Nintendo have had a complicated cultural issue with contractors for a very long while, and these reported cases of inappropriate sexual conduct and harassment seem to reflect the lower standing of contracted employees there, but in particular the way women are treated in the tech industry by predators and, more generally, arsholes.
Which regards the differences between those contractors and the full time, permanent "Red Badge" staff that they inevitably look up to, to some extent. That's what those remarks are about. There's a sense of othering, that "they're not really us" from the perm employees. It's notable in Western staff hires in the Japan HQs too, going back a long time, especially those working on more "Western" style games, but I don't have time to go into it right now.
At some point while over there I intend to meet someone who basically
made Star Wing / Starfox (my brother works for them, or they're a shareholder or something) and maybe ask about that (it was probably even worse in the 90s), as there's an interesting microcosm of expatriated US/UK/European developers working in Kyoto. Sometimes with or for Nintendo, or who ended up at Nintendo full time (there are very few of them, partly because Nintendo hires mostly Japanese people but also because their recruitment standards for permanent employees are so notoriously high, so the chances of anyone moving over there just to attempt to "get into Nintendo" are kind of low - they'll usually try NoE or indeed NoA, as there's much less cultural and language roadblocks, if they really
have to work at Nintendo. I think there was a few years ago reports of just a single Western person working at Japan HQ?).
Although this was in Japan, Argonaut were contracted by Nintendo; they were thus contractors. There's this choice quote:
They took people that spoke English in the team - they didn't realise we'd pick up Japanese quite quickly because we were quite young. At one point I remember them talking not in necessarily nice terms about us in front of us, and me and Dylan turned around and spoke to them and replied in Japanese. They looked so shocked.
[...]
The culture was still basically old-school - it's like being in a school, or the army. You come in at 8.30am, you have a bell at 8.45am to tell you to start working. Everything's regimented. You work your arse off and go home at 11pm at night, then go home and sleep a few hours. And we refused to do that. At the end of Star Fox, when we were working really stupid hours, we thought we were being taken advantage of. We didn't see the bigger picture, that we're 19-year-old kids working with Miyamoto.
You have an image of Nintendo - or certainly I did - that it's like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, this magical world where all the games come from.
No, it's a factory.
[...] the scope was much smaller back then. It kind of comes back to what I was saying about us complaining about doing overtime - stupid overtime, working 'til six in the morning kind of thing - at the time, it was really only me and Dylan that were saying, 'hang on, we're working with Miyamoto, the Mario guy. We shouldn't really back out because we want to back out because we want to party on Fridays. Everyone else thought it was just stupid, why are they forcing us to do this.
I really recommend giving this article a good read.Nintendo America is this weird satellite company that handles distribution, sales and marketing and researching US audiences, but remember there is also Nintendo NST founded in 1998 who do also make games there. It's impossible to really know, but I'm not sure if it's relevant who is working on what products or in which departments?
It's an issue also generally with the use of contractors as a disposable workforce with literally less rights, which is extremely common in the US and increasingly in the UK too. Nintendo use loads of contractors, and have a peculiar structure in which they have entire companies they sometimes own shares in working within their corporate offices. Like companies within companies. For example, HAL, Intelligent Systems. I've been one and the way you can be treated is pretty awful. In this respect, I'm not surprised women contractors AKA temporary employees are calling out unacceptable behaviour under these employment conditions. I think bullying, like condescension and manipulation, is pretty common and that isn't OK either.
So one way to demean those on less favourable employment conditions is to sexually harass them, which is just great. There have got to be some people who think that because they work for Nintendo they're invincible. On a positive note, while it probably is a challenge to eliminate this behaviour across an entire workforce so that it literally cannot or never happens, Nintendo do seem to respond eventually (their PR is so tight and paranoid they seem to either not comment initially or take an age to drip feed the media), and over in Japan they've had
some more progressive policies introduced which is good.
Although these reports are in the US, unfortunately, many aspects of society in Japan are still fairly sexist, a lot of people forget it's led by a "liberal democrat" party but is in many elements ultra-conservative - some of these things are good because dishonourable behaviour has an effect of self-ostracisation and the crime rate is very low, but you know you have problems when there are things like women-only train carriages because groping and ogling is common. I'm by no means saying we don't have the same issues over here, more highlighting that neither Japan nor America in which these corporate HQs are based are some kind of perfect place where human rights are universally respected. There are absolutely going to be cases of sexual harassment at Nintendo and mistreatment of employees, which is wrong and the company should respond to the reports sincerely.
