Well, let's see: the boss' desk is made of some expensive wood, mine is plastic.  That's just skimming the surface, though.  There is a board six feet from my desk which lists every name of regular employees for the two groups closest to us on the org chart, with a plastic marker indicating whether they're in or out of the office.  The arrangement of names on that board is important: last time it got shuffled the lady in charge of it literally solicited the opinions of two senior team members as to whether it would be more appropriate to swap CoworkerX and I or not.  That's superficial, though, too.<p>To really get a feel for it you'd have to go to the office and watch who talks to who and how (Japanese has multiple different levels for polite language).  For example, I work very closely with M-san.  M-san is freakishly talented and a good company man -- everyone treats him with more respect than you would have predicted for his age.  Except for S-san, our crusty old network admin, who is the 10x engineer to M-san's 10x engineering -- his form of address for M-san is close to "You, boy, I have homework for you".  He puts his bare feet on the table when talking to the boss, and gets away with it.  On the other hand, we have, say, a particular engineer my age who is not very seasoned yet, who gets talked down to by OLs younger than him.