Saturday, October 30, 2004

04.10.23 bed!!   Our stuff finally came.  It had been delayed for months because the people that store our stuff in Hollister somehow lost one of the boxes and for some reason were not responding to the shipping company that repeatedly asked if the storage company could please locate the box.  This went on for weeks!  It was immensely frustrating and we got involved in the process several times, calling the storage company.  They then said that they would take immediate action, but never did….  Finally we asked the shipping company to just go ahead and send whatever they had obtained from the storage company.  They too did not what they promised as it turned out.  We had packed everything ourselves, but had done so with the assurance that everything would be repacked by these professionals, because they had to be repacked.  When our things finally arrived (and by now most things are a surprise to us as well; numerous times we have turned to each other wondering ‘did we pack such and such’ and often we have no idea) nothing had been repacked.  As far as we could see the only thing that had been done was that in some boxes from additional paper was added in the top.  It was a miracle not more things were broken, frankly.  The Japanese firm that did the delivery did ‘unpack things’ that is, they took it out of the boxes and on the floor in whatever room R indicated.  This was some help, to be sure, but the end result was a huge mess. I am including a picture of our bed, as I found it when I came home late that night.  It took us a long time to clear it.  But it was well worth it!  Love the all-latex-foam bed;  Futons are a complete abomination it is an example of the samurai spirit spinning out of control.  The other much anticipated equipment that we received was R’s computer.  It is an e-mac and although Apple has lost its way (admittedly, MS never found a way), and the damn thing is so big you can barely fit your keyboard in front of it but no matter.  R can now receive e-mail.  The trouble is that she won’t, have not found a way around that problem…  But, her computer has the additional great advantage of allowing us to listen to NPR on the web.  This is an undescribably wonderful thing.  There is some English radio in Tokyo, but we have not been able to find a decent station (I thought that we would be able to receive the BBC worldservice and was quite looking forward to restarting our BBC worldservice days (in Amsterdam and Zurich this is what we listened to all day, and it was quite marvelous, with ‘play of the week’ on Sunday and the international news (from our own correspondent) unparalleled but to my great distress (and that of some of our british friends here)) I have not been able to find it on the dial) and I must say that I miss KQED greatly.  All of our numerous radios in our house were permanently tuned to 88.5 FM or 680AM and there are few things I miss more than tinkering with a wood project in the garage while listening to a prairie home companion, or this american life, or with the voice of John Miller announcing the GIANTS.*  Now KQED is back (the garage is not, of course, but you can’t have everything) in our life (albeit only in the bedroom, which is unfortunate, the time is ripe for a web-radio a device that wirelessly connects to your router, and allows you to browse through all radiostations that broadcast on the web).   * The one redeeming factor of baseball, in my opinion, is that the whole game can be described on the radio so you can do something productive and fun while following the game (it is more a game than a sport, isn’t it) and not missing a thing.  Indeed, when you listen to John Miller you will know more about the game than if you watched it life or on television (‘Barry Bonds steps in, he is crowding the plate, here’s the wind-up a split-finger fastball low and outside, the count is one and two!’  I could never see the difference between pitches).  John Miller is solely responsible for my mild interest in the game (my boss and brothers-in-law have made attempts at sharing their enthousiasm for the game, but frankly their arguments have never been very convincing) indeed when he does not call the game I will switch to KQED the other announcers are just irritating to me.  7:30:09 PM     Japanese Salary Man Blues   As part of our work, we recently interviewed a man who was the manager for a project that developed software for a number of banks (they had 11 customers, although one of the banks was much bigger than the rest).  The interview took place in his office, which was a rented space somewhere in a nondescript office building the suburbs of Tokyo.  We interviewed him in the conference area, which was essentially two tables and a few chairs in the corner of a long room where part his project team was at work.  The room was filled with a veritable sea of desks as far as the eye could see.  Indeed there was hardly any space to walk, there were desks arranged in rows everywhere.  And they are small desks, no more than a 1.20 meters wide, and may be 50cm deep, so that the person sitting directly across from you is no more than 1 meter away, whereas the persons next to you on either side is perhaps 50cm away, if you roll your chair back, you must do so carefully because you may bump into the person sitting behind you.  For the members of this team, then, there must have been a comforting continuation between the train in the office; they could go straight from being smashed cozily into a train for an hour or so to being squashed behind a desk for some 12 hours.  Our interviewee was an energetic and nice man, although his eyes were bloodshot and tired.  He told us about his project.  The project team had been developing the software for 18 months when the system was ready for testing at the first bank.  However, the bank client decided that the software did not meet either their expectations or their specifications; it had to be fixed.  Unfortunately, the problems were rather fundamental and the ramifications of the changes affected most parts of the system thus requiring a full redesign of the system, delaying the system by more than a year.  To make matters worse, several of the other banks decided to cancel their order because of the long delay, and had to be paid compensation. It was decided that the project team had to be moved closer to the customer.  The organization was determined not to repeat the mistake and only close coordination with the customer would ensure that they would get the requirements right this time.  Unfortunately, the customer is about a 2 hour train ride from central Tokyo, thus resulting in rather long commutes for the project members.  Moreover, the new space lacks certain ammenities that make this new work environment less optimal.  The only space they were able to secure was an as of yet unfinished building that has neither airconditioning nor heating.  This puts some strain on the workers, as the temperature in the summer stays a consistent 38C (105F) and the humidity in the room is around 95% (for a more detailed account on the Tokyo summer you can browse back to some of the entries I wrote for this blog earlier this year), in the winter, people keep their wintercoats on and work on their computers with the aid of gloves.  They continue to work in those conditions for over a year, until the system is finally succesfully installed and they are allowed to move back to Tokyo.  The problems for the project are not over, however, because the development of the system for the other banks turns out to be quite difficult as well, and although the system has been installed in the first bank, it still has many problems and needs continuous maintenance and fixes.  Indeed, one day a week, the project manager travels back to the bank to solve problems and as he said ‘to make apologies’.  I got this story through the interpreter, and usually do not interfere much in the interviews as I can never be quite certain that I am receiving completely accurate information.  But in this case I decided to make some small inquiries to clarify some details of his worklife.  So I asked him first how many hours he worked in a week.  After a quick calculation he said that on average he worked 68 hours a week (on weekdays, he worked from 9am to 10pm, with one hour lunch break, i.e., 60 hours, and then he came in on Saturday and worked a short 8 hour day, from 10am to 7pm).  Now to me, having to work for 68 hours a week (with no overtime pay because he is a manager) in these close quarters combined with having to spend one entire day of the week making apologies to the customer sounded like utter, utter misery.  I could not help asking him ‘Is it worth it?’  This question quite shocked my Japanese colleagues and the interviewee was also a little surprised, and gave a rather neutral answer, something to the effect of if the project had fewer problems, his life would be easier. I try to be cautious not to generalize from individual stories, but in this case, I am thinking we may have a genuine cultural difference on our hand, a case where people (despite their fundamental sameness) brought up in the same era, but in different countries, end up with rather fundamentally incommensurate positions on what is important in life.   Despite my fundamental reservations, however, I am myself turning into a Japanese Salary Man.  I am not all that keen on working 68 hours per week and I think that the time I spend with my family is on the whole a much more important a activity (personally, as well as for the greater good) as the time I spend at work.  Indeed, helping to raise my children and playing an important part in their life is one of the most important, challenging and rewarding things I do; to me a day in which I do not see them before they go to bed is in some sense wasted.* But in part because I am in a very fundamental sense an ethnographer and therefore very keen on actually experiencing the life of others, and in part because of the sheer social pressure**, I am making very long hours indeed.  Let me give you an example of just how this works.  For instance, it was decided that on Friday we hold a project progress meeting.  It is scheduled for 5 o’clock in the afternoon.  Now I think that this is a bit late to have a meeting on Friday (I think it is ridiculous, actually), but I agreed thinking that it cannot possibly take long, and once done the week has been wrapped up and the weekend can start.  Okay, so it takes a bit longer than I had hoped, but we get through most items by 7pm.  The only thing that is left on the agenda is the team organization.  We had decided that we should swap team one and team three, because the team composition was such that it made more sense to swap the teams.  We thought that this was common sense and did not expect that we needed to get into a lengthy discussion about this.  Negative.  It took 70 minutes.  We wrapped up that conversation at 8:15pm.  Now what surprised me was that there is not a single person in the meeting that has ever even looked at the clock except me.  (I had a lot of downtime as most of the conversation was, of course, in Japanese).  Having finished that conversation I go to clean up my desk area and pack my things when I am called over to the conference table where somebody has connected their laptop to the projector and has the first slide of a powerpoint presentation displayed invitingly on the whiteboard.  It is by now, 8:25pm or so.  My Japanese colleague tells me that ‘this may be important as it deals with an Osaka trip that may happen in two weeks’.  I am thinking “Just how important can it be??”  But a whole management team is seated.  Baffled I sit down to attend this presentation given entirely in Japanese and the ensuing discussion until 10pm.  But I should not complain.  I was one of the first to leave and my commute is shorter than that of most….   * Clearly, this is fundamentally not the case for most of my Japanese colleagues (although some them have complained to me about the long working hours I do not think that they share my overall attitude on life).  For instance, when I stay late, I do not mind, but it better be work that I am staying late for, I am not interested in standing around and chitchatting, while the minutes that I could have spent with my family are ticking by.  I do not mind a chat with my colleagues at all, of course, but when it is after 7:30pm I feel that most talk can be postponed to the next day.  My colleagues clearly do not share my impatience in this regard. ** When I left at 6pm one day, my colleagues were suggesting that I must be off to see my lover, and joked that they should inform my wife.  The thought that one would go and spend time with one’s family at night is apparently something that is not foremost in their mind. 7:29:37 PM     Lukas Birthday   We celebrated Lukas’s birthday October 14th.  Of course, we tried to make it a special event even if we could not quite supply him with the same excellent party environment of last year, when we had a backyard party in Morgan Hill and the children were all in their Halloween costumes and uncle E was there to help out with the children.  This year Lukas was more excited about his birthday than ever before.  He woke up three nights in a row on the days leading up to the 14th, and would come into our bedroom quite awake and tell us that we had better go out and buy presents for him as time was running out; at dinner on the 12th he also reminded his sisters that they had exactly one day to get him a present. Among the presents he received was a pair of turtles.  They were on order, and were not yet ready on his birthday, but the acquarium and turtle food was, which caused a bit of confusion as he could not figure out their implication.  Once the turtles arrived on Friday they were of course taken out of the acquarium several times and played with in the living room.  And they were not returned to the acquarium either, as we found one in the corner of the living room at the end of the day when we did a search after we could only find one in its proper habitat. His party was on Sunday, and since we have this great playroom in the basement of our apartment block, we had the perfect location for his party (no need, therefore, for throwing a birthday party in the ANA hotel with a buffet for both parents and children, complete with live entertainment and $20 barbie dolls as party favors like some other parents did who apparently lacked such a facility).  We had not quite noticed before that the acoustics in this room are not so good, so that when you host a party of even a relatively small group kindergardeners the noise would such that you want at all cost to avoid staying there.  Roberta and I competed to find things to get upstairs, or to prepare the outside space where we would do the cake and presents; even taking little boys to the bathroom became a welcome reprieve from the deafening noise.  Fortunately, Saskia was at a sleepover with a Japanese friend (we were very excited for her, both parents are Japanese*, and the mother had explained to us that they live next to her parents-in-law who have one of the few wooden houses that was not destroyed in the war.  The house is one big room with screen dividers and the only heating in the place is under the dining room table, which is traditional.  It just sounded like it would be a great authentic experience, both Roberta and I were quite disappointed when the mother insisted she would return Saskia to our house and we should not come to get her.  When she came back it turned out she had watched 4 movies and had eaten Pasta on the first day, and MacDonald the next….).  This gave Pascale a chance to play the big sister on her brother’s birthday party which she did with great enthousiasm and even greater authority.  She was a helped to decorate the room and had prepared a sequence of games for party.  She also organized the games and to express her role as referee she was wearing a baseball cap and frequently blew a whistle (this was perhaps unnecessary I thought).  We let her run the party, mostly, and the kindergardeners were very impressed and respected her quidance and obeyed her frequent orders, so it worked out splendidly for the parents. Recently, Lukas has shown an interest (and quite good skill, I think) in LEGO and being thus informed, the guests had brought LEGO boxes almost without exception, which was a shame as many of them were much nicer than the LEGO box I gave him.  Fortunately, Lukas has, as of yet, not drawn the inevitable conclusion.    * The girl is at the school mostly by chance: when she was still very young her mother had a friend who was working at the American embassy compound and had told her that there was a fun daycare center there.  Without notifying her, the friend enrolled her daughter in the day-care.  She was working at the time and did need a day care and so thought she might as well try the one in the embassy compound as it did have the benefit of being close to her work and because her daughter was now officially enrolled.  She dropped her off, quite nervous as her daughter did not understand a word of English.  Fully expecting her daughter to not manage, she told the teacher she would wait in a nearby café.  Her daughter, however, loved the American daycare center, and when she was done enrolled her in the international school for kindergarten as well.  Now she is in fifth grade and essentially a lost cause for the Japanese school system, as she will never be able to completely fit in.  She is, of course, sent to Japanese school in the after hours to ensure that she learns to read and write Japanese properly. 7:29:02 PM     Deference   Anybody who has been to Japan will tell you that the Japanese are a polite people.  It is mostly in the little things.  Here are few things I have noticed.  When a group of people is waiting for the elevator, and the elevator has arrived the first person to go in will make an immediate u-turn and push the doors open button, and hold it until all the others have entered.  (When I say all the others, I mean every single one of them.  The Japanese are experts at squeezing many people into a small space, indeed I have often wondered “just how many people can this elevator legally carry”) Whenever there is a conflict in daily life about who should go first, i.e., who should go first through a door or get in the elevator, or get in the cafeteria line the issue is invariably resolved by one party offering the other to go first (an invitation that is accepted with a quick bow of the head and may be a ‘doomo’).  Never will one party unilaterally decided to proceed, a practice I have often witnessed in other places. Another example.  In Japan bicycles ride on the sidewalk, not the street as is more common in most other nations I have visited.  In some ways this arrangement is reasonable, as the speed of a bicycle is much closer to that of pedestrians than to that of cars.  As parents of children who transferred from a 100% car-based transportation mode (our children only rode their bikes on the weekend on the bicycle path between Morgan Hill and San Jose where the danger consisted of oncoming in-line scaters and the occassional rattlesnake) to a 100% bicycle-based transportation mode, we are quite happy with the practice.  However, it also means that progress can be quite slow as you must weave continually around the pedestrians on the sidewalk, for whom bicycle traffic is (I can imagine) a bit of a nuisance.  Tonight on the way back from the goodbye dinner with my parents in a nice restaurant Pascale and Lukas are ahead of me biking rather agressively around the people enjoying the evening.  When the sidewalk becomes too narrow for them to pass the people ahead of them, they must wait until the people allow them to pass.  What was striking to me was that when the people ahead are Japanese, they invariably jump aside as soon as they notice that the children are behind them (since their breaks squeak and they tend to leave roughly 5cm distance between their front tire and the pedestrians calves it usually does not take long); the one who notices the children first will pull the other to the side and more often than not they will smile at them, oh how kawaii (cute) these little foreign kids on bicycles.  Rarely do you see anybody annoyed (although the man who tripped and nearly fell as a result of Lukas running into him from behind did not look too pleased).  But when we get stuck behind a group of middleaged gaijin, they look back, see the children behind them but simply continue on their way, not allowing them to pass, making them wait until the sidewalk gets wider (although Pascale wanted to, there was no chance of passing them sooner as they were also rather fat). Also, at work there are many doors that you can only get into when you wave your magnetic badge in front of a scanner.  It is no big deal as you must wear the badge around your neck at all times anyway.  There is a sliding glass door just in front of the project room.  Now whenever I approach that door to go into the project room and there happens to be a project member who is leaving the room (the bathroom and the green tea dispenser are outside of this door, so there is frequent traffic) and they notice me, they will make a little sprint to the door so that I do not need to bother waving my magnetic badge over the scanner.  Similarly, when I am in Citibank to try to finally set up my account so I can actually use the ATM machine and get money and there are some forms to fill out and the clerk can’t find the form in the drawer of his desk (and I am slowly getting rather frustrated) he gets up, excuses himself and runs over the other side of the room to get the form.  He returns, apologizes for making me wait and helps me fill out the form (it actually makes me feel a little bit better about the bank right then).   * I still think that the banking system is a little inconvenient (chotto fuben desu).  I had to get a dollar account so I could transfer money from the US, but I can’t actually take any money out of that account without transfering it to a Yen account, which is fine, but I cannot transfer money at the ATM, I can only do that by calling the bank and if I call after hours, the transfer cannot happen until the next business day, so that if it is Friday night and you happen to need cash for the weekend you are out of luck; you must wait until Monday).  7:28:22 PM

© Copyright 2004 Erik Vinkhuyzen. Last update: 11/25/2004; 1:04:01 PM.