Fourteen Years in the Noose

A Salaryman and His Necktie

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Once again, Japan makes a fashion discovery thirty years behind the United States. Casual clothes are comfortable. At least this time it is a good idea we are borrowing.

As reported at Japundit and in the New York Times, the Japanese government is launching a campaign to encourage both public and private employees to wear lighter clothing to work during the coming torrid summer months instead of the very ingrained traditional conservative business suit and necktie. This is in order to allow employers to raise thermostats during the peak air conditioning season, thereby reducing power generation needs and helping Japan meet its target for reduced greenhouse gas emission agreed to in the Kyoto Protocol.

The campaign will likely not make much of a difference for me personally because my company along with many others located in the Osaka area, which is reputed to have summers even muggier than Tokyo, has been following a similar policy for several years already. I welcome the dress-down campaign, though. I don't know how much impact it will have on global warming, but I support any excuse to wear a tie less frequently, and there are a lot of my fellow salarymen who would not be hurt learning to take themselves a mite less seriously in dress or otherwise.

Maybe you need a suit and a tie to sell things. It doesn't make much sense to me, but I've never had a job like that and no desire to. I like dressing up for special occassions, enough that I'm even willing to go through the torture of dressing the five kids for really big days. However, I've never seen the need or the desirability to make it a daily ritual. On the days I wear a jacket, I've always been more comfortable taking it off and working in shirt sleeves once I get to the office. I've come to appreciate neckties only as a way to add a little color to the drab business uniform, but have never had one that was better than tolerable as something to wear.

I had always subscribed to the wear anything as long as it is appropriate to your work rule of reason. At my last employer in the U.S., which had a reputation as a conservative organization, neckties were a widely declined option for technical personnel who didn't meet customers.

Having seen nothing specifically about a dress code in my contract when I started working in Japan, I assumed the same rule of reason applied. Knowing that Japanese salaymen were conservative dressers, I had made up my mind when I started working here to generally conform to the local dress customs. I always had a hard time keeping a suit nice for long, but I would at least show up for work in a (soon doffed) blazer with some form of constrictive if colorful clothing around my neck, varying from the standard only if I had a particularly good reason or a strong mood to the contrary.

However, I learned that things were not quite so free and easy at the end of last year's no necktie season. A memo was circulated sometime last September to employees at our Osaka-area offices announcing the end of the dress-down season. What surprised me about the memo was language that implied that there was an official company suit-and-tie dress code now going back into effect when I thought our dress had been dictated merely by custom and reason. I don't like having more rules than are necessary, even when I don't mind complying in the matter in question. I especially don't like having rules created by petty bureaucrats who confuse their own opinion with official policy, so I replied to the memo's author with a polite, Is that really the rule or are you just sharing your general idea of what's appropriate dress?

Maybe I should have left it as Don't ask/Don't tell, or started trying to convince someone other than the dress code memo's author. But a reply came back with the fingerprints of enough bosses to tell me that further challenge would be pointless to the effect that although we had no explicit dress code, the rule of reason did not mean that we could wear anything within reason, but that the traditional coat-and-tie was the only reasonable thing to wear.

It hasn't changed my dressing habits much, but has mad the salt mine a little less fun.