If you have ever had the opportunity to live and work in Japan, Salarymanhood: The Illustrated Jokes of an American Salaryman in Tokyo will resonate with you. From office customs like VPs falling asleep during discussions they started to everyday life like accidentally buying funeral flowers on Valentine’s Day and dodging road-raged moms on e-bikes, it will all feel familiar.

Building upon his past success with the Salaryman series, this week’s guest on the Real Gaijin AMA podcast, Michael (“Mike”) Thuresson, collaborated with Japanese manga artist Kazuhiro Yoshida (吉田一裕) who also goes by the pen name Kotobuki Maeno (前野コトブキ) to create illustrations from his sketches. Japanese stand-up comedian Meshida, famous for the WTF Japan!? The Japan Show, translated Mike’s stories into Japanese. The project evolved into an experiment in cross-cultural collaboration on multiple levels.

The book is written in English senryū (川柳), a traditional Japanese form of short poetry consisting of just three lines and 17 syllables. It uses the same basic syllabic—or, more precisely, moraic—pattern as haiku (俳句): 5-7-5. While haiku poetry tends to reference nature, the seasons, and fleeting observations, senryū poetry focus on human nature, everyday life, social behavior, irony, and humor. Senryū poems often make wry observations about people’s habits or contradictions, making them the perfect genre for poking fun at Japan’s salaryman life.

Who is he?

Before moving to Tokyo and becoming a salaryman in 2008, Mike was a businessman in Los Angeles. His first book, The Salaryman: An American Dude Becomes a Tokyo White-Collar Warrior, A Memoir, was published in 2019 and called “thoroughly entertaining” by The Japan Times. His new book, Salarymanhood: The Illustrated Jokes of an American Salaryman in Tokyo, offers a distinctly Western perspective on Japan’s centuries-old senryū tradition, transforming the rituals, frustrations, and absurdities of Japanese working life into comic verse.

On the agenda

In addition to covering Mike’s initial path to Japan, we discussed the following as part of a rolling conversation:

* The inspiration behind his books;

* The ins and outs of self-publishing in Japan, from writing and illustration to production, distribution, and marketing; and

* What’s next for the Salaryman universe, including new books, collaborations, and Mike’s plans for the future of the series.

Key takeaways

* An accidental journey into Japan became an 18-Year salaryman story: Mike did not arrive in Japan with a lifelong ambition to immerse himself in Japanese culture. It was a friendship with a Japanese college rugby teammate that led to his first visit around 2000, followed by work as a journalist and a business English teacher. After returning to the U.S., he moved back to Japan in 2008 and entered the traditional corporate world, going directly from the casual culture of a Los Angeles software startup to an old-line Japanese manufacturer, where he was the only foreigner in the office. This culture shock ultimately provided the material for his first book, The Salaryman: An American Dude Becomes a Tokyo White-Collar Warrior: A Memoir.

* “Salarymanhood” finds humor in the culture gap rather than mocking Japan: The central idea behind Mike’s new book, Salarymanhood: The Illustrated Jokes of an American Salaryman in Tokyo, is that everyday Japanese corporate life can look radically different depending on your cultural perspective. His humor is deliberately self-deprecating rather than an attack on Japanese culture; the comedy stems from the often “unsolvable” gap between how a foreign employee interprets a situation and how Japanese colleagues interpret it. For example, he believed a customer meeting had been a disaster because a Japanese executive fell asleep. However, his colleagues told him that this indicated the customer was comfortable. This example perfectly encapsulates the premise.

* Japanese senryū poetry provides the perfect vehicle for salaryman humor: Salarymanhood: The Illustrated Jokes of an American Salaryman in Tokyo grew out of Mike’s fascination with senryū, the traditional three-line poetic form that has long been used in Japan to capture the frustrations and absurdities of everyday life. Inspired by the long-running, annual Salaryman Senryū competition sponsored by the Dai-ichi Life Insurance firm in particular, Mike adapted the concept from a foreign salaryman’s perspective. The new book contains 50 bilingual jokes, each accompanied by manga artwork. This effectively combines a deeply Japanese form of expression with a Western perspective on Japanese working life.

* Self-publishing has made professional book publishing accessible, but the author becomes the publisher: Drawing on his experience as an author and a former product manager for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Mike maintains that writers can now perform most of the functions of a traditional publishing house themselves. Freelance marketplaces provide editing, cover design, interior design, and other specialized services. Print-on-demand eliminates the need to finance and warehouse inventory. The trade-off is that the independent author must assemble the production team and, most importantly, market and sell the finished book. By the way, it can be easier said than done to manage all the resources needed to turn your idea into a professional-looking book. Fortunately, Mike runs a side business that can manage the process for you. Visit his Memoir & Life Story Services website for more information.

* AI can assist the creative process without replacing the creator: Mike draws a sharp distinction between using AI to create writing and using it as a production tool. He says he did not use AI to write Salarymanhood: The Illustrated Jokes of an American Salaryman in Tokyo, describing the actual writing as “sacred,” but he did use AI extensively to solve difficult design and layout problems for a highly visual, bilingual book. Otherwise, this work might have required an expensive professional designer. His approach offers a broader model for independent creators: preserve human authorship while using AI to reduce the cost and complexity of production, workflow, and other noneditorial tasks.

Timeline

Substack does not yet have the functionality to allow you to use a link to jump to a specific section like YouTube’s “chapters.” Please refer to the times listed below to navigate through our hour-long conversation. Thank you for your understanding.

Links

* Personal Website (includes links to his books): https://www.michaelthuresson.com/

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-thuresson-a39735/

Not our first rodeo

Mike and I, both sons of Chicago, have collaborated in the past. Back when he was still using his pen name, Michael Howard, I had the pleasure of reviewing his first book, The Salaryman: An American Dude Becomes a Tokyo White-Collar Warrior: A Memoir. The book is still very much relevant.

From the archives…

https://japaninsider.com/american-dude-becomes-salaryman/

#MichaelThuresson #Salarymanhood #JapanBusiness #RealGaijin #リアル外人

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