MM

MM is a pretty common abbreviation. The Acronym Finder has 200 definitions and Wikipedia has thirty-nine. It can mean everything from Millimetre to small American sweets that are rumoured to cure impotence if you eat the green ones. It also means Minister Mentor in Singapore – the title now given to Lee Kuan Yew. LKY is founder of modern Singapore and the man responsible for a quality of life, standard of living, and freedom of speech way, way above anything Japan has to offer – despite a lot of criticism here and there, Singapore has a lot to be grateful for I think.

I now have a new meaning: Meaningless Meeting. It doesn't take 20 years to realise that the MM is a key aspect of working and even living in Japan. Most MM take place not for goals or actions, but generally for information dispersion, consensus building (although 'consensus enforcement' is probably more accurate as there's few organisations here that aren't squarely run from the top down despite much hype to the contrary), and peer pressure. The only reason to go that I can work out is that everyone else does – probably the most common reason that anything happens in Japan. At a typical MM, only about 1 in 10 of the participants will actually speak. Time allotted varies, but is never less than 90 minutes and often much longer, with the time required unrelated to the time allotted. If the meeting is 90 minutes, it will damn well last 90 minutes even if there's only one item on the vague, equally meaningless agenda.

The agenda is a dangerous and problematic thing. Once an item is on there, it has to be completed. After the usual 60+ minutes it takes to review contents of other meetings (the information dispersion part that assumes other participants can't simply read the notes themselves but need them to be read out), there are usually a small number of discussion items. In every single case, the item for discussion is pre-decided and the sole aim is to put participants in the position of being unable to disagree later, "because you were there when it was decided". Objections are either quashed or ignored – although, as diagreeing would be 'anti-consensus' such comments are few and far between.

So why attend? Because it's one of the few tasks that are actually part of the job description. Even teaching duties come secondary to such MMs. It is our duty to attend these meetings. I knew one American professor who, after 20 years in Japan, had learned just one phrase, "Boku ha iken nashi" or 'I have no opinion'. Even this he wasn't required to practice very much in the meetings themselves and he spent his time, usually in blissful ignorance of what was happening around him, writing really quite good short stories. In the past 17 years, I have attended on average two two-hour meetings of this kind per week. That's 1,700 hours of meetings during which time I've probably been called upon to actually speak about twice. 1,700 hours is a whole year of work – much more in some countries.

Did I mention I might have been here too long?