TOKYO (AP) — They’re your run-of-the-mill “salarymen,” as firm employees in Japan are referred to as — hard-working, pleasant and, properly, relatively common.
However the chief government and common supervisor at a tiny Japanese safety firm are among the many nation’s largest TikTok stars, drawing 2.7 million followers and 54 million likes, and honored with awards as a trend-setter on the video-sharing app.
Daikyo Safety Co.’s account, which gathers goofy dances, devoured immediate noodles and different on a regular basis fare, is the brainchild of the corporate president.
Regardless of his unpretentious demeanor, Daisuke Sakurai is lifeless severe about not solely enhancing model energy but in addition recruiting younger individuals to his firm, a problem he sees as a matter of survival.
Based in 1967, Daikyo has 85 workers, 10 of them working on the headquarters workplace, tucked away on the second ground of an obscure constructing in a downtown Tokyo alley.
“Our job is amongst these labeled ‘Three-Ok’ in Japan,” Sakurai mentioned, referring to “kitsui, kitanai, kiken,” that means, “exhausting, soiled and harmful.”
A standard job for Daikyo guards is to work at development websites, directing visitors with a flashing stick, ensuring the vehicles come and go safely with out operating over pedestrians.
It’s not a job that requires overly particular expertise, however nobody desires to face round outside for hours. As many as 99 safety corporations are preventing over each recruit, in distinction to 2 potential employers for workplace clerks, Sakurai mentioned.
And that is in quickly getting old Japan, the place each sector is struggling a labor scarcity.
So why not flip to social media, the place the place children supposedly flock? Sakurai began posting on Twitter and Instagram. However it was when he went on TikTok that issues went viral.
In successful phase, Common Supervisor Tomohiko Kojima slaps, with a flip of his hand, gel sheets, every adorned with the eyes of varied comic-book characters, on his boss’s face, proper over his eyes.
“What is that this character?” the subtitles ask in English.
No cuts are used, they are saying proudly. Kojima needed to preserve making an attempt till the strip landed good.
“I don’t observe throughout my work hours,” he mentioned with fun.
The clips have a transparent message: They defy the stereotype of rigidly hierarchical, even perhaps oppressive, Japanese corporations. At Daikyo, a employee will get to slap gel sheets on the CEO.
Earlier than TikTok, the variety of individuals making use of for jobs at Daikyo was zero. After TikTok, the corporate is getting dozens of candidates, together with these of people that need to work on the movies.
A number of the movies, equivalent to one wherein the employees cook dinner up a delicious omelet, unfold to the sounds of snappy songs, like “World’s Smallest Violin” by American pop trio AJR.
All of them depict the joyful but humble lifetime of uniformed women and men at work who don’t take themselves too significantly.
They’re Japan’s good guys. And it’s clear they like one another very a lot.
Their success contrasts with the picture of Japan Inc. as falling behind in digital know-how, particularly of older males who’re mounted of their methods and unable to embrace new know-how.
Lately, TikTok is flooded with companies looking for consideration, from “izakaya” pubs and hair salons to taxi corporations.
Sakurai has his eyes on international affect now, hoping to attract employees from locations like Vietnam and Indonesia, and permitting them to work in English.
And so a current video options gel sheets with varied nations’ flags on them, a clip that has drawn hundreds of feedback and thousands and thousands of views.
Slap a flag from Mongolia, and viewers from Mongolia remark in gratitude. Others request their favourite flags, be it Lithuania or Lebanon.
It’s an indication TikTok has helped Daikyo overcome language and cultural limitations by merely hamming it up and getting fun.
“What makes my job worthwhile is that it’s about individuals,” Kojima mentioned.
“What attracts me are individuals, not issues.”
Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama
