Halfway through November, i.e. a month after arriving here, my work visa was finally stamped into my passport. My time as an illegal laborer had come to an end. At last, the boundless pleasures of legality—a phone, an internet connection, a bank account, who knows!—would be available to me. Task number one was to go to the city hall and get officially registered, so that I may receive my foreigner's registration card, the key to functioning normally in Japanese society. So the very day my stamped passport was handed back to me, I ran to the city hall straight after work. Unfortunately, that proved to be too late: the city hall's foreigner-registering bureau closes at 5, just about the time I got there. It is also closed on weekends and on public holidays.
Which brings me to my central problem. The Japanese are workaholics. This is not simply a stereotype. I'm always a bit dismayed when negative stereotypes about countries turn out to be 100% true, when these countries' inhabitants blithely continue to conform to behavior that is either ridiculed or pitied everywhere else, but the fact is that the central institution of Japanese life is the workplace—making, I think, the concept of a work-life balance here a little bit foreign. This starts from an early age (when the workplace is the school, obviously). A few illustrative examples: the kids at my school go to school six days a week, from first grade onwards. As I don't know whether I've mentioned, my working hours end at 4:30, and by 4:35 on most days all three of us full-time English native speaker teachers have left the building. The Japanese teachers, on the other hand, I am told, generally stay until 7 or 8 in the evening, and all-nighters are not unheard of (with teachers sleeping on beds in the nurse's office). This, keep in mind, is a freakin elementary school! I am frequently asked how many "holidays" I have a week. When the head teacher at the elementary school let me know that I would be getting two holidays a week, I was bewildered and dared not to hope that he meant what it sounded like he meant, that I would only be working three days a week. But no: the "holidays" are the weekend, magnanimously granted by the workplace, and frankly getting two a week is a pretty sweet deal.
Another example: at the end of their third (penultimate) year of university, Japanese students go through a "job-hunting" period, during which they apply to and take entrance exams for up to fifty different companies. Before the actual application, exam-taking and job interview period, there is an earlier period of preparation, which involves attending these companies' "seminars"—which I guess must be where the companies sell themselves as rad places to work—and also studying for the entrance exams. The total amount of time this takes is about four months. During these four months, as one of my friends who is in the middle of them right now tells me, these poor job-hunters get absolutely no "holidays", for even on Sundays they are expected to take the train over to some 8am seminar/interview/test on the other side of Tokyo. Working hours, of course, are exacerbated by lengthy commutes: I met one university student whose daily commute is two hours on the train each way, frequently (I imagine) without a seat.
(You'll have to excuse me while I follow this tangent much further than is entirely necessary. Another well-known aspect of the Japanese workplace is lifetime employment and loyalty to one's company, which is earned through a system of seniority-based pay, and which one is expected to display, for instance, by not taking all of one's vacation days (e.g. apparently, on average, Japanese people get fifteen days' paid vacation a year, but only take seven—a week and a half of paid vacation a year, people!!!), or by (Wikipedia tells me) singing the company song. I had never heard of these company songs before five minutes ago, but they would explain the gusto with which my school's song is sung at just about any school-sponsored gathering. Incidentally, Wikipedia offers a link for "company song", but this redirects to the page for "jingle": so are Japanese employees expected to sing their company's commercial jingle? E.g., are employees of male grooming products giant Gatsby expected to sing "I——— can give you Gatsubi!" as in this terrifying commercial? Do in-house consultants for Bic Camera stores have to sing this song (as recorded by someone who, from their commentary on their own video, is clearly insane)?)
Anyway, some people are always harping on about how this creates a supportive working environment, gives employees a sense of belonging, cuts down on Taylorist alienation and all that. What it does instead is produce a culture with a special word for death from overwork (karoushi, 過労死) and with the second-highest suicide rate in the OECD (the highest belongs to South Korea, where, I am told, people work even more than in Japan). Japan is desperately in need of a bit of the focus on "lifestyle" which has of course gotten a bit out of hand in the USA but which was a pretty necessary development in the 1960s. In fact, if you want a quick-n-easy caricature of the mainstream Japanese lifestyle, you can think 1950s-America, which may explain why a bewildering number of female students at even prestigious universities want to become flight attendants here.
Well that's it for my rant on the Japanese workplace, which SOME OF YOU will no doubt blame on some sort of alleged terminal laziness on my part. Returning, then, to the question at hand, which is really not very momentous: with these kinds of work hours, how do Japanese people ever go to the city hall to get their administrative whatnots sorted out? (And a related, probably more important question: how come city hall workers are exempt from the work-till-you-drop schedules that afflict their compatriots, and how come all the rest of the Japanese don't either horribly resent them or say to themselves, "Hmm, these city hall workers sure do have it good, why doesn't society as a whole emulate this sort of work schedule?"?) You'd think they could ask their boss for permission to leave early one day, but if their workplace is like my school, then even this is deducted from their vacation time. For instance, if I leave work at 4 instead of 4:30, I get one hour (the 3:30 to 4:30 hour) deducted from my paid vacation time. And if these poor city-hall-service-seekers live two hours away from home, they'd have to leave work at 3, if not before, to get to the city hall by 5. And if their official working hours go until 6, for instance, then that's three hours—almost half a day, since each day is officially an eight-hour one—of paid vacation out the window, just for some boring old administrative formality.
So, to return to moi, the next available day I took my hour of paid vacation and went to the city hall to get registered. This happened without any major snags, although there was a bit of a to-do concerning my lack of a telephone number. In the end, I gave them the telephone number of the school, which seemed to satisfy them. Once this was done, the next step was to open a bank account. Japanese banks, it appears, are not very good at dealing with foreign depositors, and I was told to direct my yen to either Citibank (which I avoided because it was collapsing at that moment) or to home-grown Shinsei bank. Shinsei, unfortunately, only has branches in central Tokyo. Fortunately, it is open until 7 and on Saturdays, unlike most banks, meaning that I would not have to take an extra hour of paid vacation every time I needed to go to the bank.
The next available evening, then, still in my working suit, I made my way to the Ikebukuro branch of Shinsei bank, where, I had been told, the staff spoke English. I was ushered in and seated in a little armchair, one of three or four around a coffee table, while the staff prepared the application form. Once it was ready, a lady (who didn't really speak any English) came over and squatted/knelt by my seat to present the application form and go through it with me. (This coming over and squatting is a little bit disquieting, but it's the standard seated-customer service procedure here: even in restaurants, waiters come and squat by your table to take your order.) It was all easy until we reached the blank for my telephone number. I told the lady I had no telephone number, and could I perhaps give them the school's telephone number, since this had worked so well at the city hall? Alas, no: work phones were not acceptable. So I explained my problem: a Japanese bank account (one of my colleagues had assured me) was necessary for me to get a phone. So if they could just open my bank account, I could run out and buy a phone, then come right back and give them the new phone number. Surely this little gymnastic flip would cause no trouble. All of this in my semi-coherent Japanese (fortunately I had recently learned the word for "necessary"). But to no avail: the machine would not budge.
By this time (we had moved back to the front desk) I was a bit annoyed that I had deployed my nascent Japanese skills in vain, and I started grumbling in English and throwing around the expression "catch-22" in the hope that it might have crossed the Pacific. I explained my quandry in Japanese again. As this went on, the lady became more and more distraught, her bows became deeper and deeper, and her apologies became more and more complex and incomprehensible. By the end she was spending more time bent at the waist than upright, and (jokes aside) she sounded like she was going to rush off to comit suicide as soon as I left the building. I tried to change tactics and gave her the telephone number of one of my friends.
"Can you be contacted at this telephone number?" she asked.
"Sometimes," I replied.
"We need a number where you can be contacted all the time," she explained, the mortification in her voice equal to that of a reckless, drunk driver admitting to a woman that he has just permanently maimed her son, a promising cross-country runner. This hyperbolic shame just served to make me more angry: if she was really that sorry, she would take my friend's goddam number. After all, if I had a home phone and had given her that number, it's not like she would have been able to reach me at it during most of the day (when I was at work). The now practically groveling lady and I parted on these hostile terms.
When I complained about this incoherent policy to my friend, I was given the resigned (and not ironic) answer that this was "Japanese culture". If there is one firm prejudice I have acquired during my university education, it is to be suspicious of culture-based explanations for anything. Some people claim that oppression of women is part of "Muslim culture" (and hence that Muslims can never be integrated into our totally gender-equal Western countries), as though women had the right to vote across Europe and America one hundred years ago. I think one reason for what appears to be Japanese people's relative disinterest in politics (and possibly for their acceptance of inhuman working conditions) is that they get taught that various things are part of an eternal "Japanese culture" that doesn't change and cannot/should not be changed. Canett's obsession with Japan's having four seasons is part of this bundle of allegedly unique Japanese stuff. Also the claim, which I have heard more times than I can recall here, that "Japanese is shy", i.e. that Japanese people are all shy, despite the fact that many of them clearly aren't. There's a whole field of study here devoted to this, which you can read all about here.
The end of my phone/bank account saga, by the way, is anticlimactic. Turns out I could get a phone without getting a bank account here, by showing the phone company my French bank card. All's well that ends well.
So by the end of November, I was in possession of a phone, my yen lay snugly in a bank account, and I was on my (also long and tortuous) way to getting a home internet connection. It was at about this time that Canett unveiled his master plan for me. One day I was summoned once again to Canett's class at the University—exactly the same class as the one I had visited a little over a month before. As we have seen, though, Canett is an aficionado of the art of restatement, and I was once again introduced to them as a graduate from the oldest university in the world with a master in philosophy and a major in politics. This time, there was a photographer, who took pictures of me pretending to make conversation with a few students convoked to the front of the class.
After the class was over, we made our way back to Canett's office (we being Canett and I, accompanied by a university staff member who speaks very good English), where three copies of Canett's beloved leaflet-prospectus, so enthusiastically recommended to me by Canett on the very day of my arrival, were laid out on the table. Canett explained that he wanted me to go through the prospectus and make corrections to the English, so that he may have an immaculate promotional document—the purpose of which, of course, remained completely incomprehensible to me. But rather than simply let me go through the prospectus in my own time, Canett then proceded to open it up and began to read, word by word, as he had done on my first day here, although this time there appeared to be little chance of stopping before the end.
I decided to tackle this tedious task without any ill will, even though I didn't understand why Canett had elected me to perform it, since there were already native English speakers at the elementary and secondary schools. (No doubt he wanted to be sure that the final product was written in the Queen's English.) The first actual passage made up of sentences and paragraphs, after lists of names and slogans, concerned the location of the school: "XXXX Educational Institution's main campus is located in Saitama prefecture. Bordering the nation's capital, Tokyo, on the south, Saitama prefecture has undergone rapid urbanization with population of about 7 millions, which is the fifth largest of Japan's 47 prefectures." (Everything sic, of couse.)
Well I stopped Canett right then and there: since Saitama is in fact located north of Tokyo, I suggested that the word "south" in the preceding passage be changed to "north". Unfortunately, this suggestion seemed to pain Canett greatly. Giving me a kind of limp smile, he quaveringly pointed at the map that accompanied the text on the prospectus, and told me that Tokyo was south of Saitama, and thus that my correction was probably wrong. I told him that I knew exactly where both prefectures were located, but that the structure of the sentence as it stood implied that Saitama was the southernmost prefecture. We continued to argue about this, Canett convinced that I was obtusely refusing to understand the map, for about five minutes, until Canett gave up and pretended to accept my correction, so that we could move on.
After this, of course, I confined my corrections to the most blatant mutilations of the English language only: we had another ten or so pages to go, and if it was going to take me five minutes to make each correction, it was clear that I had better focus in on the most crucial errors. My plans to temper the flights of lyricism about singing birds and blooming flowers came to naught. At the end of this long, painstaking process (the speed of which, you must remember, was dictated by Canett's out-loud reading of the text), Canett explained to me that he would go over all my corrections and give me a definitive version of the text later, which he then wanted me to record, so that he may have his prospectus in audio form too. Again, I presume I was chosen for my Queen's English abilities.
On December 3rd (a Wednesday) was held Veep and Canett's beloved "Hospitality Event", the culmination of their one-and-a-half-month ruminations on how to make best use of me. It was an all-day event, which took place in Ikebukuro, and I was expected to attend the whole damn thing. My job, though, was simple: after the lunchtime intermission, I was going to be introduced up on the stage, once again, then I would have to make a short speech of the usual type, along the lines of "Hello I am Rémi, what a fantastic event this is congratulations everyone! Smiles dreams hospitality!" Finally, in the spectacular apotheosis of my appearance, I was to teach the audience how to say, in English, French, German and Italian, "hello", "good morning" (in those languages that have a special term for it), "good evening", and "good night". Yes, this meant I would have to start by enunciating "Hello", and getting the audience to repeat it back at me.
Incidentally, none of these tasks were being asked of me by Veep directly anymore. Cat, at the elementary school, had become fiercely protective of my job there, and had demanded that any requests for extra appearances be made through the requisite channels, i.e. by contacting Mr. Mumbles, one of the elementary school's administrators. Whenever I was going to have to attend an event like this, Cat would come up to my desk, looking terribly pained, and explain to me whatever mind-numblingly stupid plan Veep had cooked up for me. He was, understandably, especially pained about this multi-lingual taster session I would be offering.
So I did what I had too, dying inside with every new expression I fed to the audience (which was made up of adults!!), sarcastically asking the audience to give itself rounds of applause after each successive language had been covered and pointing out that all of this information was readily available on the internet. But the Japanese don't really do irony.
The point of the whole damn Hospitality Event, in fact, was completely lost on me. Most of the attendees were students at the vocational schools and the university, and the morning was taken up by a speech by some dude who I think worked for a Japanese TV station, and then by presentations by students of each of the vocational schools describing what sort of stuff they worked on. (The school that has a department of prosthetics had a presentation that included a picture of a little dog with no hind legs, whose hindquarters were sat on a little miniature skateboard. I dutifully mentioned, in my afternoon speech, that I had particularly liked the bit about the dog on wheels. Other than that, there were also some pretty gross pictures of tapeworms and stuff like that.) The afternoon was devoted to a mishmash of random sideshows (of which I was the first). For instance, the school's handbell ensemble performed a Disney medley, which featured no fewer than two renditions of "A Whole New World" from Aladdin. The handbell ensemble gets trotted out at just about every event here: the poor kids who were no doubt tricked into joining must be ruing the day they chose such a crappy musical instrument which, on top of that, would take up so much of their free time in the service of Veep's incoherent designs.
There was also, bizarrely, a speech by a woman who was not Veep but who was decked out in even more bears than Veep usually is, who trotted out onto the stage to the sound of some inane children's-TV-program music and who introduced herself as Veep to the audience. This, I can only assume, was designed to elicit laughs from the audience, and was approved by the real Veep, because she had personally OKed the fake Veep's bear accessories in the wings before she went on. This made me even more angry with Veep's whole shtick: not only was she completely self-aware about it, but on top of that it seemed to be a calculated, cynical, self-aggrandizing strategy to win the love of the students and employees of the Educational Institution by posing as this wacky lady who loves bears.
As far as I can tell, though, people over here don't resent this sort of cynical manipulation. This is a country, after all, where people will ask you with a straight face whether you like Mickey Mouse or Winnie the Pooh (not the cartoons that they're in, the characters themselves), as though they were real people and not corporate logos designed to make you buy useless crap (at which they are unbelievably successful in this country).
At one point during the afternoon, as I prowled the backstage area with nothing to do, Canett approached me and once again brought up the subject of Saitama's and Tokyo's relative geographical locations. I stood my ground forcefully, refusing even to consider his suggestion that I might be wrong about how to formulate the sentence.
That evening, Veep and Taz (whom you might remember from my first post) accompanied me to the Chichibu night festival. Chichibu is located in the western mountains of Saitama prefecture, and it has a big shrine, which hosts a once-yearly nighttime festival which attracts tourists from all around the surrounding area. I kind of thought this might be to make amends for my participation in her retarded event that day, but no: the main purpose of this was once again to take photos of me and Veep smiling together against a different backdrop.
But no matter: I had a good time, and I really like the atmosphere of these Japanese nighttime events—fires, teams of drummers in (what look to me like) traditional costumes, stands selling hot soup and warm sake (remember, this was in December in the mountains). Here are some pictures:
This below is the portable shrine: Chichibu is a "portable shrine" festival, where the inner sanctum section of the shrine is taken out and carried around the town to the joyful cries of "Wasshoi!" (which my dictionary translates as "heave-ho!").
I also have a video of the portable shrine being carried down the street, but oh well.
The next event was the following Saturday, December 6th (the eve of my birthday, and, coincidentally, of Pearl Harbor Day). This was a "food festival", and was being held in Kawagoe, which is two train stops away from the school. Beyond this being a "food festival", I had no idea what to expect here.
I arrived about five minutes late, because I had a bit of trouble finding the hotel where the event was being held. As I entered the antechamber of the room where the main event was to occur, I saw Veep, her anuran's lips wobbling about in pouty stress, desperately trying to arrange a pile of cards esthetically on a table which was already covered in Oxford memorabilia (including, of course, an Oxford teddy bear), Alice in Wonderland memorabilia, Peter Rabbit memorabilia, and more cards. (There was also another table covered in Australian stuff, and a couple of other tables for various other things I don't remember.) When Veep spotted me, she shoved her pile of cards into my hands and moaned at me, "You are late!" I looked down at the cards: they were all birthday cards to me, which Veep had clearly strong-armed students from the Educational Institution's many campuses into writing. This was really embarrassing. On top of that, she wanted me to go ahead and display these cards on the table like so many trophies—a task, I might add, which was physically impossible given the size of the table and the number of cards involved. There were more cards for me in a bag that also contained so much Winnie the Pooh crap (as well as some Sesame Street crap!) even a two-year-old would have felt condescended to.
Once Veep had left to go flail elsewhere, I dropped all the cards and made my way into the main room. This room was lined with long tables, thus:
On these tables were displayed, at regular intervals, table settings—i.e. sets of crockery and cutlery arranged just so and decorated with thematic accessories. So this was not a food festival at all, I realized with disappointment: it was a table-setting festival. Each of the settings had been arranged by a different student from somewhere or other in the bowels of the Educational Institution—some from the culinary school, others just normal junior high and high schoolers. Some of them were fairly tastefully done, but others were just ridiculously extravagant or just plain ridiculous.I was told that I had to pick one of the settings, which would be awarded one of the many prizes that were going to go out today. I asked for the criteria on which to base my decision, but it quickly became clear that it made absolutely no difference which setting I chose (making the point of my attending this event, once again, unclear). So I chose this one:
The journalist Mrs NWDFT, who was attending, asked me with a straight face whether I liked pink. Either the Japanese are simply incapable of irony, or their sense of irony is too subtle for me to detect. In any case, I told her that pink was far and away my favorite color, and that I was especially fond of pink poneys. Here is a sample of some of the other entries. First of all we have this, in much the same vein as my pick:
This contestant saw their dreams of winning first-place collapse like a… oh never mind.
The obligatory Hello Kitty-themed entry:
What the hell is going on here?
After we had all milled about a while, the festival itself started, with a speech by King Bear and a serious of exhortations followed by "Ga-teng!"s, just as in Tokyo. We then retired to a private room for lunch, where Canett once again broached the subject of Saitama's and Tokyo's boreal and meridional locations. He had a copy of the leaflet with him. I cavalierly got up from my seat, borrowed a pen from someone, sat down next to Canett and proceded to prove to him that I was right. The sentence, as you will recall, read: "Bordering the nation's capital, Tokyo, on the south, Saitama prefecture has undergone…". I then re-wrote this, not too controversially, as "Saitama prefecture is bordering the nation's capital, Tokyo, on the south", to indicate that Saitama prefecture was the implied subject of the appositive phrase. I then crossed out the middle of what I had just written, leaving Canett with "Saitama prefecture is on the south"—clearly a falsehood! QED. But Canett appeared skeptical. I sensed this was not the last I would hear of this thorny problem.The afternoon was devoted to the delivering of prizes—I'm pretty sure just about every entry got a prize of some sort. I'm also pretty sure the prize I was asked to award personally was not the one I had been asked to choose the recipient of. Oh well. After yet another photo-op with the students (none of whom, you must remember, I had actually met or spoken to for any length of time, much less taught), I was out of there.
And since the whole beginning of this post was hijacked by my pop sociology of the Japanese, this is where this post is going to have to end as well. Next time, Christmas and New Year's.
