The Journey Has Just Begun

My name is Oki, “WangShu(王树)” in Chinese pronunciation. Considering “Wang” is a common family name in China, as well as the first Japanese staff in the company, many Chinese colleagues kindly call me “Professor Wang（王老师）” instead of Wangshu.

To be frank, I joined the company quite by chance.

Firstly, I have built a strong and lasting connection with Chinese Culture. After taking Chinese as an elective course in university, I was fond of Chinese culture and worked on various projects related to China while I worked in NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization. Besides, I have a strong interest in internet company. As ByteDance stepped into overseas market in 2016, this fast-growing company popped up into my mind. I realized that the company has set foot in all leading technologies of mobile devices, including machine learning, AI algorithm, SNS Sharing etc. As the company products have completely appeared into people’s daily life, I truly believed that ByteDance would seize the opportunity to explore Japanese market. Therefore,

I accepted the offer with no hesitation, and eventually became the first staff in the Tokyo office.

It was a really hard time during my first year in ByteDance. Considering many company staffs called me “Professor Wang”, people may believe that I was doing a fancy job; however, I did all fundamental things, including registering trademark, selecting location of Tokyo office, translating company’s information, taking financial works, receiving and sending packages, etc. Meanwhile, I felt so frustrated to realize that my Chinese was not as good as I expected because most of company colleagues get used to explaining complex concepts in professional internet terms that I even couldn’t understand by looking up the words in a dictionary.

As more and more young elites who are specialized in Japanese joined the company, I eventually could go back to my own job position, the Business Development and Content Partnership Director in Tokyo office. However, the new challenges just began.

At the beginning, there were just few users of our Japanese products. We spent lot of time introducing the company and products to clients, as well as overcoming the culture shock between China and Japan market. It was quite hard to balance the needs between the company and clients. However, as TikTok. the music community platform has been launched in Japan, we experienced a surge of users in the following year. The products achieved its first milestone by obtaining millions of Japanese users. At that time, as the first Japanese staff based in Tokyo, I felt so proud to be part of the team. 

The journey has just begun. I’m well prepared.