The Ringi-sho and the N+1: Getting a Decision Made in Tokyo vs. Paris

🇯🇵 Japan · 🇫🇷 France

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In a Japanese corporate meeting, the decision was almost always made before anyone walked in — the meeting exists to confirm consensus, not build it. In a French corporate meeting, the decision is often still being made, loudly, by whoever holds the most seniority in the room, and everyone else already knows it. Both are hierarchical to a fault. Neither one gets there through open disagreement in a group setting.

[IMAGE_1]

Do's & Don'ts

🇯🇵 Japan

🇫🇷 France

Japan's corporate decision-making runs on two linked mechanisms that any newcomer needs to understand before their first real meeting: nemawashi, the informal groundwork of one-on-one conversations that happens before anything is proposed formally, and ringi, the subsequent written approval process in which a ringi-sho document circulates for sign-off. According to guides on Japanese business culture, meetings themselves function primarily as alignment forums, not arenas for debate — by the time a room full of people convenes, the substantive persuading has already happened quietly, and the meeting exists to confirm what's been agreed and let everyone save face. This is inseparable from Japan's emphasis on wa (harmony) and the tatemae/honne distinction between public and private opinion: a direct "no" in a group setting is rare, and genuine concerns surface in private, not in the room. OECD data shows Japanese average annual working hours have fallen to roughly 1,607 hours, now comparable to southern Europe, though still well above Germany's 1,341 and the Netherlands' 1,417 — the old image of relentless overtime has softened, even if the consensus-first decision culture hasn't.

France runs its hierarchy in the open. The N+1, N+2 shorthand — referring colloquially to your manager, your manager's manager, and so on — structures not just reporting lines but who is expected to raise what, to whom, and in what order, according to multiple guides to French office etiquette. Hofstede-based analysis puts France's power distance at 68, notably higher than Japan's 54, and it shows up in decision-making style: French managers are generally expected to gather input but then make the final call themselves, rather than defer to a slow-built group consensus. Formality is a visible marker of this structure too — Monsieur and Madame by default, titles in written communication, and daily handshakes with colleagues as a small but consistent ritual. The famously protected French lunch — one to two hours, often a sit-down restaurant meal with colleagues — isn't a loophole in an otherwise rigid culture; multiple guides describe it as one of the few sanctioned spaces where hierarchy relaxes and genuine informal exchange happens, alongside the mid-morning coffee break.

The Reckoning: Both France and Japan are, by Hofstede's framework, high-hierarchy, high-uncertainty-avoidance cultures — France scores 86 on uncertainty avoidance, Japan 92 — which means both prize order, rules, and predictability over improvisation. But they resolve that shared instinct in almost opposite ways procedurally: Japan defuses hierarchy through extensive, quiet, pre-meeting consensus-building so the final decision feels collectively owned even though it flows through approved channels; France concentrates decision-making visibly at the top and expects subordinates to accept a decisively made call once the discussion phase ends. The irony is that Japan's process, which looks slower and more consultative from the outside, often produces faster, more unified implementation once a decision lands, precisely because the persuading happened before the ink dried — while France's faster-looking, top-down call can still face slower buy-in on the floor if the N+1 chain wasn't consulted along the way.

[IMAGE_2]

The Part the Brochure Left Out

datainsightsmarket.com (republished first-person account) — A foreign employee who took a corporate job in Japan three years earlier described the office quirks that still caught them off guard even after years there: meetings that seemed to exist purely to "share information" everyone already had, and the slow realization that the real decision had already been made in conversations they hadn't been part of.

Quora — Answering a question about the best and worst of expat life in France, one respondent singled out the daily ritual of shaking hands with every colleague individually each morning as something no orientation had mentioned, describing it as small but oddly binding — skipping it even once drew a raised eyebrow.

understanding-japan.com (cultural explainer citing workplace practitioners) — Described how newcomers to Japanese firms frequently misjudge nemawashi as bureaucratic delay, only realizing months in that the informal one-on-one conversations they'd dismissed as small talk were the actual decision-making process, and that skipping them meant being formally overruled in the ringi stage without ever understanding why.

Quora — A separate respondent addressing French office culture noted that new arrivals from more casual work cultures tend to underestimate how seriously the N+1 chain of command is enforced, recounting a case where escalating a minor issue directly to a department head, bypassing a direct manager, caused lasting friction even though the issue itself was resolved.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Japan, invest your real effort in the private, one-on-one conversations before any meeting — that's where the actual influence happens, not in the room. If you're moving to France, learn your place in the N+1 chain immediately and use it, and treat the long lunch and morning coffee as genuine professional infrastructure, not a lifestyle indulgence. My honest advice, over a drink: in Japan, win the meeting before it starts; in France, know exactly whose office door you're allowed to knock on.