I have just billed eight hours to a calendar that produced, in measurable terms, nothing. Not a decision. Not a document. Not a single sentence of resolved fucking anything. This is Japanese corporate meeting culture, the kaigi, and it is the most elaborate piece of theatre staged anywhere on earth in service of going precisely nowhere. Hamlet has more forward momentum. Hamlet at least dies at the end.

Let me walk you through the architecture, because it is genuinely a thing of beauty if you hate yourself. First there is the meeting before the meeting. The nemawashi, the root-binding, in which the actual conversation happens quietly between four people so that the real meeting can be a flawless performance of consensus already reached. So already, before the meeting we are about to attend, the meeting has happened. We are now going to re-enact the meeting. Like a Civil War battle, but with worse catering and a projector nobody can connect to.

Then there is the document. The ringi-sho. A piece of paper that circulates from desk to desk for three bloody weeks, collecting little hanko stamps from people whose entire contribution is to confirm they have seen it and decline, with enormous politeness, to take any responsibility for it whatsoever. By the time it reaches the top it carries the personal seals of fourteen wankers, not one of whom will admit to having had an opinion. That is the genius of the system. Everyone signs. Nobody decides. If it goes wrong, it was a building, not a person.

Why nothing is ever decided in the meeting room

The meeting itself is the part that breaks you. You walk in, and there are eleven people present, of whom roughly two will speak and one will actually matter. The most senior person says almost nothing, because saying something would be vulgar and might commit him to a position. Everyone nods. There is a PowerPoint with forty slides and a font size designed for ants. Someone reads the slides out, loud, to the room, as though we are a class of fucking six-year-olds who have not yet mastered the printed word. Forty minutes in, a man who has not spoken makes a small noise of consideration, and the room recalibrates around the noise like it was scripture.

And then it ends. No decision. "Let's take it back and consider," which is corporate Japanese for nothing happened and we shall now do this again. You file out, defeated, having achieved less than you would have lying face-down on the floor. For fuck's sake. I am thirty-five fucking years old and I have just spent the most productive hours of my one finite life watching grown adults perform agreement they reached last Tuesday in a corridor.

Which brings us to the corridor. Because the corridor is where it actually happens. After the meeting that decided nothing, two people, the only two who were ever going to decide, stand by the lift and have the conversation in ninety seconds that the previous ninety minutes existed solely to avoid. The outcome is settled in a hallway, whispered, deniable, and entirely real. It could have been an email. It could have been a single fucking email sent at 9am. Instead it was eleven people, three weeks, fourteen stamps, forty slides, and a man going "mmm" with the gravity of a High Court judge.

The decision was made. It just wasn't made here

What enrages me is not the inefficiency. Inefficiency I could forgive. It is the aesthetic of competence laid over the top of it. The immaculate suits. The bowing. The agenda printed and bound. The whole apparatus humming with the appearance of serious people doing serious work, and at the centre of it, a vacuum where the decision should be. It is a cargo cult of productivity. They built a runway and a control tower and a beautiful little hat, and no plane has landed since 1991.

The truly bleak bit is that I have now been here long enough to do it too. I scheduled a pre-meeting last week. To align before the meeting. I heard the words come out of my own mouth, those absolute clowns, and I have become one of them. There will be a meeting to discuss this development. I'll let you know what we decide.

We won't decide anything.