Hover a line for its reading in kana and its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
根回し, and the meeting that has already happened
The word is gardening: 根回し is cutting the roots around a tree some months before you move it, so that it survives the transplant. Applied to an organization it means visiting everyone whose agreement you will need, one at a time, before you ask for it in public. Done well it is invisible and the meeting takes fifteen minutes. Skipped, the meeting becomes the negotiation, which is the one thing a Japanese meeting is not for — and the proposal is likely to be 持ち帰られた, taken away, which is where proposals go to die quietly. The practice has an obvious cost in speed and an obvious benefit in that nobody is ever publicly overruled, and Japanese firms have been arguing about the trade-off for forty years without resolving it.