unique word: Omotenashi. Now, before I go on, I should probably answer the question that might be on your mind at this point: why is this American white guy on stage talking about Japanese customer service at a Ruby on Rails conference?
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I’d like to answer that question by way of answering another question: what do I think about when I think about Japan? First, I think about the time I spent in Japan with my family. My wife Maria is a second-generation Japanese American, she’s an academic who studies Japanese politics and economics. She received research grants that brought us to Japan to live for six months in 2007 and again in 2014.
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My oldest son went to yochien, which is Japanese kindergarten. She has relatives there, and we've made almost a dozen other trips to Japan over the last 20 years. I've been incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to travel extensively within Japan and have made several good friends during our time there. However, since I am an American, my knowledge of Japanese culture has inherent limitations, and I have no relevant professional expertise. I'm not here to mansplain it to you; instead, I’m here to share what I've learned from my own experiences, my wife's experiences, and from talking with friends I've made.
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Having an outsider's perspective also has value as it has helped me gain a deeper awareness of my own culture and learn from its differences with Japanese culture. What are some of the other things I think about when I think about Japan? I think about orderliness and societal respect. I took this picture in 2004 when payphones were still a thing. This is my wife Maria using a payphone on a subway platform in Tokyo. Sometimes, the most mundane things can tell you a lot about a society.
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Notice that all the wiring is not secured, and the power cord is exposed and plugged into an ordinary wall outlet. The handset cord is about the same as what you'd see on a home phone. This is because street crime and vandalism are rare in Japan. Compare that to an American payphone, where the only accessible wire is the handset cord wrapped in steel. Tokyo is one of the biggest cities in the world; how long do you think a payphone like this would last in a city like New York or LA?
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Also, note how spotlessly clean everything is. In case you can't see the picture that well, the subway platform floor is immaculate, and the chrome railings and wall tiles are shiny. This cleanliness is something that stands out when I think about Japan.
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For anyone who might not be able to read that, it's a sign in a Japanese bathroom that says, 'Please urinate with precision and elegance.' Things you may think of as inherently dirty, like public restrooms or garbage trucks, are generally very clean. I think about politeness, personal respect, and friendliness. Everywhere I have traveled in Japan, I've always been made to feel welcome.
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This quote is from a friend of ours after she visited Japan for the first time, and I can't think of a better way to describe the feeling. She said, 'I just wanted to hug everyone.' Japanese people are known for being polite, but they're not typically known for being overly friendly. However, they actually are, especially if you venture outside of Tokyo.
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If you make an effort to engage socially, you may be surprised by the warmth of the interactions you'll experience. I also think of professionalism and decency. One of the most striking things in Japan is that almost any full-time job will pay a living wage. People are treated with respect regardless of their job, and you can almost always expect professional quality service.
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For example, the Shinkansen bullet trains can get you anywhere about as fast as an airplane. These trains average 12 minutes between arriving at their last stop and departing again, with 5 of those minutes needed for passengers to get on and off. This leaves 7 minutes for cleaning the train.
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Now, there's one person cleaning each train car, and those cars each have 100 seats. So they have 7 minutes to pick up the trash on the seats, clean the floor, wipe down the trays at every seat, check for lost items, and since the seats rotate, they're also required to ensure all seats face the same direction for new passengers.
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Doing a job like that well in such a short amount of time requires having a standardized set of tasks that maximize efficiency, along with executing those tasks with excellence day in and day out. Now here I am on stage at a software conference, excited to tell you how they clean trains in Japan. It's an ordinary job, but when done well, it reaches the level of an art form; one that Harvard Business students want to study.
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This brings us to the idea of Omotenashi, Japanese customer service, and hospitality. A key motivator for why things like cleaning trains are taken so seriously in Japan is hospitality. In the U.S., we think of hospitality as something we experience when visiting someone's home or perhaps a hotel, but in Japan, it's also a key aspect of almost every business.
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When you do something like getting on a train, it is very much considered similar to visiting someone's home in terms of how you should be made to feel welcome. Bridgette Brennan, a columnist for Forbes magazine, put it well in describing her customer service experiences in Japan. She said, 'Wherever I ventured in stores large and small, I experienced what would be considered white glove service back home, delivered with warmth, enthusiasm, and salesmanship typically found in black and white movies.'
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Omotenashi is the combination of two words in Japanese: Omote, which refers to the public face we show the world, and Nashi, which means without. Omotenashi means your actions are wholehearted, sincere, and without artifice. Whether people genuinely feel that way while, say, working as a cashier at a 7-Eleven day in and day out is another question, but the main point is that customers experience the service you provide as if it was always true.
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Uniqlo is a clothing store chain that started in Japan and has since gone global. To give you a sense of the quality of their service, Uniqlo's CEO, Tadashi Yanai, said this when they opened their first store in Australia: 'There is customer service, and then there is Japanese customer service.' They spent a full year training the Australian staff to get them to a Japanese level of quality service.
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Imagine going through 12 months of training before taking a job at a place like The Gap. Now, if you've been to one of the Uniqlo stores that have opened in the U.S. over the past few years, your customer service experience may not have stood out as anything special. The quote on my slide here is from 2014. This is just a guess on my part, but I think Uniqlo must have found it cost-prohibitive to maintain this level of training as they rapidly expanded globally in recent years.
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To give you a more personal example, when I was living in Tokyo with my family in 2007, I was responsible for our boys each day while my wife was working. After dropping off my oldest son at kindergarten, I would usually find a place to explore in Tokyo with my one-and-a-half-year-old son. I discovered a department store that had a children's play area on its top floor, so we headed there one day.
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We were the first to arrive when they opened the doors in the morning, and there were no other customers. In an American department store, you might see the staff milling around still getting ready for the day, but in Japan, they are there and ready to serve you. Department stores in Japan also have more staff than in American stores, as you would never want to risk keeping a customer waiting.
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I had to cross the main floor to the elevator on the other side to go up to the play area. As I walked with my son in the stroller, lined up in front of me on each side, every 15 feet or so was a staff person who would bow deeply to me as I passed by. I had experiences before with individual staff people but never with so many like this. It made me feel like royalty, though I also felt a bit bad because we just wanted to play with Legos and Ultraman action figures.
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Similarly, if you visit a boutique retail store like a nice clothing shop and make a purchase, when you leave, the person who helped you will follow you out the door and bow deeply, staying bowed until you've reached the end of the block. Westerners often perceive this as selfless devotion to the customer; you get the impression that Japanese workers will do anything to please you since you are made to feel so well taken care of.
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That's certainly how I perceived it at first, but this perception is the result of our own Western cultural assumptions, presuming a hierarchical relationship where it's a service provider's job to do what the customer wants. That's not how customer service works in Japan. As a customer, you're expected to respect the professional judgment of your service provider and their expertise.
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If you are a customer service provider in Japan and you have a customer asking for something that isn't supposed to be part of their experience, it means things are starting to go wrong. The customer has overstepped the bounds of their role, and it's your job as the service provider to steer them back onto the correct path. Situations like this often happen with foreigners visiting Japan who don't know anything about Omotenashi.
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This puts a Japanese customer service provider in an awkward position, and they need to get things back on track as gently as possible, but also firmly. To illustrate this, I’m going to show you a brief clip of a TED talk from Dr. Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School and an expert on choice.
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At first, I wanted to paraphrase what she says here, but I realized I really couldn't do it justice. So here she is describing one of her first experiences when visiting Japan for the first time: I knew even then that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings, but they popped up when I least expected it. On my first day, I went to a restaurant and ordered a cup of green tea with sugar.
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After a pause, the waiter said, 'One does not put sugar in green tea.' I know, I said, I'm aware of this custom, but I really like my tea sweet. In response, he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation: 'One does not put sugar in green tea.' I understood, and said that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea, but I'd like to put some sugar in my green tea.
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Surprised by my insistence, the waiter took up the issue with the manager. A lengthy discussion ensued, and finally, the manager came over to me and said, 'I am very sorry, we do not have sugar.' Well, since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it, I ordered a cup of coffee, which the waiter promptly brought over, and resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar.
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My failure to procure a cup of sweet green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding; it was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice. From my American perspective, when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences, she has every right to have that request met. The American way, to quote Burger King, is to have it your way.
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However, from the Japanese perspective, it’s their duty to protect those who don't know any better—in this case, the ignorant gaijin—from making the wrong choice. Let’s face it, the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards, and they were doing their best to help me save face. At the end, Sheena says they wanted to help her save face. This is a common reason why you may not get what you want in certain situations.
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She didn’t realize that from a Japanese perspective, she was unwittingly embarrassing herself by asking for sugar with her tea. So they were trying to protect her from herself. There can be other reasons for these kinds of situations as well, which we can explore with a couple more stories. Here's one from my own experience where Japanese customer service professionalism collides with American notions of choice.
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In 2014, we lived in a city in southern Japan called Fukuoka for six months. Near our apartment was a pastry shop called Anderson's, which was our favorite stop, especially for my boys. As you can see in the picture here, you get a tray and pick out your pastries, and then go to the cashier to pay. The cashier would also individually bag each of your pastries.
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I am eco-conscious and this would bother me. I found it wasteful to use so many bags, so one time, using my limited Japanese skills, I mustered the courage to politely ask the cashier to use just one bag. Her response was to simply ignore me. I felt confident she understood me, as I had many other kinds of simple customer service verbal exchanges without trouble.
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My Japanese wasn’t good enough for me to feel comfortable pressing the matter further, but on future visits, I tried a few more times and they always just ignored me. Why were they doing this? It's because they knew what might happen if they actually did what I asked. I would go home and take my sugar doughnut out of the bag, and when my wife saw the egg bread, it would have sugar all over it from the doughnut, and she would think, 'What a lousy job they did at Anderson's.'
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In this situation, they're not just trying to protect me from myself; they're trying to protect others from me as well, and by extension, maintain their own reputation. Here’s a third and final example of a customer service situation going a bit off the rails. This is a story my wife Maria told me. She was in a small tableware shop in Tokyo admiring a handmade tea caddy, which is for storing tea leaves.
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Unlike me, her Japanese is excellent, and is actually good enough that native speakers often don’t notice her American accent. She was chatting amiably with the store owner and said she would like to show the tea caddy to her friends back home in America. At this point, his demeanor completely changed. He stiffened up and said, 'Oh, you're from America? You're not going to put paper clips in it, are you?' This isn't just about protecting her from herself or protecting others from her; it's about protecting the product from her.
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He would prefer to not make the sale rather than see it used incorrectly. This may seem a little extreme, so what's really going on here? Before I answer that question, I have to provide some context for the next short video I'm about to show you. My wife, Maria, has recently gotten into a ridiculously fun and very popular Japanese heavy metal band called Maximum the Hormone. When you watch videos on YouTube, they automatically recommend other videos that their algorithms think you'd like.
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She came across a video by Marty Friedman, the former lead guitarist for the American heavy metal band Megadeth. It turns out he has lived in Japan for the last 16 years and has his own TV show there. I give you Marty Friedman providing some advice for first-time visitors to Japan in an interview he did with the online magazine Metal Injection, and it turns out it’s perfect for what I wanted to say about this experience Maria had while shopping for a tea caddy.
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That's one of my favorite things about Japan. Customer service is off the charts. Just wherever you go, whatever you try to buy, even from a convenience store, fast-food chain, or high-end department store, the customer service is second to none. They really make your experience great. But one thing I want you to know is, unlike America and sort of like Europe, special orders are not really going to happen.
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Take that out of your mind, and you're going to have a much more enjoyable experience. The food is so incredible, just go with it. I mean, how many times do you go to Japan in your life? It's their way, and if they tried to do it your way, it's not going to come out right, and they're not going to have the same pride that they would have in doing it their way.
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So if you get refused, please do not mistake that for unfriendliness. Please understand that what they're doing is their way, and they want to give it to you the best way they can. A lot of restaurants don’t allow you to take food away, like doggy bag-type things. That's mainly because they don’t know exactly how you’re going to handle it afterward, and they want you to have it in the best possible form.
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Tying this back to Dr. Iyengar's tea and sugar story, my pastry bag story, and Maria's tea caddy story—there are common threads. There’s a very strong focus on providing service according to strict standards of excellence. The salesman Maria was dealing with definitely went a bit too far with his comment, but it's an expression of his concern about a customer not having the right experience with the product.
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There’s a reason I'm focusing on these stories about customer desires coming into conflict with the professional standards of Japanese customer service providers because that's where I think the most interesting lessons lie for us, and there are three lessons I've thought of. The first lesson is about how we as developers do our work and how we work together as teams. Omotenashi entails a rigorous approach to achieving consistent excellence for everything from cleaning trains to hosting the Olympics.
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With developing software, we have standards and practices that allow us to achieve excellence as well. Most of the places I've worked over the years, when I started on the job, my team didn't have things like a definition of done or mutually agreed-upon ways of doing things like testing or pair programming.
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Or if we did have them, they weren't followed with any real consistency. I just mentioned a definition of done. If you're not familiar with this, it's essentially a checklist of tasks you should complete before saying that your work on a feature is done. The checklist is something your team works together to create and it should evolve as the team's practices grow.
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When you don’t have a mutually agreed-upon way of working in your team, disagreements typically end up being resolved by someone asserting authority, or by whoever decided to push their position more aggressively, or a situation may end up unresolved, lingering to plague the team again the next time it comes up. Over the years, I've worked at major universities, medium-sized tech firms, small venture-funded startups, consulting shops, and nonprofits. At all these places, I've experienced team environments like this where there are always areas of significant dysfunction.
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Maybe I've just been unlucky, but I've heard many stories like this from friends over the years as well. My impression is that these situations are more common than we might think. This has led me to believe that just like every family, every organization is dysfunctional; it’s just a question of in what way and to what degree. Just like with families, what you experience daily naturally defines your perception of what’s normal, making it easy to become blind to the dysfunction and the associated costs over time.
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The costs can be high in terms of quality, efficiency, and team morale. This happens because people are unwilling to have hard conversations, or they don’t know how to have them, or they don’t have the organizational support for them.
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In addition to that challenge, as an industry, we are still figuring out the best ways to do things. Even when you can bring your team together, it’s not always obvious what the right way for it is. Some days, you can go online and find people arguing about whether Scrum is great or should die in a fire, or whether application model lists are bad design and we should all just switch to model-driven development. This environment exists because our industry is fairly young compared to others.
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This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse because it makes it hard to figure out how to proceed when you're hearing really smart and experienced people telling you really different things about how to do your work. But it’s a blessing because it means we have the opportunity to participate in the conversation about where we're headed, to learn different methods of working, and to decide what works best for us.
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So I encourage you to have conversations with your team that might be hard to work towards being on the same page for things like testing strategies, having a definition of done, code reviews, pair programming, and so forth. Having those conversations first requires building an environment of trust and mutual respect. Sometimes you have to build up that trust first, but when you do, I have found that having a mutually agreed-upon way of working is really empowering and promotes team harmony, quality, and job satisfaction.
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Everything I just said is about teams. The challenges are even greater when dealing with clients. Whether it’s an internal client in your organization or you’re consulting with external clients, the Japanese customer service stories I’ve shared have all been one-time retail or food service interactions. In our world, we have ongoing relationships, which is a huge difference.
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Doing things like ignoring a customer's request, as the cashier at the Anderson’s pastry shop did with me, is really not an option for us. All the mistakes I’ve made while working with clients over the years—I’ve made them all. The most common mistake is over-promising and under-delivering. Unless you're lucky enough to have especially enlightened management, you will always face pressure to do more in less time.
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I've done things like meekly saying yes to impossible deadlines, then exhausting myself and cutting corners to try to make it happen. The end result is almost always damage: damage to code quality, stress, and the client relationship. Even after all that, they still end up with some combination of missed deadlines and buggy code.
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To give you a sense of what I mean, this is a chart I made after I started as the director of the web team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. It’s an effort allocation chart showing the number of people we need to do the work expected of us for the upcoming six months compared to how many people we actually had.
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The blue bars represent the staff we had who were assigned to meet the needs of specific departments and small teams of mostly one or two people, which meant team sizes were too small—but that was a separate issue. The red bars represent the number of people we would need to do the work that was expected of us. Until I got everyone together to make the estimates that inform this chart, we didn’t see the big picture of our situation.
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The team had never done estimating like this before. We used what's known as the SWAG estimating technique to generate this chart. If you're not familiar with the term, it stands for 'Sophisticated Wild-Ass Guess.' So, it's by no means perfect, but it's valuable for providing a general sense of scope and scale when looking at a long time horizon.
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Almost all the demand in that tallest red bar came from one department. They had a history of always getting what they wanted; if we ever pushed back, they would escalate their demands politically through the school's administration to apply pressure. Prior to this, we had no means to really respond to this pressure other than just giving in, leading to more pressure and requests.
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These demands also came with deadlines that pressured us to rush and not always produce our best work, leading to suffering in the long run with bugs, unhappy clients, and poor user experiences. This marked the start of a very challenging but worthwhile agile transition for the team. We discussed and implemented solid engineering standards and practices and stuck with them, which over time allowed us to deliver more maintainable, less buggy code, providing our customers and users with a better experience.
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We also adopted agile workflow and project management practices, allowing us to articulate and visualize the bigger picture of what was happening with our projects. These changes gave us the ability to do something analogous to what Japanese service providers do when they face difficult situations. We were both protecting our clients from themselves and protecting the product from our clients.
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Importantly, these changes also helped us develop the ability to have productive conversations with the client about how we had been working together over the years, and how to find a better way forward. We even learned how to protect other clients from this client by developing skills for estimating and providing transparency about our work.
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By making data and charts about our work available to all departments, we provided transparency about where our time and effort was directed, which enabled other departments to participate on a more equal footing in higher-level political conversations that determined our team’s overall effort allocation.
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So having standards and practices is good, but a huge part of what we do is creative problem-solving. Every project we work on is a unique creation, not quite the same as any other. On a regular basis, we are called upon to be insightful and innovative to solve new problems. This is very different from the Japanese customer service stories I've been sharing with you, which emphasize consistent adherence to standards and delivering service in the same way every time.
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An American friend of mine who lived in Japan for many years said, 'In Japan, I consistently get very good service. In the U.S., I've had the worst service, but I’ve also had the best.' What is he getting at here? At this point, we know about the high quality of Japanese service, and if you're from the U.S. or have spent time here, you know about the terrible service that can happen. But the best service he refers to is when you are provided with creative problem-solving.
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When Marty Friedman was saying to try not to customize your order at a restaurant in Japan, it’s not a big deal if we're in the realm of preferences. But what if you have a food allergy? While living in Japan in 2014, we became friends with my Japanese tutor, and her daughter had a food allergy. She told me that dining out in Japan was often frustrating for them; while staff were always willing to provide menu information, customizing an order was difficult.
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When they visited the U.S. and went to good restaurants with good staff, she was thrilled at the service they provided. Wait staff would often say something like, 'Oh, it’s no problem! I’ll talk to the chef; we'll see what we can do and come up with something just for you.' There are parallels here for the kind of work we do with software: creative problem-solving is essential to our work and we need to incorporate it into our standards of what it means to do quality work.
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Creative problem-solving can sometimes even call for pushing back on client requests and educating them on possibilities they hadn’t thought of. When I was working in a consulting shop, we had a client whose business was to make buildings more energy-efficient. They would retrofit buildings with new windows, doors, insulation, and so forth. They wanted us to build an online calculator for potential clients to provide information about their buildings and then receive cost savings estimates.
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They knew how they wanted us to do the calculations, but as we became familiar with everything, we thought we had a better way to do it. We asked if they had actual cost savings data from previous customers, and they did. So we said, 'Great! If you're willing to share that data with us, we can run some statistical analysis and use it to provide more accurate estimates with the calculator.' They seemed intrigued but also a little hesitant and said, 'Well, we've always done it this way.'
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They hadn’t worked with us before, so they weren't sure how much to trust us, and they said no. At that point, we could have just said fine and gone ahead with their approach, and they would have been perfectly happy. But instead, we came back and offered to develop and run initial analysis and share the results with them to show how it compared to their old method.
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We said that if they still wanted to use the old method, they would have to pay us for the time we spent on the analysis. They said yes. Once they saw what we could do, they really liked it and adopted our approach. There's a whole talk I could give on interviewing clients and eliciting business requirements, but my point with this example is to illustrate the value of asking questions and creative problem-solving.
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A key question is when does a situation call for adherence to professional standards in order to avoid yielding to unrealistic demands, and when does it call for client education and creative problem-solving? I believe the answer is that many situations call for both. You want to adhere to engineering standards to maintain quality and morale, and you want to offer alternative creative solutions to problems when necessary.
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This is the key point of my talk: there’s a lot we can learn from Omotenashi about having high standards and achieving consistent professional excellence. Given that the nature of our work is also about creative problem-solving, we need to be opened to new ideas and new ways of doing things. For example, if a deadline must be met and we don’t have enough time to do the work well, can we defer certain features until later? Or can we start with simplified versions of certain features? Or are there other creative ideas we can explore that don’t require compromising quality or putting the team on a death march?
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These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking. But how exactly do we go about having these kinds of conversations with clients—conversations that can often be difficult? In the world of Japanese customer service, customers are expected to respect the professional judgment of their service provider. In software development, we are educated on programming languages, frameworks, tools, and workflows, but we’re not taught how to behave.
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We’re not taught how to clearly articulate and diplomatically present and defend our professional judgment. A key part of the education of doctors and lawyers is how to behave with their clients and co-workers. Doctors know how to handle themselves and the pressures of an emergency room or how to persuade a patient to make healthier choices by cultivating a perception of knowledge and expertise.
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In their professions, doctors and lawyers are typically treated with great respect, even when they have to say things their clients don’t want to hear. Now, I’m not suggesting we all have to go to school for a million years like doctors and lawyers do and spend a fortune in the process, but what I’m suggesting is that if you want to be seen as a professional and treated like one, it means pursuing technical excellence, providing creative problem-solving, standing up for the quality of your work, and always being courteous and diplomatic.
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My slides are available at the link here, and you can find me on Twitter at @mtopa. I'm going to leave you with another short little video; this is a moment of Zen. This is an example of creative problem-solving and teamwork. These are my two boys when we were in Japan in 2007 and we were living in a small apartment commonly referred to as a one LDK: one means it has one bedroom, L means it has a living room, D means it has a dining room which is also the living room, and K means it has a kitchen which is also the dining room.
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So this is a small place where we set the boys up in the bedroom. My wife and I put a bed in the living/dining/kitchen area. This is the morning my boys are having breakfast, and my younger son decides he wants to have access to his older brother’s drink, but he doesn’t want to move the drink. So together, they construct an extended straw, while you can see my wife in bed trying to capture some more sleep.