Two of my dōkis (coworkers) who worked as porters during our Hotel Training

As some of you might know I received my department placement results at Rakuten in the end of May, and it turns out I will be working for Rakuten Travel in the years to come. Considering how much I love traveling I was quite happy with that result (also, Rakuten Travel is one of the most international departments in our company). Right now we are going through another month of training at Rakuten Travel, and last weekend we had our Hotel Training at Karuizawa Prince Hotel. The goal with this training was to experience a hotel from the inside to see and learn more about the hotel's omotenashi - Japanese hospitality.

We discovered many ways that the hotel is trying to present their guests with omotenashi during our stay at the hotel. One example is the welcome message that was prepared for us in our cottage. In Japan the Teru Teru Bozu doll is believed to bring good weather, so it is not uncommon that it is used as decoration. When we entered our cottage we found a cute Teru Teru Bozu doll left as decoration at the table in our common room with the welcome message. Apparently the hotel receives a lot of good feedback regarding this small doll, and a lot of guests even take the doll with them home as a souvenir.

A cute Teru Teru Bozu doll that is believed to bring you good weather

Below is a picture of the inside of the cottage we stayed at. While Karuizawa Prince Hotel has four main buildings with regular hotel rooms they also offers cottages that can be rented for people who want to stay together in bigger groups. The cottage our group stayed at had a common room and four bedrooms with a total of 8 beds, so it was possible for us to hang out in the common room after work was done.

The common room of our cottage

Task 1: Restaurant Training

The restaurant had gotten a large number of reservations for the evening and I was a bit nervous about having to deal with the guests directly. But for most of the time I ended up helping with bringing empty dishes to the kitchen and delivering plates with food to the real waiters working in the restaurants. It is difficult to remember the name of the Chinese dishes so it was probably for the better that this part of the job was left to the experts.! The supervisor of the restaurant, Ikeda-san, was very friendly and helped me and my dokis understanding more about the services of the restaurant.


Day 2: Hotel Room Training
On the second day we were supposed to help cleaning hotel rooms, but apparently this day the maids didn't have that much work for us so instead of the cleaning my group had the honor of being shown around the great resort area by Seino-san, who supervises reservations at the hotel.

Karuizawa is a popular tourist destination and a lot of people visit the place just to go shopping in the many outlets situated right by the station. Karuizawa Prince Hotel is situated only a couple of minutes away from the shopping outlet, and it also has its own popular facilities such as a golf court and a ski resort. Since they also have machines for creating artificial snow you can actually enjoy the Koyou (紅葉 - red leaf) season while skiing at the resort in November!

During the winter people can go skiing in the hotel's own ski resort

The hotel has some large halls where they arrange weddings, and hundreds of couples are wed at the resort every year

View from inside The Prince Karuizawa

The French style restaurant at The Prince Karuizawa

Seino-san showed us the four main buildings of Prince Hotel, and he also showed us some of the special facilities the hotel has to offer. The part of the hotel that was most interesting to see was the dog hotel, where owners can stay with their beloved pet. Apparently the hotel staff has to refer to the dog as Wanchansama (ワンちゃん様), which is really hard to translate into meaningful English but it would probably be something like "our honorable guest Little Mr. Doggie" and use keigo (extremely polite Japanese) when talking about the dog to its owner.

The dog hotel cottages

The inside of one of the dog hotel cottages

Special items presented to the guests at the dog hotel. Even includes a dog poop mat to the left!

Sunday was the last day of our training, so after all groups were done with their work we left for Tokyo by bus in the afternoon. Some groups apparently had to fulfill more demanding tasks than others, so I was really lucky that I was in a group that got to experience both working at a restaurant and getting a tour of the hotel resort area. All in all I think it was a good experience to see the hotel from the inside, and get to see how hard the staff works behind the scene to satisfy their guests. If I get the chance I definitely want to come back to the resort in November for the nice skiing-kouyou combination!
But now it’s back to regular work again of course. On Monday we will get our next placement results, so I’ll finally know the specific content of my future work. Looking forward to that!

As always, thanks for reading my blog!
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We were divided into teams of 6-7 members + 1-2 mentors, and my team ended up choosing the slightly humorous team name "All Nighters". We had to work night shifts in order to contact the American merchants due to the time difference, and that is how we got the idea for the group name..! The great thing about this training is that we got to talk directly to CEOs from a lot of interesting and unique companies! But although I learned quite a lot during the process I have to say I'm really happy that this training only lasted for 6 weeks.. Night shifts is not something I would like to do as a regular job to be honest, it is quite tiring.

The Rakuten All Nighters!

But although the training itself was pretty tough we bonded very well as a team. Everybody really did their best to perform well and support other team members, and I felt really proud of working with such talented and ambitious people. I'm convinced that I've made some really great friends, and hopefully we'll be able to stay in touch with each other also after we have been assigned to different departments.

Our 7 members + 2 mentors

So as I've already mentioned, this week our initial training period was finally over! On Friday we had a placement ceremony (配属式) where our superiors announced our future departments, and for the 32 members of the International Merchant Development Group most people were assigned to Rakuten Ichiba. This is the biggest department in Rakuten, so it was not really that surprising. Other departments people in my group was placed in included Rakuten Travel, Rakuten Card, Rakuten Marketing Japan, and finally the Creative & Web Design Department. Members of the DU (Engineering New Grads) have also been a part of the same training program as the Business New Grads (BU), but they get their placement results later as they will have their own training program starting from next week.

Got assigned to Rakuten Travel. In the background: The Rakuten Shugi

I got assigned to Rakuten Travel along with 23 other new-grads (among them 3 foreigners)! I'm pretty happy about my placement, and I think that it will be a really interesting place to work. I already had the opportunity to talk to some of my sempais, and they seem to enjoy their job a lot. So far so good.! 

Getting ready to change office

Goodbye to the large office we have had our first training at!

I still would have to say that in general I do think that Rakuten is a very stereotypical Japanese company in many ways. There is a lot of focus on reaching the monthly KPI, and although the company is trying to become global there is still a long way to go. Unless you are prepared for long working days (sometimes you might even have to stay until the last train) you might find the work in this company pretty tough. From what I've heard from others working in the company there is a huge gap in the working conditions depending on departments, so you might be lucky and end up in the more international parts of the company where they're better at providing their employees with life-work balance but you might also be very unlucky and end up in the departments where you'll have little spare time outside of work.

Luckily Rakuten Travel is known as one of the more foreigner-friendly departments at our company so hopefully I'll be fine. From now on my Rakuten Travel group is going to have another month of training before we get to know our actual position in the company. I look forward to the training and I'll be back with more blogposts about my experiences here in Japan.

As always, thanks for taking your time to read my blogpost! I really appreciate all the comments and feedback I receive from you guys^^