"Then, when the right time comes, push for it."Earlier this year Helen Bamber, a bond dealer, was awarded pounds 100,000 damages for sex discrimination by Fuji International in London. She claimed she had been denied pay rises similar to those received by her male colleagues.Gender is the great minefield for the Japanese abroad. "Even if he was technically your junior, other Japanese would talk to him first," he says. "I loved my time at Komatsu but at no time did I feel part of the company."Not that a Westerner cannot be promoted, especially if he is a specialist. The former City analyst was given a better job, "even though I didn't know what it meant." Richard Lewis says the Westerners who achieve the greatest success are those who learn and play by the Japanese rules. The Japanese "salarymen" would be moving up a defined career ladder from which Western managers would be excluded - and each Briton would have a Japanese "adviser" to shadow him. "In many ways Komatsu operated as two companies - a British and a Japanese one," Mr Mayo says.

'Very small car, very noisy car,' he said."More confusion here. Do the Japanese have an inferiority or a superiority complex? Both, Mr Lewis says. At times they can be very humble, and mean it, at others they feel they earned the right to lord it over others. They are still, in general, racist towards blacks (it is significant that the two other plaintiffs in the Quick case were Asian)."They are not used to being surrounded by people who look different - they'll have to learn the lesson," Mr Lewis says But their attitude to Westerners swings. "On the one hand they think they're superior and are very proud of their success," the motor industry man says. "On the other they are incredibly sensitive to outward criticism."Whether inferior or superior, there is little doubt that the Japanese regard themselves as different.

"When I was in my office in Tokyo one of my staff came up and apologised," Mr Lewis says. "I asked what for, because he had given me a lift home the night before in his car. His manager was surprised when he complained, because the Japanese regard internal meetings as free-fire zones.Perhaps the most alien habit of the Japanese - again linked with face - is their obsession with apologising. "They do explode, but I saw it happen only three times in the five years I was in Japan."Losing your temper means losing face - one thing you must not do, nor cause other people to, in Asian societies. "You must never say to a Japanese you've got this wrong," a former City executive says. "You should say I don't quite understand this." But the subtleties of Japanese society mean the rules can sometimes be turned on their head.A British manager in a Japanese industrial giant says he was shocked to be severely dressed down in front of his subordinates at a meeting.

It is difficult not to associate thissort of behaviour with the "prison-camp guard" model of war films.Is the model still there, occasionally bursting out of a buttoned-up culture? Mr Mayo says he "sometimes felt it was coming through" Mr Lewis says the buttons usually hold. But it can make them frustratingly inflexible for the improvising British. "They would rather you stuck to the system and kept your nose clean than added value by bending the rules," one manager says.That said, the Japanese feel closer to the British than to more demonstrative Westerners. They may be disappointed that we do not all dress in tweeds and bowler hats but, Mr Lewis says, "we are probably their favourite foreigners". They also tend to think of us as allies - as we were until the 1930s - while we tend to think of them as enemies.