A Japanese company... with some efforts to look global - Anonymous employee Rakuten Employee Review

I have worked for some traditional Japanese companies as a foreigner, and I joined Rakuten because I thought it is more global. But as mentioned in many other reviews, it is just the look from outside, inside, it is close to a traditional Japanese company with some more or less desperate efforts to globalize, nothing more... Beside that, - depending on department, terrible work/life balance (work until last train, sometimes over night or on weekends, phone calls from boss on holidays, etc.), foreign staff that tries to retain some work/life balance is secretly laughed at and perceived as lazy by default - absurd rules (forced to attend famous asakai, forced to attend morning meeting with close to zero insight value, forced to buy baseball tickets (up to 5 tickets per employee, no matter whether you really go or not!), forced to attend nomikai, forced to read (=buy) books of CEO etc.) - very politic, as mentioned in many other reviews, no equal chances for foreign staff/ female staff - in case of Japanese/foreign mixed team, English/Japanese bilingual can have hard times because they need to mediate between non-Japanese speaking foreign staff and (almost) non-English speaking Japanese staff and doing lots of translation (especially new grads) for non-English speaking senior staff - in meetings conducted in English, excluding the still very few people who are actually able to communicate in English, you need to listen to speakers staring at their smartphone screen the whole time to read every single word, more or less badly pronounced, directly from google translate Beside that, I strongly recommend to read the summary of the review "Wearing the mask of Internationalization. ” posted on Nov 22, 2014. Very much to the point, nothing to add.