台灣角川股份有限公司

Before I begin listing the disadvantages, I want to make one thing clear: these are my impressions from a brief 40-day stint in the Administration Department, and they do not mean that Kadokawa's other departments are bad. Please do not apply what I describe to the company as a whole.

Kadokawa's benefits are somewhat above average, I suppose, and, like most Japanese companies, as long as you do not make any major mistakes and properly complete the work assigned to you, you will not be moved around. It is a place well suited to staying for the long term.

1. First, let me talk about the manager of the Administration Department.

a. My position was Senior HR Specialist, and I joined because someone who had held this position for a long time had resigned. (The official reason was to pursue further education. According to people from different departments, however, the person was driven out by the manager. This is only a rumor, and I cannot verify whether it is true.) Perhaps because my predecessor had worked with the manager for a long time, my manager seemed to assume that I should understand “the detailed things this company needs to do.” As a result, many assignments were given in the following manner:

“We need to prepare the budget. This is the version we prepared last year; just fill it in the same way.”

“We need to migrate the system. Go look at the new system and create a schedule for testing the new system.”

I had to search through the public folders myself to find out where the budget figures came from, or infer them from the descriptions in last year’s version. When I asked my manager to confirm whether a figure was correct or whether something had been written properly, she said, “You are a Senior HR Specialist. My expectation is that you can think things through more before doing them.” Even a computer needs the correct conditions in order to determine whether a value is true or false, so I can only say that my manager had very high expectations of me. (More about this manager’s working and speaking style below.)

The same applied to the system migration. I had never even used the old system, and no one had taught me how it worked. I had only seen the system that was scheduled to go live. After I prepared the schedule, my manager said, “What I had in mind was for you to compare the new and old systems and identify which steps would be the same and which would be different.” I understood that, but shouldn’t that have been the next step after becoming familiar with the new system? Moreover, she did not seem to consider my lack of knowledge about the old system a problem.

In short, everything was still expected to proceed the way it had when my predecessor was in the position. My manager seemed to think that the handover document left by my predecessor would solve most problems. However, I still had to ask about many things one by one—partly because the work methods here differed greatly from what I had experienced elsewhere (more on that below). Even tasks that you would think, “I have handled this many times; there is no problem,” still had to be done according to the methods used here. Perhaps this would not be a problem for some people, but I found it quite restrictive.

b. The manager’s communication style was also a problem. In the situations described above, when I had a question and was describing the circumstances before getting to the actual question, she would say, “I already know everything you’re telling me, so what do you want to ask?” Or she would quickly take over the conversation and not give me a chance to speak.

The same thing happened in both internal and external meetings. Once, during a meeting with the IT department about the system migration, my manager talked at length about the migration method, leaving the IT manager—who was the expert—unable to get a word in. The meeting could originally have ended in five minutes after confirming the three questions the IT manager had raised, but listening to all these irrelevant matters made it last nearly an hour.

On another occasion, my manager called a meeting to confirm the contents of an audit by the head office. The meeting included the two of us and two other managers. A few days before the meeting, she asked me, “Have you looked at the materials?” After I said yes, I asked, “So what are we supposed to do during the meeting?” My manager was vague. We repeated this same exchange several times over the following days. Once the meeting began, the other two managers immediately asked, “What are we supposed to confirm?” Only then did my manager start reviewing the audit materials one item at a time. After finally reaching the items that needed to be confirmed, the other two managers said, “Then let’s translate this with translation software and write it in,” and the meeting ended. Neither the purpose nor the procedure of the meeting had been communicated in advance.

Taken together, this manager loves to talk but does not know what she is supposed to be doing. She was probably the most incompetent manager I have ever encountered.

2. Ways of working.

When I joined, I signed five documents; when I left, I also signed five. HR professionals can draw their own conclusions from that fact.

Perhaps my predecessor set the bar impossibly high. Whenever I did something here that did not fit their usual practices, I often heard my manager or teammates say, “My predecessor used to do this or that.” For those of you who are dating: imagine your partner talking every day about what their ex used to do. How would that make you feel? Overall, the team was not ready to accept a newcomer and only wanted to remain with the old ways of doing things. It is obvious that “every company has its own practices.” I have also worked at several companies and have changed environments before, but this place was particularly difficult to adapt to.

In addition, there is a regular meeting every week, and we have to prepare a presentation for it, reporting what we did the previous week and what we plan to do this week and next week. I think one rule of thumb is that places with a lot of meetings are actually less efficient, because it means people do not communicate in their day-to-day work and instead spend valuable time in meetings. That is certainly the case here. Most of the meeting time is spent listening to matters unrelated to me, and we also have to spend considerable time preparing presentations. If the presentation is too simple, the manager will call you out, with the explanation, “I also need to report this to my manager, so I should be able to use your presentation directly without having to make many changes.” What an impressive statement.

Everyone here also relies heavily on large language AI tools. Even short phrases for presentations intended for everyone to read have to be written with AI’s help. On one occasion, I had to write an external communication. I had written many such pieces in the past without any problems, but after reviewing my draft, my manager’s feedback was, “It would be better if you let AI adjust it for you,” and she sent back the version revised by AI. Apparently, hiring AI is more cost-effective than hiring me.

So my impression is that this place does not really need professionals. They place more faith in AI and in people who can follow procedures that have already been established. Several times, I pointed out ways in which the methods here could be made more reasonable. My teammates’ responses were usually either, “That’s true; you can propose it later,” or, “That’s just how we do things here,” or some combination of the two. I am not someone who is afraid of hard work, but a lack of awareness is genuinely difficult to fix.

3. Environment

The office air conditioning is always set quite low because one colleague is very sensitive to heat, so it is usually set to 23 or 24 degrees Celsius (and sometimes even 22 degrees). You can go to the first floor of the building where Kadokawa is located and experience it for yourself. The building’s cooling towers work very well, so it is genuinely cold at work—unless, like that colleague, you are also very sensitive to heat. To be clear, I have nothing against this colleague; I am simply describing the environment.

The other employees are friendly and very polite, but every now and then there are scenes reminiscent of the morning and evening temple bells. I do not know whether this is an individual habit or something caused by working here. For example, A sent me a message notifying me of something. I saw it and immediately started handling it, intending to tell A after I had finished. Ten minutes later, A asked whether I had seen the message. I said yes, that I was handling it, and that I had planned to tell A afterward. However, A insisted that I reply as soon as I saw a message to indicate that I had seen it. I believe handling the matter should take priority, with addressing a colleague’s anxiety coming second. Of course, anyone who is good at managing colleagues’ anxiety would probably thrive here.

As a result, doing the work first can instead lead the other person to say, “You finished it? Why didn’t you tell me first?” or “You could have told me first.” You end up trapped in a cycle where “questioning why the other person did not say something first” somehow wins. (To deal with this kind of person, you could simply say, “Why didn’t you come and ask me whether I had done it?”) I found this rather unhealthy.

So, if you are someone who can accept this kind of environment, you are welcome to take on a position in Kadokawa’s Administration Department. I found it very difficult to adapt, however, so I left and am leaving these words here to inform everyone. Please do not make the same mistake.

Close to the MRT station

A Japanese company; they didn’t offer water during the interview. Is that a bad sign?

The environment is very new, and transportation is convenient.

Interviewer A seemed fairly familiar with the works published by their own publishing house, so they should have some enthusiasm for light novels.

The interview was for an editor position at Kakuyomu (responsible for Japanese proofreading).

At the beginning, you are asked to take an aptitude test (the kind that tests spatial awareness).

They said they have resources from Japan (カクヨム) that can be utilized, but also emphasized that they want to develop original works in Chinese.

The website has a great deal of advertising, the interface is basic, and submissions are currently open. The covers take up a huge amount of space, but their quality is inconsistent.

Interviewer B emphasized that the company has its own considerations and needs to cater to Taiwan’s general public, gradually easing them into content translated into Chinese.

The environment is very new, and transportation is convenient.

Interviewer A seemed fairly familiar with the works published by their own publishing house, and apparently has some enthusiasm for light novels.

The position interviewed for was an editor at Kakuyom (responsible for Japanese proofreading).

At the beginning, you are asked to take an aptitude test (the kind that tests spatial awareness).

They indicated that they have resources from Japan (Kakuyomu) that can be utilized, but also emphasized that they want to develop original Chinese-language content.

The website has a great deal of advertising, a very basic interface, and is currently open for submissions. The covers take up a huge amount of space, but their quality is inconsistent.

Interviewer B emphasized that the company has its own considerations and needs to appeal to the general public in Taiwan, gradually acclimating them to content translated into Chinese.