After the imposition of a state of emergency and with the government imploring citizens to stay home as much as possible in order to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, there has been a lot of discussion in the media about the many people in Japan whose employers are still requiring them to come into work. Of course, that workforce also includes non-Japanese and those in the international community.

Working outside of your home country can be stressful under normal circumstances, so a pandemic certainly has the potential to exacerbate challenges. Speaking to non-Japanese people in a wide variety of professions who haven't been able to work from home, I was expecting to hear a lot about hanko (signature seals) and paperwork, barriers to telework that have been extensively covered in the media. Instead, the most common thing I heard was frustration at the difference in perceptions of the pandemic, and the shock of confronting some hard truths about Japanese organizational culture.

As followers of the English-language media, with its vivid descriptions of spiraling death tolls and harsh lockdowns abroad, as well as hearing firsthand accounts from friends and family at home, many non-Japanese are hyper aware of COVID-19 and highly motivated to practice social distancing. In contrast, many of the Japanese they work with are going about their daily routines with seemingly little change and no social distancing. As a British employee of a prefectural government in Kyushu put it, “I’m sadly deflated from how normal the office is behaving.” This sense of mismatched perception may be accentuated by the fact that many foreign workers are one of a small number of — or the only — non-Japanese in their workplace, leading to a sense of isolation.