Monthly Archives
Already : Hatachi Monthly Archives
Maybe I haven't really changed that much Wednesday August 29
While I believe that humans change based on their experiences, I often believe there is this core portion of someone's personality that really never changes, or at least, not all that much. I have four great parents, two of which happened to be directly involved in my birth. Those two share some characteristics that, as I have grown up, have become endearing:
- My Dad: I Don't Care What Your Policy Is As I Am The Customer, Damn It
- My Mom: Take Care Of Your Own Stuff Because The Fairy Isn't Going To Clean Up For You
But I digress. It would be simplifying the human experience to boil down my personality to the net sum of my parents' personality traits.
My parents, however, have both been known to be persistent in their opinions at times. I have received this quality without any disintegration in quality, it seems. I am stubborn. If I am wrong, I will give up -- that's fine. However, the problems of how we define what is right and what is wrong, well, that goes back to my Dad's ability to get Customer Service Representatives to give him whatever it is that he feels is necessary.
It could be generational, but one notable difference between my parents and I is the active interest that I take in making environmentalism an everyday part of my life. I don't say that my parents don't care about the environment -- that is a false conclusion -- but I do imagine that I think about it more than they do.
Recently, outside of our building at work, there have been delivery drivers sitting inside their vans, windows shut, ignition on, sleeping, and it's really been bothering me. There are taxi drivers and individuals doing this as well, but I can't very well tell an individual how to go about living their life. They paid for the gasoline, so I imagine that they will exhaust that gasoline into the atmosphere however they so please. That is, if I am not mistaken, part of owning a car: doing things your way. It's the personal individual freedom that it unlocks.
Delivery drivers, on the other hand, frustrate me. They are wasting their company's money, unnecessarily, and more importantly, raising the temperature of my Earth unnecessarily. Also, in the short term, the heat generated by their cars is contributing to the heat island effect that is Tokyo. When it is ninety-two degrees and I am wearing a full suit in the 2:00pm sunshine, it is an understatement to say that I am unhappy about these individuals' decision to unnecessarily heat up the neighborhood.
So, rather than be Japanese, which I find to be largely passive-agressive, I have decided to start taking a more active approach to these people.
I take a sheet of paper (which I have used the other side of, I am not wasting paper) from my bag and write the following in Japanese: "(We) ask for your cooperation to not idle your vehicle (here)." It's very Japanese, but it gets the point across. Then, I put it under the windshield wiper of the vehicle, such that the driver will need to exit the vehicle to remove it. Making the driver exit the vehicle is key, as they must understand What Ninety Two Degrees Feels Like.
I did this twice yesterday. Today I didn't see anyone there, but I could have missed them.
Simon recommended the Beverly Hills Cop trick: stick a banana in the tailpipe as to stall the vehicle. If the problem continues to escalate, I may be forced to such measures.
The old man at the public bath Monday August 20
When I lived in Yokohama, there was a public bath down the street that I'd often frequent. In the middle of summer, a quick soak would be so refreshing. In the middle of the winter, ten minutes in the sauna would keep me warm for hours. For 400 yen (USD$3.50), it was a deal. Sure, we use the word "public bath" in English, but this is more-or-less a spa with a sauna, shower area, hot-tub, and lounge area.
At the front of any public bath in Japan, there's someone to collect your money, and if you need it, sell you the odd shampoo bottle or mini-towel. I got to know both people that ran the front -- I saw them every two weeks or so for eight months.
Towards the end of my tenure in Yokohama, the old man started to talk to me more. Really, he wasn't that old: glasses, a warm smile, large streaks of gray appearing in his otherwise black hair, he was maybe only fifty-five or sixty. One night, I went right before close, and I was one of the last people there. As such, on my way out, we struck up a conversation. He wanted to know the normal things: where I was from, why I speak Japanese, so on so forth. I am good at that conversation.
Then, he did something that a lot of Japanese people do: talk negatively about Japan. I shouldn't say "negatively", as that makes him sound like a bitter, senile man. He is far from it. Gentle is the best word that comes to mind. Maybe I should say that he spoke lamentingly of a Japan that was, that is no longer.
I've lived long enough to know there's danger in believing people's recollections of the past: people shape their memories how they want them to be, and as their values change (particularly with age), so do their attitudes about the way things were. They may naturally begin to forget the otherwise-conflicting experiences that no longer match their value system. I don't believe this to be a cognitive process.
That point aside, this man's recollections of the Japan that used to be were clear: people had spirit (Japanese: 精神). They had a will for life that no longer exists in young people today. Young people today, he suggested, have grown up spoiled in a society that emphasizes material possession and, more than anything, money.
His conjecture is that this individualistic, money-hungry generation is ruining his Japan. This is why he spoke so somberly, I imagine. I'm not sure what I was supposed to do on the other end of this conversation.
The old man's final plea to me was along these lines: "Mark, you've come here to learn this language, to learn this culture, and to expand yourself and lead a fuller life as a result of a greater understanding of the human condition; please do not let what you see in front of you today block your vision of what Japanese culture should be or where it came from. There is more than you can see," he suggested.
I really respected this, as this man with whom I barely spoke other than to exchange currency for towels had suddenly an insight that was simply well-thought, well-put, and so pertinent to my situation. It could have been chance, or it could be my romanticization of the circumstances, but he had a great point.
The Japanese populace emerged from WWII cast as a test-case (democracy), a victim (of pre-war and wartime fascism), and a failure (of an ideology). I'll leave the scholars to debate whether or not it is fair to allow the Japanese to consider themselves, too, as victims, considering someone had to do all of the raping and pillaging (literally, not just as an expression), I've included "failure" to cover myself on the point. Certainly, you are better than the rest of the Asian races, Japan... as long as you have enough oil and forced-labor Taiwanese and Koreans.
But I digress -- war is hell, and I'm not here for a rehash.
I'm here to say that given these circumstances: failure, ruin, victimization, and poverty, it makes wonderful sense that Japan was set up in the way that it was post-war. Industrial education system. Focus on manufacturing. The rise of the salaryman. Fair wages for everyone. No one minds that you make the same as the guy next door, because everyone's in it together, and if we just work harder, we'll make some money, make the country rich again, be great, and be respected on a world stage. And that's exactly what happened.
Now cue the loss of the collective spirit. There's no need anymore: Japan is a rich country. Today's children grew up with The Things Their Parents Never Had. Why join in a collective spirit with the next door neighbor? We don't know him. We don't need to know him.
In the absence of a consumerism-driven society, people are left to their social networks and their status (yes, I do mean class status) as a means of driving identity (as identity was based on the group). Consumerism leads to patterned consumption: everyone has the same x or y. Identity driven from ownership. This is just the Keeping Up With The Joneses, and this is not Japan-specific.
The next step is product diversification: my x has more y's than yours. Soon enough, people begin to diversify their identities not by what they do for a living (and I do mean outside of work as well), and they start diversifying their identities by what they buy and what they own. A production-based economy moves to a consumption-based one.
The old man at the public bath tells me that Japanese youth have traded their souls for money and things. It hurts him. They no longer produce their own identities; they mix-and-match them from preselected templates. I need to go visit that old man sometime soon. I want to tell him that I still try my best to derive my identity from who I am, not what I own. I think he'd like that.
My camera: an unchanging classic? Saturday August 18
Around six years ago, Todd introduced me to a web page of one of The Coolest People You Will Probably Never Meet. His name is Pete, and he is funnier, smarter, better-looking, has more Game, and, generally, is cooler than Mark or Todd would ever be. At least, that was Todd and I's consensus at the time.
One of Pete's brilliances was his eye for picture composition. He sang the praises, though, not of his talented eye, but of his trusty Canon PowerShot, one of the sleekest digital cameras on the market in 2001.
So, when Todd and I got our first digital cameras, we did what any right-minded person would do: we emulated the success we had seen on Pete's blog. We both owned Canon PowerShots. I had two versions, as I was lucky enough to get the Best Buy warranty plan, so when one little plastic tab broke on my camera, thereby ceasing its operation, I just got a new one, and I traded up models. Never mind the fact that the camera was fixable, and operable with well-applied Scotch Tape.
My PowerShot SD110 lasted for years: it lived in my bag with my keys, my wallet, and many other items that had blemished its surface, but the optics have been good enough, and I like to think it's taken some damn good pictures over the years.
Recently, though, I've just felt that it's not quite up to snuff. 3.2 megapixel seems like nothing when I hear about today's cameras at 8.2 or more. Many of the models in Japan have a function that auto-corrects "blur" from your hand when you don't hold still and take a picture without a flash (this happens to me pretty often).
What did it for me, though, was the trip to the Great Wall of China.
I don't think many people know, but I will be flying to China in two weeks for a trip to a tourist-secluded portion of The Biggest Stone Fence Which Is Not Visible From Space. I don't know when the next time I'll have such an opportunity is, so I decided it might be just about time to get a new camera.
Today, I went to the Shinjuku Yodobashi Camera and bought myself the Canon IXY, which is really just the same thing as the PowerShot, but in Japanese marketing, this is what it's called.
What I was surprised about, though, is that while the megapixel difference is quite large, if you scale down the resolution of my new camera to the highest resolution of the old camera and take the exact same picture, they are essentially the same quality. This was a little disappointing, having just spent 30,000 yen (=USD $250) on the device. Did I just buy a bigger LCD screen, a new case, and the same old optics?
That said, the Canon PowerShot is an unchanging classic. Just ask Pete.
The Japanese obsession with packaging Thursday August 16
Why are the Japanese people so obsessed with packaging?
I'd like to believe that there is a simple answer to this question; much like the answer as to why there is excess infrastructure due to the Japanese construction industry: a government subsidy creates unnecessary things on purpose as a measure to maintain budgets and to infuse cash into the less-educated levels of society to keep the wa stable and everyone "equal". I could understand a simple answer like that.
Walk into any of the five main coffee chains in Tokyo competing for market share: Starbucks, Doutor, Tully's Coffee, Cafe Veloce, and Excelsior Cafe, and order an iced coffee (the implication is "to-go"). You get much more than an iced coffee: a plastic cup with lid, straw, napkin, nasty fake creamer, gum syrup sugar, and a stirrer, all placed neatly into a small paper bag. I'm sure if you look at the training manuals for these places, though, that's not just it: you have to fold and roll down the top of the bag three times over again, creating a nice little "tote" for the customer to carry.
Then there's the corner-fold.
It would be shameful, embarassing, and probably just flat out rude if you were to give a customer what they ordered -- an iced coffee -- without faithfully discharging one's filial duties to uphold the "corner-fold tradition". What an insult to the customer to receive a non-corner-folded paper bag that they will summarily throw away upon arrival to their office in approximately 90 seconds!
For those of you not in Japan, what you do here is seal this beautifully wrapped... iced coffee. Use your left hand to secure the portion (the "lip") that you've just folded down from the top three times, and then take your right hand and create a triangle by folding in the top right corner downward and to the left.
Only then, my friends, only then may you pass the iced coffee to the customer.
This is all just too much for me at 8:13am on a Tuesday. Just give me my damn coffee. I said coffee! Now! (You know how it can be.)
Accordingly, one of my favorite things to do when I encounter The Silly Things Japanese People Do Without Thinking About Them is to purposefully cause an interrupt in the system so that I can test their error exception handling procedures.
While I usually go to Cafe Veloce, as it has the cheapest iced coffee (by a margin of 50%, that's how bad this iced coffee is), I at first decided to adopt the Starbucks-asshole-order method:
"Iced coffee, medium, black, no cream, no sugar, no stirrer, no bag, no straw, no napkin please."
However, I could rarely get all that out before one of the four people behind the counter had attempted to give me something extraneous just to put themselves at ease. I was pretty sure I was going to get plastic forks or something just so they could feel like they gave me something. The straw was always the difficult part. You could always see the confused expressions written on their faces:
"How does he drink iced coffee without a straw?"
They wouldn't cut it out with the straw, even when I'd hand it back to them. Eventually, after about two weeks, everyone at the store learned my order, and everything started to run smoothly. Life was good, except for the occasional new employee who had to unlearn what they had learned when handling my morning order.
Call me an anarchist, but that's one of the problems with status quo: it can get boring. Let's have some fun.
About three weeks ago, I brought a travel mug that I had brought back from the States with me in my bag (while travel mugs are sold in Japan, they are not the everyday item that they are in the States). As I ordered my black, no napkin, no bag, and no stirrer iced coffee, I reached into my bag for the goods. Pandemonium ensued.
"We don't know if that is a large or a medium size," I was told.
"Charge me the large size! I don't care! I just don't want any packaging! Please! No more! I can't take it anymore!"
A sea full of dumbfounded faces.
One brave gentleman decided to get smart: he poured a regular large iced coffee into a to-go plastic cup, and then proceeded to pour these contents into my travel mug, and to everyone's great relief and surprise, it was a Large! "Thank God! We are saved from the wrath of the hairy, mug-wielding foreigner!" Never mind that we had to throw out a perfectly good cup to win this battle, which makes the entire point of me bringing my own mug a moot one.
And this is just coffee. You should see the candies.
