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Intermediate Japanese - Free Online Course
SHINNYŪSHAIN
新入社員
"new employee"
The experience of being a new employee at a Japanese company has much in common with the experience of being a member of the freshman class at a university. Japanese companies mostly restrict their hiring to newly minted college graduates. The new hires are all inducted as a group each April. Their orientation begins with a “basic training” course that lasts between two weeks and two months. After that, they are given individual department assignments.
Most Japanese employees feel a strong sense of kinship with their dōki / 同期—fellow employees who entered the company at the same time. In a continuation of the above metaphor, the dōki are analogous to a class at a university. They share the common experience of being newcomers in the company, and they tend to advance up the corporate ladder at more or less the same pace. The attachment to the dōki persists as employees advance in years. Older employees, whose days as a shinnyūshain are years—or even decades—behind them, continue to refer to their colleagues as dōki.