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QUESTIONS › ARE JAPANESE OFFICES OPEN PLAN?

Question · Working in Japan

Are Japanese offices open plan?

Yes — and they always were. What is changing is not the walls but the desks: more and more Japanese offices now take the partitions down and let people sit where the work is.

The open work floor
The open work floor

01 · The short answer

Open floors, with no partitions

Rakuten’s headquarters in Futako-Tamagawa is the clearest version: desks have no partitions, so “shall we talk about it now?” is always possible.

The open work floor
The open work floor

02 · At scale

NTT DATA, building by building

NTT DATA runs the same idea across a headquarters for thousands of people. Work floors have no partitions, and the company is rolling out clean desks and free-address seating.

The open work floor
The open work floor

03 · The reason

Seeing what others are doing

At The Asahi Shimbun in Nagoya there are almost no partitions, and the designers say that is the point: when you can see what the people around you are working on, conversation starts by itself.

The open space
The open space

04 · The halfway version

Free address within a team

Not every company goes all the way. OEC in Oita uses “group free address”: each team has its own area, and inside it people sit wherever they like.

The 2F open space
The 2F open space

Offices in this answer

Walk through them

NEW
Rakuten
“Three free meals a day, and an all-hands since 1997”
Tokyo · Internet services
NEW
NTT DATA
“A town of ten thousand”
Tokyo · IT services
NEW
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
“Hexagonal desks for teams of six”
Nagoya · Media & publishing
NEW
OEC
“The Great Staircase is for debate”
Oita · Internet & tech

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