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.