Two Ways to Never Discuss Money and Call It Politeness

🇯🇵 Japan · 🇫🇷 France

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Tokyo, you will likely learn your coworker's salary only by inference — from the neighborhood he lives in, the car he doesn't have, or the particular quality of silence when bonus season is mentioned. In Paris, you will learn even less, because asking is considered faintly obscene, akin to inquiring about someone's therapy bill at a dinner party. Both countries have built entire cultures of professional life around the shared conviction that money, unlike weather, wine, or the failings of the government, is not a fit subject for conversation — and both are about to be legally forced to talk about it anyway.

Do's & Don'ts

🇯🇵 Japan

🇫🇷 France

Japan: The Long Game

Japan's compensation system was built for a world where you joined a company at twenty-two and left it in a wooden box, professionally speaking, forty years later. The nenkō joretsu — seniority-based pay and promotion — still shapes salary trajectories at large firms, even as the postwar assumptions underneath it have quietly expired. According to the OECD's Employment Outlook 2025, Japan has recorded consistent nominal wage growth in recent years, yet real wages were still down roughly 2% year-on-year as of early 2025 before stabilizing — the kind of number that suggests raises exist mostly to keep pace with the receipt from the grocery store.

The structural oddity outsiders notice first is the bonus. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare puts the average annual bonus near ¥671,800, typically split between summer and winter payouts that can equal three to six months of base pay at healthier firms — meaning a meaningful share of annual income arrives twice a year, tied loosely to company performance and not at all to a negotiation. This is not incidental generosity; it's a shock absorber. Firms that go to considerable lengths to preserve lifetime employment, as CNN Business and Al Jazeera have both reported on Japan's three-decade wage stagnation, use bonus flexibility to avoid raising fixed base salaries they might later regret. The average Japanese worker's income barely moved between 1991 and 2022 while the OECD average climbed by roughly a third — a statistic that explains a great deal about why "job security" and "raise" are treated as substitutes rather than complements in Japanese HR vocabulary.

Foreign workers occupy their own separate ledger. MHLW's Basic Survey on Wage Structure puts the average monthly salary for foreign workers at roughly ¥232,600 against a national average of ¥318,300 — though bilingual professionals and staff at foreign-capital firms can out-earn local peers by 20–40%, according to industry salary guides and data aggregated on Levels.fyi for tech roles specifically. The lesson, echoed repeatedly across Quora threads comparing Japanese and Western pay-raise culture, is that Japan doesn't really have a raise culture in the Western sense — it has a promotion calendar, and salary follows title, which follows time served.

France: The Discretion Economy

France's salary culture runs on a different but equally rigid logic: everything is negotiated by the state and the union before you ever sit down with HR, and none of it is discussed once you have the job. The bulletin de paie — France's famously exhaustive payslip — itemizes dozens of cotisations sociales covering pensions, health insurance, unemployment, and family benefits, and by law employers must retain a copy for five years, per multiple French payroll guides. Employee contributions run 22–25% of gross salary depending on cadre (executive) or non-cadre status, while employers pay an additional 25–42% on top — the highest employer social-contribution burden in the OECD, which is precisely why French raises feel expensive to companies and modest to employees simultaneously.

The taboo is the real story. Discussing salary at work is broadly treated as a breach of taste; a 2024 survey cited by The Local found only 17% of French workers were comfortable discussing pay in 2019, rising to 54% by 2024 — progress, but still a coin flip. The Connexion France has run entire explainers on the etiquette of not asking colleagues what they earn, because doing so plainly enough required a guide. That discretion is about to collide with policy: France has yet to fully transpose the EU Pay Transparency Directive, but a draft law published in June 2026 will require companies with more than 250 employees to disclose pay bands — a genuinely new experience for a culture where even close friends often don't know each other's salaries. A 13th-month payment, meanwhile, is common by collective agreement though not required by national law, which means "competitive salary" in a French job posting can mean wildly different things depending on which convention collective applies.

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the irony sharpens: Japan pays for tenure and calls it fairness; France pays for the state and calls the leftover a salary. Japan's employee rarely negotiates because the trajectory is fixed by age and years served; France's employee rarely negotiates because discussing money at all is socially disqualifying, even though the pay itself was largely pre-negotiated by unions decades ago. Neither culture produces much individual haggling — Japan out of structural loyalty, France out of collective bargaining plus manners — which makes both nations strange training grounds for anyone raised on the American gospel of "always ask for more."

Where they diverge sharply is transparency of mechanism versus transparency of number. A French payslip will tell you exactly where every euro of your gross salary went, in exhausting itemized detail, while telling a colleague your net figure remains close to a faux pas. A Japanese payslip is comparatively sparse, but the total annual picture — base plus bonus plus allowances — is something colleagues can often estimate from tenure and title alone, without anyone saying a number aloud. Both countries have, in their own ways, made peace with knowing everything about pay except what people actually make.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

r/japanlife — A longtime foreign resident described discovering, after four years at a Japanese firm, that a colleague hired eighteen months later on the same title was earning less purely because of start-date-driven seniority bands — and that raising the disparity with HR was met with polite bewilderment rather than any acknowledgment it was odd.

Quora — A commenter who had worked at both a Japanese conglomerate and a Western multinational in Tokyo noted that the biggest shock wasn't the lower base salary at the domestic firm, but how much of their real income only became visible in December, once the winter bonus landed — budgeting month to month was almost beside the point.

Blind — An engineer who moved from a Japanese company to a foreign-capital tech firm in Tokyo described the compensation conversation itself as the strangest part: being asked directly what salary they wanted felt invasive after years of a system where numbers were simply assigned.

Expat.com (France work-culture forum) — A newcomer recounted asking a French coworker, in what they thought was casual small talk, how raises typically worked at the company — and watching the coworker visibly redirect the conversation to the weather, later learning from a manager that salary is simply not discussed among peers, ever.

r/expats — A recent arrival in Paris described opening their first bulletin de paie and being unable to reconcile the gross figure quoted in their contract with the net deposit in their bank account, only later learning to mentally discount every French salary offer by roughly a quarter before comparing it to anything at home.

Conclusion

If you're relocating for work, the practical advice is almost identical despite the wildly different mechanisms: in Japan, evaluate the total package — base, bonus, and allowances — because the number on offer letters is deliberately incomplete; in France, evaluate net, not gross, because the number on offer letters is deliberately generous-looking. Neither country will teach you what your colleagues earn, and neither will reward you for asking. What both will reward, eventually, is patience — Japan's system pays out over a career, France's over a well-negotiated convention collective you didn't personally negotiate.

The honest version I'd give a friend over a drink: in Japan you're betting on the company outliving your ambition, and in France you're betting the state already did your negotiating for you, badly but permanently — pick whichever kind of not-knowing you can live with.