Believe in life after work? Not here!

About a week ago I saw this article on the BBC website. Apparently one in nine Britons work a 48 hour week. I showed the title of the article around the office and everyone marveled: What a benevolent country Britain must be to only insist on its workers working for 48 hours. Here’s why they missed the point:

Perhaps too easy a target, but the Japanese work like crazy. In the schools I work, teachers usually work at least twelve hours a day. The office workers work at least that much too. I went to work the other day, mildly irritated to find myself locked out of the Saturday morning meeting (starts 8 a.m. people!) because no one had yet arrived to open up at five to eight. Only later did I find out they had been working until four that morning preparing for an important school event. Then they went home, were back at eight, and worked another 15 hours on the Saturday. Amazing.

This extreme effort is made possible through the group-mentality instilled Japanese people from school age. The group is more important than the individual. The group’s needs take precedence over those of the individual. The success of the group is more important than that of the individual. And your status as a member of the group is to be closely guarded: No-one wants the ultimate shame of being nakaba-hazure, or outside of the group.

So you will find people actually unwilling to go home when they finish their work, if colleagues are still working. They will stay as moral support. They will stay until their whole group has finished. Of course this does have good points, you can build a strong team-ethic if everyone works in this way. However, this can also be abused by a company. Because if by going home early, a person is seen to be insensitive to the needs of the group, then people will stay to save face while actually being unwilling to stay at work. It is the ultimate peer pressure. So if people are staying later, they can be made to do more work in the time they wait for the other members of the group, and it becomes a vicious circle of lateness. All you need is one masochistically hardworking member of each group, and EVERYONE will work as late as they do.

So, despite being contracted for 40 hours of work, people often put in double. The law theoretically enforces overtime payments and a number of maximum hours worked: However, time sheets are regularly falsified (with the full knowledge of staff and management) to show that only 40 hours were worked, remaining hours shown on computer log-in systems as “Other” for which of course there is no requirement to pay for. My company demands, and provides systems in order for, employees changing their worked hours to no more than 40 each week, regardless of hours actually worked. And people don’t complain! Why not? Because that would be to put your own feelings over those of the group – and you don’t want to be nakaba hazure!

Finally, ahead of the BBC

Having missed the Nova news, despite it being round the corner, and letting The Times scoop it.  I would like to point out that I still have the drop on the  BBC: By clicking on the link you can read their coverage of Japanese immigration’s introduction of compulsory fingerprinting of all foreigners entering the country… at least two weeks after I mentioned it in “You’re not from round here, are you?”, below.  They seem to have been speaking to “some people” who said very similar things to me too. Hurrah! I am in the moral majority!

Concrete Opinion

After the second world war, in the 1950’s and 60’s Japan experienced a building boom. Not unsurprisingly perhaps, given the amount of destruction waged upon its cities and towns by the American air force. A lot of the old wooden buildings that had the quintessential Japanese flavor that we now only see in places like Kyoto or Nara were destroyed and new buildings erected in their place: A terrible shame, especially since many old neighbourhoods were destroyed not because they were damaged, but simply they were seen as a throwback to when Japan was an old fashioned, feudally governed country and now unrepresentative of the emerging Asian power that Japan was becoming.

So Japan’s love affair with concrete began – and the more the economy picked up, the more premises and building that needed to be built. Even the government, with its coffers steadily filling as the economic revival gathered pace got involved, it built the famous bullet train network as well as highways, express ways and local train networks that still are the envy of many countries in the world. At it’s height the construction industry employed more than 20% of the entire Japanese workforce, so construction companies came to wield considerable political clout too.

Some wily politicians realised that, with the vast amounts of money available for public works, companies would reward any information or help in swinging the contract their way. Japan’s pork-barrel had never been so full, and everyone was getting their share.

Unfortunately, what didn’t happen in tandem with the building boom was the evolution of a system of zoning building areas or anything resembling planning permission. Basically if you owned the land, and had the money to build, you could pretty much build what you wanted – such as a chemical works next to an infant school. It also meant that power cables are not buried (because that is more expensive for the power companies). In fact, most of the mountain views of Japan – and there are a lot – are almost without exception despoiled by ranges of power pylons criss-crossing their summits.

Of course, there came a point when the private sector’s needs were largely met, and the contracts for private construction declined. The construction companies began to put people out of work – and the politicians got scared. What should have been the planned downsizing of the industry never happened. That 20% of the workforce meant a huge number of votes – especially in rural areas – belonging to the ruling LDP party. The politicians themselves were also too used to the amount of kickbacks they were getting to entertain the possibility that this state of affairs couldn’t continue. So, the amount of public money available for construction grew and grew.

What was no longer being built by the private sector was built by national and regional governments with “donations” ending up in the pockets on local administrators, and local populations being saddled with buildings they don’t need. Projects such as flood defences have meant that EVERY river in Japan has been concreted for some part of its length, even in the cases where no flooding had ever happened in living memory. Of course, concrete does not allow for much of an ecosystem to develop, and the results for wildlife have been catastrophic. Mountains haven’t escaped either. They are given concrete frames over them to stop rock slides – imagine the expense of covering a mountain in a concrete lattice! Add to this thousands of culture centers and community buildings that have been built, despite an absence of need, in nearly every village and hamlet in Japan.

The government supplies low-interest loans for these activities, which communities take up only to find that the running costs for these buildings far exceed the amount of money to be made from them – causing a circle of debt to accumulate. The second largest city in the country, Osaka, is so overburdened with these kind of projects that it had to declare bankruptcy, and is now governed by central government. It reckons to be solvent again in 2050! But still the construction industry is not sated.

Local governments receive a set budget every year. A lot of this is earmarked by central government for construction projects whether there is a local need or not. Now here is the rub – if the money is not used, the subsequent amount of money budgeted to that local government will be smaller. There is no incentive to save money… the only way to assure that current levels of budget are retained is to spend everything allotted for a given year. Thus, the white elephants of modern Japan are born – more concrete, more buildings, more running costs for things that people don’t use. More rivers and mountains concreted, more old buildings replaced by concrete boxes.

Japan is looking less and less “Japanese” every year, and governments and regions becoming poorer whilst the bureaucrats and construction companies get wealthier and ever more powerful. Somebody has said it won’t end until the whole country becomes a car park.

Such a shame that everyones’ memories of what was a beautiful country have to be buried beneath it.

Would you like a woman with that drink, Sir?

Flashback to August: I was out drinking with my Japanese boss in Kobe. It was his way of apologising for getting me to come into work during my summer vacation in order to help with a foreign exhange program. I wasn’t bothered: three hours work, and now I was being treated to lots of expensive raw fish and as much beer and sake as I wanted to drink. Since it was all on expenses anyway, there was no reason to hold back, and I didn’t. We were having a pretty good time, and two or so hours flew by.

We left the reastaurant, me ready to wend my wobbly way home but my boss was having nothing of it: he was up for more, and whether I wanted to or not, I was coming along for the ride. More free food, more free beer – I didn’t put up too much of a fight.

Anyway, we ended up in a hostess bar. Not my idea, but since I wasn’t paying (wasn’t and indeed couldn’t) I didn’t have much say in the matter. Hostess bars seem to be pretty big business in Japan. You finish your hard day at the company, go for a few beers, and with the wife and kids at home, Japanese guys take off to the hostess bar. Usually these consist of a lounge-type bar, where you sit with your drinks and your buddies and are kept company by hostesses – young, becoming women who pour your drinks, sing duets with you on the karaoke machine and flirt and add general chit-chat to make the night more enjoyable. And that’s it. Not nearly as dodgy as some may think. Even so, just for a little flirting and chit-chat, it adds a huge whack to the bill to be thus entertained. Our hostesses were Japanese, meaning that the establishment was quite classy (and expensive) – the cheaper establishments apparently rely on Filipina or Thai ladies.

I suppose that the hostess bar is really just a modern iteration of the geisha establishments of older times. The geisha would pour drinks, make conversation, and sing or play a musical instrument to amuse their patrons. The hostess bar is just a racier version of that.

I suppose it might sound quite sordid, but is in fact incredibly tame – you talk, you sing, you drink and then go home. Having paid a lot for your company. One of the girls asked if we had hostess bars in England, and I had to say no. It’s a weird feeling, for me anyway, to talk to someone for whose company I (or rather my boss) is paying. Coming from a culture where it’s not unreasonable to strike up conversation with unknown people in bars and enjoy their company for a while without having to pay cash to do so, it’s a pretty strange feeling to shell out for the privilege. Though it was fun to seem so captivating, it lost its lutre when I reminded myself that I was only as amusing and interesting as my boss’ money was allowing me to be!

Musical Youth

On Sunday, I went to a music festival at the elementary school to which my girlfriend’s daughter goes. Since Mimata (the daughter in question) is only 7, I wasn’t expecting much, having  made similar “performances” myself as that age. I have to say I was mightily impressed. Thirty seven-year olds played an amazing piece of music on their pianicas (kind of a keyboard instrument that you blow into). I mean, the piece of music may have been basic, but they were note-perfect, and all in time with each other.

Now, I have no musically ability whatsoever and never have done. Schools in England seem to treat music as completely unimportant, and the idea that kids can play music instead of just generally making a racket seems overlooked. Yes, practice takes time, and the Japanese may be a bit masochistic when it comes to practicing, but it really pays off. Japanese kids are taught how to read music from age six, are required to have a pianica for school music lessons, and have a school performance each year. Someone like me, for whom written music is just a collection of dots and squiggles, is an anathema to any Japanese ten-year old. Everyone, whether gifted or not, played along with the rest of their class. No-one made any big mistakes, no one refused to play.

The Japanese try to build the group ethic up from very young. If you make mistakes or don’t try then you are not simply letting yourself down, but also your group (or class, or family etc), so these kids practice like crazy, not just for their own benefit, but also to avoid the shame of letting down their classmates. Though the group mentality has its downside (which we will surely merits its own post sometime), it is mightily impressive to hear the sixth grade (twelve year olds) play the Marsellaise with the all the pomp and vigour that would make them right at home at the Last Night of the Proms, without missing one note or beat.

The British school system could learn a lot.

Not from round here, are you?

It’s a tricky thing, racism. If you look for it, you can find it everywhere and blame it for everything, it can be made the reason for everything that goes wrong in your day in Japan from dawn to dusk. Generally Japanese people don’t intend to offend, it’s just that their media and education haven’t really caught up to the idea that denigrating someone’s race or drawing stereotypical inferences from it is bang out of order.

At it’s very mildest it’s the expectation that no foreigner can speak Japanese (see below), or that we should be offered a knife and fork in a restaurant because no non-Japanese person could possibly have mastered the ancient art of chopstick use. My personal favorite is going to a restaurant, ordering the meal – in Japanese, only for the waiter to address his replies exclusively to my Japanese and hitherto silent girlfriend. I suppose actually being able to  get in the door to order the meal is a bonus: As foreigners, we are also barred from some restaurants, clubs, onsens as this video attests.

To be fair, “racism” may be too strong a word for the everyday experience – unless you have the ultra-nationalists in their black speaker vans come around your neighbourhood espousing ideas for sending nuclear weapons into North Korea and the like. There’s certainly no Japanese Ku-Klux Klan or racially aggravated violence to speak of. It’s more that normal Japanese people have little contact with foreigners, and seem bewildered what to do when that opportunity presents itself. But many Japanese people are at least uneasy around foreigners. Perhaps we are viewed stereotypically because there are only stereotypes to draw from. Blonde hair, blue eyes, large noses, speaking terrible Japanese, these stereotypes proliferate in Japanese TV shows and print media.

However, this occasionally irritating but ultimately harmless cultural insensitivity hides a much darker undercurrent, the effects of which go straight  to the highest level of government: the governor of Tokyo has stated, on record (See the section “racism”), that were there a natural disaster in Tokyo, all the foreigners were likely to rampage – looting, pillaging and much worse. We are barely tamed beasts, it seems, and thus we are to be watched carefully.

Today, this distrust has reached new heights with the announcement that all foreigners entering the country are to be fingerprinted and photographed. Ostensibly the reason for this is to combat terrorism and rising crime. I can perhaps see their point in doing this for visitors without visas – illegal immigration is becoming a world wide problem. But I have a visa, have lived here for ten years and pose a lot lower threat to law and order than the yakuza who are based near my city’s station. I already have to carry a special “Alien Registration Card” everywhere I go or face arrest – this already has my photo, signature, domicile and place of work written on it! Why not photograph the whole population? Crime, while rising, is lower than almost anywhere else in the world, and as far as I know is only committed by foreigners in proportion to their makeup of the entire population. By fingerprinting all the foreigners, you are telling the whole country that ALL foreigners are potential criminals and somehow untrustworthy. It won’t stop crime, but the sales of masks and gloves might go up.

The only country that photographs and fingerprints its tourists and visitors is the USA. Now, pardon me, but the USA has a much larger problem with terrorism than Japan. So does Britain, Spain and even France and Germany. They don’t take these draconian measures. The only terrorism perpetrated on Japanese soil has been perpetrated by the Japanese, most recently by the Aum Shinrikyou attacks on the Tokyo underground, and previously in the 70’s and 80’s by Japanese communist lunatics. But not a foreigner. Not once.

By bringing in these needlessly stringent rules the government assures the population that it is being strong on law and order, by picking on an easy target (since it’s not like we foreigners can vote against it) whilst really achieving very little: by concentrating on the foreigners it makes for more division in society, plays up to the right wingers and makes us feel less welcome in the communities in which we live. And of course, by focusing on the foreigners as a source of potential trouble, it makes domestic attacks like Aum’s subway atrocity more likely, since the police are literally looking the other way.

Red Dwarf (Super Nova cont’d)

Just a brief update on the Nova story from two or so weeks ago: The company has filed for protection against its creditors here in Japan, confirming what everyone feared: Nova is on its very last legs. Not last on the list of creditors are the some 4,500 foreign teachers here and all of the Japanese staff (some of which haven’t been paid since JULY!).

I walked past the Nova in my little city here today to find the shutters down and hastily pasted signs on them saying that the branch had closed and a number to call: a free phone number, so lord knows how many hours people will have to wait, or rather be made to wait to make their claims for refunds. Of course if customers with outstanding credit with Nova are counted among the creditors from whom Nova is to be protected, then we really are in trouble. Not only Nova, but the whole business of foreigners teaching in Japan is going to be hit with a lack of confidence, as well as a surplus of teachers and falling wages.

**UPDATE** According to the Times (nice to know I’m so on the button eh? – bringing you the news after it hits Britain!, and then courtesy of my brother in France) but not only my local Nova has closed, but EVERY Nova in Japan. That is  a lot ladies and gents. But then, so is the 210 million quid that the company owes.

Needed: One Rosetta Stone, good condition.

People, especially the Japanese themselves, always seem to have the idea that the Japanese language is difficult. The truth is that it isn’t, at least as far as speaking is concerned : The verbs are regular, and the grammar is uniform, written letters always conform to the same sound, and there are no tricky articles or tenses.

Compare this to English with our seemingly unrelated spellings and pronunciations (why is the present and past tense of “read” spelt the same but said differently?, why do we use both “f” and “ph”? Why is “c” hard in “crisp” but soft in “circus”?), our completely un-standardised verb-conjugations (“If “played” is correct, why don’t we say “eated”?), our completely whimsical use of prepositions and articles (“We go to the bank” but we need no ‘the’ when “We go to school”.). And these are just problems my primary school students have.

So in terms of gaining spoken ability, Japanese is quite straight forward. Which is more than can be said for writing: Firstly Japanese has two main “alphabets”, of 56 main characters each, one for Japanese words (Hiragana), one for loan words from other languages (Katakana). Not so bad, only about twice as much to learn as the alphabet’s upper and lower cases.

BUT… The Japanese don’t write most of their words using these alphabets. Only up to the age of seven or eight do any Japanese actually write full sentences in these alphabets. From age nine and up they simply use them for inflecting verbs, as prepositions and to write foreign words. : For the verb stems, adjectives and nouns, they use kanji. Kanji are Chinese ideographs – the things that people in the UK occasionally get tattooed with, thinking themselves cool to write something they can’t read permanently on their body. Now, to read a newspaper in Japanese, it’s estimated that you need to know 1,945 kanji before you even get to specialist words such as those found in science, economics etc.

In addition to this dizzying amount of lines, squiggles and dashes, the kanji (unlike the alphabets) don’t even have the same pronunciation everytime you see them. Take the kanji for “outside” for example, it can be pronounced “gai”,”ge”,”ha(zure)” and “soto” depending on the sentence which it is in, and which kanji character precedes or follows it. And four readings is by no means rare. Some kanji have up to eight ways to read them, depending on context.

There is no sure way, when looking at unknown kanji to even begin to guess what they sound like (unlike unknown words in any European language). The alphabet represents sounds, so even when seeing a new word we can hazard a guess to its pronunciation. Kanji on the other hand represents an idea – hard to guess what an previously unknown idea sounds like!

Dictionaries for kanji are arranged commonly according to the order in which their strokes are written: With some kanji needing up to 30 strokes of the pen to write, you also have to remember them in order, to be able to use the dictionary. Another way dictionaries use is to break the kanji down into smaller components and to list them according to these, but it can still take a full five minutes to find one word – something which makes reading road signs while on the move really tricky.

Kanji is on my brain today because I am to be the MC at my company’s All Staff Training event next week, and I have just been given my script. I’ll be awake most of the weekend before I sort out what it even means…

(Super) NOVA

English teaching in Japan has always been big business. Owing to the downright awful standard of English education in the school system, most Japanese wishing to master the language turn to the private sector. One of the largest private providers of English education is a company called Nova, which employs around 4,500 foreign staff in Japan.Nova’s sales techniques have always been quite forceful. Having worked their myself, it was not unusual to see sales staff corralling a new customer in a sales booth for hours on end, literally wearing down their resolve until the contract was signed. Nova sells its lessons as packages of points: A lesson cost a set number of points, and the more points you bought, the cheaper each individual lesson became. For example, 30 points might cost 20 000 yen (about 100 British Pounds) but 60 points might cost 35 000 yen. Thus customers were pressed to buy larger and larger amounts of points on the basis that the more they spent, the better value they received.

Customers paid everything up front (or financed via Nova’s credit options), and in such amounts that it didn’t take a genius to realise that customers were being sold amounts of points that wiould take years to use. In the meantime their needs to learn English might change or a whole host of personal circumstances could intercede and require that they terminated their contract with the company.

However, small print in the contracts, unmentioned by the sales staff in the sales process, stated that on cancelling a contract the customer was to forfeit a great number of their outstanding points. For example, cancelling a contract with 200 points remaining might only yield a refund to the monetary value of 125 of those points – a difference of tens of thousands of yen. Very sharp practice indeed.

Eventually METI, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, took Nova to court over this practice, and it was proven to be illegal. A rare victory for the customer in a country where consumer rights rarely make news.

METI’s penalty to NOVA was a ban on recruiting new students on long term contracts for a period of six months. Since NOVA bascially worked as a Ponzi scheme, needing to recruit more and more students each month to maintain its cashflow and expansion plans, they basically lost all of their revenue and liquid assets over night. While the consumer has celebrated a victory, the staff of NOVA, both foreign and Japanese are feeling the pinch: salaries for most NOVA staff, due on the 15th, have not been paid at the time of this posting. For foreign teachers, abroad without money, without job security or even a means to get home the situation must be very alarming indeed. Nova doesn’t pay unemployment insurance or national health insurance for its members, preferring its own in-house schemes, so some teachers are really going to be in trouble.

Even for those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected, it will still have serious repurcussions: 4,500 teachers looking for work at the same time in an already crowded market is going to push up competition for jobs, push down wages and increase job insecurity. For schools other than NOVA, the level of distrust generated towards the industry by these events has yet to be measured. There could be some stormy times ahead for all of us working in English education in this country.

And yet, NOVA is still recruiting teachers at it’s London office as we speak.

Noh, noh, definitely Noh.

Last weekend, me being the occasional culture vulture, we went to see a Noh play.

Noh is a kind of sylized Japanese art-form that is part play, part traditional music, which relates a story using about four or five actors, along with musicians and a chorus. It dates from the 14th century, which explains my first problem with Noh… had no idea what they were talking about. Not just me, even the Japanese around me were checking their translations. Thing is of course, the more you read the translation (at my reading speed anyway), the less you see of the action.

By far the strangest part was the music – it’s sort of an atonal collection of whoops from the chorus, to not-entirely challenging drumming from the musician, though there is a kind of badly tuned flute too. And the dancing – well all I can say is, well…. watch!

Actually this video is a bit more lively that what I watched. The one I watched was only semi-professional: kind of the Cotswold Players of the Noh world.

I love Japan, I’ve read more books about the culture and history than I can count. But Noh lost me. I was more confused leaving than I had been coming in! I don’t want to criticise, or seem like a philistine but I have to say… I don’t get it!