Okay, Boomer / Ganbatte, Kohai: A Generational Field Guide to Working in America and Japan

🇺🇸 USA · 🇯🇵 Japan

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Tokyo, a 26-year-old employee will still address a colleague three years his senior with a respectful honorific, even if that colleague now reports to him. In San Francisco, a 26-year-old employee may not know his manager's surname, and there is a reasonable chance he is the manager. Two labor markets, two theories of what a career owes a person and what a person owes a career, and four generations in each country currently failing to agree on the answer. According to the OECD, Japan's employment protection legislation scores roughly six times stricter than America's — 1.62 versus 0.26 on the agency's index — which is either the most reassuring or most claustrophobic fact of your working life, depending entirely on which generation, and which country, raised you.

Do's & Don'ts

🇺🇸 USA

🇯🇵 Japan

USA: Four Generations, One Open-Plan Office, No Consensus

American workplaces don't have a generational problem so much as four separate value systems sharing a Slack channel. Pew Research's long-running workforce data sketches the divide bluntly: Boomers prize security, titles, and traditional perks; Gen X wants independence and flexibility; Millennials chase growth and meaning; Gen Z prioritizes purpose, diversity, and technology that actually works. These aren't complementary preferences so much as four different job postings for the same role.

The data on how that's landing is not encouraging. Gallup's 2026 workplace report puts U.S. employee engagement at 32 percent — still the highest of any global region, which says more about everyone else than about America — with engagement among older millennials falling from 39 percent to 32 percent in a single year, and Gen Z and younger millennials both sliding as well. Gen Z and millennials are also the most pessimistic generations about the job market itself: only 19 percent and 24 percent respectively think it's currently a good time to find a job, against 42 percent of boomers, according to Gallup. Meanwhile Deloitte's Global 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey finds that only 25 percent of Gen Z and 21 percent of millennials actually want the rapid-promotion career ladder their elders assume they're chasing — most would rather grow gradually or move sideways for experience. The at-will employment system underwriting all of this, per the BLS, produces a median tenure of just 2.7 years for workers aged 25 to 34, a fact that reads as liberating to a 27-year-old and alarming to the 61-year-old who trained them.

Japan: The Lifetime System Is Still the Landlord, Even as Tenants Move Out

Japan's generational story is the mirror image: a system built for permanence, being quietly renegotiated by the people who are supposed to inherit it. The postwar model of lifetime employment and seniority-based promotion produced the OECD's 1.62 employment-protection score and, not coincidentally, Hofstede Insights' cultural data showing Japan scoring far higher than the U.S. on long-term orientation (100 versus 50) and uncertainty avoidance (92 versus 46) — a culture structurally built to reward staying put.

Younger workers are not fully buying it. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare data shows job-switching among workers under 35 has more than doubled since 2010, and non-regular workers — part-timers, contractors, freelancers — now make up over a third of the workforce; a 2024 CrowdWorks survey counted more than five million Japanese freelancers, over double the figure a decade earlier. Even the nomikai, the after-hours drinking session long treated as unofficial team-building, is fading fast: Tokyo Shoko Research found company nomikai attendance fell to 29.1 percent in 2024, down from 51.8 percent in 2019, and 60 to 70 percent of workers across every generation now call the ritual unnecessary — not just the young ones, contrary to the stereotype. What hasn't budged as much is the hierarchy itself: seniority-based deference, decision-making by consensus (nemawashi), and a promotion clock that still runs slower than most Gen Z employees would prefer.

The Reckoning

Here is the irony neither country's HR department wants printed on a recruiting brochure: America sells flexibility and delivers precarity, while Japan sells stability and is currently watching its own young workers opt out of it. The American system assumes that constant job-hopping is compensated by open information and fast feedback — yet Gallup's engagement numbers suggest workers feel neither informed nor rewarded, just tired. The Japanese system assumes loyalty is repaid with security — yet freelancing and job-switching among the under-35s are rising precisely because that promise increasingly feels theoretical rather than guaranteed.

The generational fault line, in both places, runs through the same question: who absorbs the risk of a career? In America, risk sits with the individual from day one, which Gen Z has responded to by demanding meaning up front, since security was never on offer. In Japan, risk has traditionally sat with the institution, which younger workers are now testing by quietly declining to reciprocate the devotion their parents gave for free.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

r/antiwork — A millennial described being stuck in the same role for nearly five years with no path forward, because a 71-year-old boss keeps promising to retire "next year," a line he's apparently been repeating since before she was hired. The frustration wasn't really about the boss — it was about a promotion ladder with no rungs left.

Quora — A respondent explained that in Japanese firms, age and tenure still function as an informal org chart of their own: a newer employee, even one technically senior in title, is expected to defer conversationally to colleagues who joined the company earlier, regardless of who reports to whom on paper.

InterNations — Expats in Tokyo repeatedly advised newcomers not to judge the whole experience by the first three to six months, which almost everyone finds disorienting; the general consensus was that things click into place around the one-year mark, once the unspoken rules stop feeling unspoken.

Metropolis Japan — A software engineer in Fukuoka described the generational shift plainly: Japanese attitudes toward work are evolving toward "working in moderation" rather than maximal devotion, framing quiet boundary-setting not as laziness but as a search for humanity within the job.

GaijinPot — A foreign employee recalled feeling uneasy when a Japanese manager began addressing staff by first name to signal unity with international hires, only to realize the informality was a deliberate, slightly self-conscious gesture rather than the natural workplace default it would be in the U.S.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between these two countries on the strength of their generational cultures, choose based on what kind of uncertainty you can tolerate. America will hand you freedom and feedback and precisely zero guarantees, and every generation there is currently relitigating whether that trade was ever worth it. Japan will hand you structure and patience and a promotion timeline your grandchildren may witness, while its own twenty-somethings quietly test how much of that structure they're still willing to accept. Neither country has resolved its generational argument; they've just been arguing about different things for different reasons for about the same number of decades.

Pick the country whose argument sounds more like the one you'd rather be having at happy hour, because you'll be having it either way.