Although being a truism, this oversimplified statement about Japan often made not only by Westerners but also by the Japanese themselves urges us to start thinking differently about differences, search for their causes and reflect upon the nature of those differences in Japanese culture, society, people, and their mentality. The discourse, which we will refer to as Japanism (analogously to Orientalism), started as early as in the 16th - 17th century and persists until today, generating an image of Japan full of peculiarities and contradictions, which, depending on the historical moment, is emphasized in a positive or negative manner. The idea of “being different” as promulgated in the works of Western writers about Japan elicited in Japan itself a response in form of construction of the notion of a very special Japanese character responsible for the creation of this extraordinary culture at the “end of the world”. This is called Japaneseness (nihonjinron).

In this work, our point of departure will be the stereotype of the Japanese work ethic and patterns of behavior as described in literature, especially the phenomenon of karoshi (occupation-related sudden death). With our empirical case study of a small Tokyo/Haneda-based steel company, we wish to deconstruct the current cliché of Japaneseness as pertaining to the working culture in Japan. Starting from emic concepts such as sumanai, richigi, kichomen, yuzu ga kikanai etc., through which we could deduce the meanings of this ethos, we will show that beneath them there is also another reality, not manifested explicitly in the same way as those current concepts, taken as interpretive tools intended to show the implicitness of different ways of communicating ideas and acts among Japanese business people.