Random Memories #60

This is the conclusion of my series of memories based on working at a Japanese company for 12 years. It may not be the last memory of my experiences, but it will complete this series. The other parts are here:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.

After my company was purchased by a Nova subsidiary, my work experience took on a new cast. Yes, there was a lot of uncertainty with the imported staff from the new boss's former company, but, when the dust settled, my working situation became much more stable and there was a good deal less drama and strife. Rather ironically, it also lead to a bout with what would likely have been diagnosed as clinical depression (or quite close to it) and my eventual decision to quit.

While the old president brought a lot of strife into the workplace with his power playing, idiosyncratic behavior, and obsession with every little detail, the place felt more "alive" while he was there. There were periods of constant adjustment in which we created new content, flirted with new areas of business, and tended to work together as a team. Having been through the golden age brought on by the economic bubble in Japan, the old president, Mr. O., was always trying to revive his dying patient with some new economic therapy.

One of the early attempts to expand the company into the modern age which I absolutely dreaded the thought of was the inclusion of video phone calls. This was back before every granny and her grandchildren could log on to Skype using a camera seamlessly built into their computer and have a chat. In fact, it was back when ISDN (for those who don't remember, this was a step up in speed from dial-up internet back in the old days) was the cutting edge in connection speed technology. Mr. O. hitched his wagon to NTT (the Japanese equivalent to AT & T in the U.S.), bought some clunky-looking web cams, and finally upgraded our badly aging PCs to something with a snowball's chance in hell of running the proprietary software that was supposed to make talking with students and allowing them to see us at the same time a reality.

On the surface, the idea seems just grand. However, the president wanted this to be a one-way street. They wanted the students to see us, but did not want them to have to be seen. What was more, our students often conducted their telephone lessons on the fly from poor quality (and camera-less) cell phones, office phones, or pay phones. The chances that they'd choose not to call and miss their lessons was exponentially greater if they had to sit down at a specific time in front of a special PC outfitted with the right gear and software to process a video signal.

There was another aspect to this which we also hated. The fact was that we had to enter a ton of data into the computer as well as fill out various feedback forms while we talked to the students. There was no getting around the fact that we couldn't possibly be looking into the camera lens most of the time while doing the job. At least half of the calls required the sort of paperwork that one had to attend to rather consistently like drawing directions on a map, filling in a schedule in a roleplay in which an appointment was being made, or completing a final evaluation form which required specific comments. All of this had to be done during the lesson because we didn't have a guarantee of down time between calls. We simply could not see the value in such an upgrade when we'd likely spend the call looking at paperwork on the desk or at the computer screen and not the camera perched above it.

In the end, the entire idea was scrapped because the technology just was not there. The president appeared on camera for a test call and the video was so sluggish that he appeared to be moving in a jittery Matrix slow-motion scene. It was also simply a fact that the students did not care to see the teacher badly enough to bother. Even now, I teach one of my former face-to-face students via Skype and she could easily have a video lesson with me but prefers to just do it as an audio call. It's just not that important to see the other person's face and it takes a toll on the quality of the experience if the connection on either side or the equipment is not up-to-date.

During Mr. O's reign, my manager, D., and I worked closely together to weather the upheavals and develop new materials for each passing fancy. The experience felt fairly dynamic, though it obviously could be very stressful as well. When the new guy took over, everything felt flat and lifeless. We moved offices and I was placed at the other end of the building because of the noise and air conditioning issues. The phone cubicles needed to be away from the office workers and the salesmen in particular as they tended to get loud and raucous without regard for the fact that we were doing telephone lessons and their behavior interfered with our ability to do our jobs. Putting me - the only full-time instructor left - at the opposite end killed two birds with one stone. I no longer had to fry in the summer because I didn't have to compete with the reptilian metabolism of the office ladies and the noise situation was greatly reduced.

Unfortunately, D. was no longer doing telephone call lessons or did them so little that I was totally alone all day every day. The new president, Mr. G., was concerned mainly with growing sales through setting up a system of quotas with increasing sales targets rather than expanding the business. He did not want to invest in trying new things or building up new materials. We did refine old textbooks and I actually wrote and laid out an entire new book on my own only to have it set aside and abandoned, but materials development was not something which was being pushed anymore.

My work situation was stagnant and isolated. While I once used my down time to learn how to do desktop publishing and taught myself how to use Adobe's big ticket software, I'd largely mastered everything to the level needed for my work and that work was no longer even of much use. Beyond this situation, I'd also been cheated, mistreated, unappreciated, and taken for granted at the company for so many years that I felt quite worn out by it all. There was nothing behind me to be loyal to and nothing ahead to look forward to. What was more, business was so bad that the prospect of my husband coming to work there during busy seasons was vanishing from a low commitment by the company of employing him for only three months to zero. 

I've talked before about how life in Japan can be especially hard on women and that I knew no small number who became very depressed while living there. I saw it "break" more than one woman and I know how it happens because it broke me as well. It is a fact that women's brains work differently than men's. They process information and perceive the world differently on a neurochemical level. That tends to mean that they aren't missing much, especially if it has an emotional impact, whereas men tend to be more analytical and attend to less overall stimuli. 

Women don't miss much and multi-task. Men do see less and single-task. This is actually of great benefit in complex environments in which there are many people and things. This isn't a choice on either's part. It's a function of biology. If you couple women's sensitivity to the environment with living in a metropolis in which you are constantly bombarded with emotional stimuli, objectified both as a foreigner and as a female, and are generally without any substantial support system, it is a recipe for emotional difficulty.  

If you don't know the difference between being "depressed" and suffering from "depression", I'll tell you that a big part of it is energy. You lose the energy to go out and do what you have to do or struggle to get through the day. What is more, you often can't or don't enjoy things that you used to enjoy (in psychological terms, this is called anhedonia). As time went by, I became anhedonic and listless. You cannot "cheer up" because you lose the capacity to be happy about anything. It is not a choice to be sad or down in the dumps. It is a state which you cannot change by force of will.

I'm a strong person who is very disciplined. The fact that I write eight posts a week for two blogs regularly should speak to that. I can push myself in ways that most people cannot even when I am sick or having problems. It was that which kept me going to my job through depression for far too long. 

Over the course of a year, I started to feel more dead inside every day and it got harder and harder to go to work each morning. I took the longest vacation I could and came back feeling no better for having gotten away for three weeks. I knew it was long past time that I quit, but it was incredibly difficult to walk away for many reasons. The primary one was that I wasn't sure that I'd ever get a job in Japan which didn't involve face-to-face teaching again and I really believed that I didn't want to do that anymore (this ended up being a mistaken impression). I also felt an attachment to D. and my company which was hard to simply let go of. I think that, mainly, I was just afraid of making such a big change after having been in the same place - the same rut, really - for such a very long time.

During the vacation that was supposed to give me the boost I needed to go on, my husband and I talked and I finally decided to do what he'd been encouraging me to do for years - quit. I came in to work after that vacation and told D. that I didn't want to leave, but felt I had to. He said he understood and asked if I'd stay on for a little more than two more months rather than the one month I was contractually obliged to remain after giving notice. I agreed because I knew they would find it difficult to replace me and I also knew that he was looking at hiring as a lead up to the busy season. D.'s acceptance of my news reflected the fact that he knew I should have quit long ago as well, though I also knew he also wanted me to stay on some level. 

For a month, I cried every day because I was leaving. It may sound silly, but a lot of my identity and sense of stability was wrapped up in my job and company. It was like a family - an awful one that took me for granted and didn't always treat me well, but was always there for me. In Japan, where I had little else other than my husband to offer a sense of grounding, it was a lot to give up. 

After the first month, I cried myself out, but I was still sad to go and had moments in which I became emotional. I also started to train not one, but two successors. It seemed that I couldn't be replaced by a single party, especially when they'd been planning on dumping more responsibilities on me shortly before I left (though, honestly, that had nothing to do with my leaving - I was fine to do more work). Neither ended up lasting very long at the company after I left. 

One left within a year and the other within two. Neither was very good at the job and I knew this for a fact because one disappeared for over a month and I was sent the work at home that could not be done. It turned out he got arrested for getting into a fight at a soccer game and was being held by the police. Sometimes, even while he was there, I was sent some of the work he simply couldn't get done. While I was there, I did everything that was there no matter how large the load. It was difficult at times, but it could be done if one tried hard enough. My successors simply didn't care enough to try.

Later, he would just bug out and I was sent his work again until they replaced him.  I wonder in retrospect if the company appreciated the stability and work I did after the series of unstable employees who had no dedication to getting the work done. My best guess is that they never gave it a second thought. The chances that they suddenly had any regard for me or what I did after I was gone were pretty slim. 

The final time at the company was hard as much because of the depression I suffered from as any real loss, but the last day finally came. Mr. Saito, who was there the day I got hired, said he never thought I'd actually leave. Both D. and I had been there so long that he figured we'd be there when the lights were turned out or when we were both old and gray (D. was already gray, and I was well on my way).

The story that the office workers were told was that I was leaving to become a housewife. Only D. knew the truth about how I was just too mentally ill to go on there any longer. They bought me a nice set of dishes in line with this story and kindly shipped these heavy objects to my apartment rather than make me schlep them home. I gave a great goodbye speech which emphasized the aspects of working there that had me sobbing my way through so many final days and skipped over the negative parts that had ground me down over the years. There was no reason to burn bridges or grind axes at the end. 

I can remember what it felt like to stand in front of everyone and give that speech. I can't remember what it was like to get on a train for the last time and head home. I can only remember that the next year was spent in a state of depression in which I'd spend hours talking to my sister or playing Guild Wars or Diablo II with her and a friend of mine in the U.S. Besides that, I learned the ropes for how to shop in our local neighborhood at the cheapest places and how to become a better cook. I also started picking up private students one by one from ETC and my depression slowly lifted. It was also around that time (2006) that I started doing my first personal blog and I think a lot of the posts that I made at that time were a reflection of my state of mind. 

My views on life were certainly more negative then, but I think the writing was a way of trying to sort things out. That being said, once you have been seriously depressed, it alters your brain forever and you are inclined to be that way again and again. To this day, I continue to struggle, especially when times are hard as they have been since returning to the U.S.

It took nearly two years before I started to substantially find my way out of my depression and another year to make the next step and think seriously about leaving Japan. In retrospect, I think that my job was a trap that I stayed in of my own volition. I both wanted out and to stay in. I felt secure staying in it, even as it was taking away my sense of self-worth and represented living at a dead end. Having that job kept me in Japan which kept me from facing the scary prospect of leaving and trying to find my way in the U.S.- a place that had become more alien to me as the years went by and remains so to a great extent now.

Part of me knew quitting that job meant in some respects that I'd be "quitting" Japan. If I hadn't gotten depressed and become so dysfunctional, I'm not sure that I wouldn't still be there now. It's a sad truth that many people, including myself, are only motivated to change when they are miserable. It turned out that my life and mental health got greatly better between 2006 when I quit and 2012 when I left. I learned to love Japan more in the last three years than I had in the first 20, and that made leaving all that much harder when the time came. Those years are a story for another time, and possibly another place. 

(Yes, this is the end of this series, finally. However, more random memories from different points will be along. Thank you for reading this long-winded series!)

Random Memories #59

This is the enormous butt of a duck in stuffed toy form. Given what I mention in this post, the reason for showing something's tail end will become clear. FYI, this is in Sugamo, Tokyo. And, no, I don't get it either. 

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. The other parts are here: 
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

While Steve was the foreigner half of the materials development "team" that was brought in when our company was acquired - if two people can even be called such - Mr. Hagihara was the Japanese half. From the start, he was a strange entity. We weren't even sure of what to call him because sometimes he wrote his name in roman letters as "Hagiwara" and sometimes as "Hagihara". While the Chinese characters for his name could be read either way, surely he had a way that he was generally addressed in Japanese and that was the reading his family followed. It seemed as if he couldn't even make up his mind about who he was or wanted to present himself to be at the most basic level.

A superficial examination would lead one to conclude that Hagihara was a slightly mod version of the average Japanese businessman. He wore his hair a little long in the front and had a habit of theatrically tossing a lock back with a snap of his head when it fell in his eyes. He wore suits and ties, but his pants were stove-pipe cuts that resembled the early Beatles' attire. On one occasion, he came in with a fuzzy tail pinned to the back of his pants. It was a fashion choice that I hadn't seen since my high school days in the early 80's and seemed extremely bizarre on a Japanese businessman in the 2000's, especially as a choice for wearing in a conventional office environment.

When he first assumed his position, my boss, D. (who is from Australia) was uncertain of the command structure and was rather deferential to Hagihara. He didn't know if they were at the same level or if this strange creature was his boss. To that end, he tried to accommodate him as best he could. At one point, someone had left a cup of hot water with a tea bag in the break room and this apparently offended Hagihara's delicate sensibilities. D. asked me if it was my cup and I said that it was not. When I queried about why this was a cause for concern, he said that Hagihara wanted the offending item removed from the kitchen as he felt it was "starting to stink." That was the first and last time that I ever heard anyone object to the aroma of an over-steeped teabag.

As time went by, D.'s initial regard for Hagihara degraded as we learned that he was very poor at the job he was supposed to be doing. When he did the work, it was barely adequate English teaching material. More often than not, he seemed to get very little done at all and presented us with far too little far too late more often than not.

D. was in a bit of a bind not only due to the confusion about the hierarchy, but also the fact that our new boss/president, Mr. G., seemed to be friends with Hagihara. It was difficult for him to lodge a complaint about the slipshod work that was being done when he was under the impression that he would be narcing on the president's buddy. All of us who were from the original company were wary of our status compared to those brought in from our acquirer's company. D. kept mum, and time eventually solved the problem.

Hagihara was never great at the job, but he did initially show up for work. As time went on, he started to miss days and, when he did show up, he appeared increasingly bedraggled in appearance. Frequently, there were no calls to the office to say that he would be absent. When someone tried to reach him at home, there would be no reply. As time went by, he didn't seem to be shaving or showering every day. His clothes were sometimes rumpled or the same ones that he wore the previous day. Days on which he looked groomed and appropriate were becoming rarer and rarer. 

His absences became so common that it took over a month of missing work for us to wonder if he was not coming back. D. and I worked around him when finally word came down that Mr. G. was giving up on him entirely. For several months, there was not a peep from Hagihara about why he was gone or for how long. When D. finally made an enquiry, he learned the sorts of truths that rarely reach foreign ears when working in Japanese companies.

After talking to Mr. G., D. learned that the president and Hagihara were never buddies despite what the latter lead D. to believe. They had worked together at the parent company, sure, but they weren't in any way closer than most employees. Mr. G. believed that Hagihara was deeply in debt to loan sharks and that his absences were related both to the reason for those debts and his attempts to avoid his creditors. Chances were that his disheveled appearance on so many occasions was the result of not being able to go home to wash and dress for fear of running into whatever goons were chasing after him for money. 

It took about eight months of this sort of behavior and Hagihara's seemingly permanent disappearance before the company decided that he was finished working for them. They tolerated his erratic behavior, poor work product, and unaccounced absences. This may surprise those who see Japanese workers as cogs in well-oiled machines, but Hagihara was not the first Japanese person whose unprofessional behavior was tolerated nor was Mr. G. the only top boss who put up with it. One thing I certainly learned during my years in Japan was that the Japanese can be incredibly patient and tolerant when they want to be, or at least they are with employees who are not foreign. (to be continued)

Random Memories #58

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

As I mentioned in the previous post, a former coworker of mine from Nova just so happened to move in when the new boss took over. This fellow, Steve, wasn't just "any" coworker, he was notorious for a variety of reasons. Beyond being one of the not tiny number of Canadians who was offended to the point of being angry if he was mistaken for a citizen of the United States, he also had temper tantrums on the job.

Steve and I worked morning shifts at Nova on Mondays and Fridays. We were the only two people who started at 10:00 a.m. on those days so there wasn't any slack if one of us was late. It's not like another teacher could cover so the students would have to cool their heels until the teacher made an appearance. I was always either early or on time and Steve started to habitually show up late on these days. He made it clear that he hated being on the early shift and wanted taken off of it. The obvious conclusion was that he was intentionally late to vex the staff until they capitulated to his request.

After the 4th or so time, the staff told him that he would be docked the hour's pay for being late. When told this, Steve had an absolute meltdown in the office. He started shouting and dropping F-bombs loudly enough for everyone to hear. Fortunately, most of our students didn't know what he was saying, but his anger and volume certainly conveyed the message quite well. The strange thing was that knowing he'd be penalized didn't stop him from being late again. He just had another fit the next time.

Beyond his temper tantrums and America-hating, Steve was also known for being extremely pathetic when it came to women. He wanted to date Japanese women, but couldn't really make headway with any of them. Since he wasn't a bad-looking guy (though he wasn't a great-looking one either), it had to all come down to personality. If you're a foreign guy and even Japanese women dislike you, something must be amiss as cultural differences tend to obfuscate most personality problems and allow foreign men to find a girl abroad when they can't get one at home.

Steve dealt with this issue in two ways. The first one was that he tended to enlist the high school girls to go on outings with him. I must make it perfectly clear that he wasn't trying to romance them in a creepy way, but rather just find some girls who were willing to spend time with him. Part of the reason for this was certainly that he wanted to hone his Japanese skills and the only way to get in practice was to find Japanese folks to socialize with.

The result of polishing his language skills in this way was that he talked like a Japanese schoolgirl. I was new to Japan and couldn't understand anything, but I was told that he used female language and childish phrasing. The Nova office ladies tittered at how he spoke and the other teachers who understood him because they had similar language capabilities snickered behind his back.

The other half of his acting out on his need for companionship was that he formed a crush on one of my coworkers. This (British) woman joined Nova at the same time as me and had come to Japan with her (also British) boyfriend. She and I bonded over our newness at the job and tended to spend our lunch time together and socialized outside of work. Steve mooned after her pathetically and she tried to politely rebuff his advances. His response to this was to hate me because I seemed to be monopolizing her lunch hours and cutting off his access. It didn't occur to him that she was more interested in talking to me than a 22-year-old with a temper problem and a social life that included a lot of trips to Tokyo Disneyland with high school girls.

As one might imagine, finding out that Steve was going to be working in a similar capacity as my boss and me was not exactly happy news. The truth was that I didn't exactly recognize him at first and he's the one who recognized me. He had changed a lot in the decade since I'd last seen him. He had quite a few more pounds on his frame and quite a bit less hair on his head. Fortunately, he seemed to have grown up quite a bit and pretty much did his job and kept to himself. This was an enormous relief because my past experiences had primed me for the worst when I learned that Steve was one of the new president's transfers.

Part of the reason he had to bring in his own people was that we were losing the head of our materials coordination. Mrs. O. had been threatening for years to retire and we had been doing everything short of sacrificing goats to get some deity or another to have her make good on that threat. She wasn't a bad person, but her notions were so idiosyncratic and outdated that our hands were constantly tied when it came to advancing the program. She held us back in the 1960's when she learned English and her husband held us back in the 1970's in terms of publishing technology. We got him to allow us to move along, but she was immovable. Fortunately, she left when the company was sold and we got a new guy, Hagihara. As old-fashioned and hidebound as she was, he was not. (to be continued)

Random Memories #57

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

Before I went off on an extended tangent about my coworkers, I had mentioned that the company I had been working at, the darling of Mr. O., had been sold to someone who couldn't recognize a pig in a poke when one was wriggling around in front of him. I say that because business had been slowly tanking since I'd joined the company.

It was nearly a decade of solid decline in sales and a shrinking client list that caused Mr. O. to decide to put his baby on the market in the first place, but he sold it to a subsidiary of Nova ICI (the company famous for its owners disgrace and for treating the teachers at its conversation schools pretty shabbily) as an opportunity to gain our company's "know how".

Mr. G., which is what I will call the man who arranged to purchase our company, was interested in the materials and effort that went into creating a correspondence course that appealing to major companies. I don't know how Mr. O. danced around the fact that sales had been capsizing for a decade, but I'm sure there was a lot of selective showing of various books and name-dropping of major corporations. The idea that the company was being sold to a subsidiary of a major English conversation school struck terror in the hearts of all of the employees and my Aussie boss D. and I were no exception.

Our main concern was that Mr. G. would decide to replace all of the employees with staff that he knew from his office. Of secondary concern was the possibility that Nova's tricks to cheat employees out of wages and benefits would be imported. We were already getting screwed over on holidays as the president flagrantly broke the law and capped our vacation time at well below the legal first year mandated level of ten days and we imagined that this might mean we'd also be cheated out of part of our salaries as well.

It turned out that Mr. G did bring in his own staff, but he assured all of us that he wanted the entire old team to stay. In fact, he felt that he really needed us if he were to retain the very thing that convinced him to purchase the company in the first place - the "know how". He was more concerned about our quitting than we were about being fired and that was a relief to all.

Despite our worries, the new administrators swept a lot of the thornier aspects of our employment aside. When Mr. G. came in, he followed the law. He didn't change our salaries and both D. and I finally got the vacation time we were due. I went from being locked at five days off per year to receiving the full number that I was due - 20. What was more, no one was put out by the idea that I might actually take all of the days off that I was entitled to.

Beyond doing what was legal, Mr. G. ended up not being around very much. The president's office which oversaw our cubicles was now vacant much of the time and that eased up the well-heated summers that we had been enduring. With no president to dictate 84 degree heat blowing down on us in summer, we were free to set a more comfortable temperature.

There's an old saying about hitting yourself over the hammer. "Why do I hit myself over the head with a hammer? Because it feels so good when it stops." When Mr. G came in, I felt as if I had been hit on the head with a hammer for ten years and it felt so good now that it had finally stopped. The old president had been unfair, controlling, irrational, old-fashioned, and omnipresent. Having a president who did not micromanage, cheat, or watch us like a hawk felt like coming up for air after being held under water for a very long time. It wasn't that we were suddenly treated so well, but just that we stopped being treated so poorly.

Though these changes were refreshing and welcome, we still had to manage the personnel changes that were to come. Of greatest concern to D. and I was the foreign materials development person who was being imported. We were both concerned that he was going to slowly take over our work, but it turned out that was not going to be the case. The weird thing about it was that the two people who came in to work with us - one foreign and one Japanese - were not entirely new to me.

One of them was a teacher who I'd worked with at Nova before. His name was Steve and I mentioned him briefly in my first post in this series. No one was more surprised than me that he was still around in some capacity related to Nova, and his presence did nothing to inspire confidence in the rosy future of the company. (to be continued)

Random Memories #56

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

It was much easier getting to know foreign coworkers than the Japanese ones for a variety of reasons. The primary one may seem to be language, but it was far from the most limiting one. The main issue was that we did not work much together and that we were on different schedules. The foreigners were on 11:00 AM-7:00 PM and the Japanese, ostensibly, 9:00 AM-5:00 PM. They had lunch while we were just getting started.

Since there was no natural way in which we could socialize with our Japanese coworkers, it took many years to get to know the ones who went the distance. While we hear a lot about Japanese workers loyalty, the truth was that only two male workers were there for the entire twelve years that I was at the company. In fact, the most senior people at the company to this day are those two men and my former manager, D., an Australian. If you measure time served as a function of devotion to the company, he's right up there with the hardiest of my former Japanese colleagues. As I've mentioned before, some of them moved on to greener pastures, but many of them "quit" in the best interests of the company (aka they were fired).

The first Japanese staff member that I spoke to was Mr. Saito. He was present at my interview and seemed to be trying to find ways not to get me hired. Every question he asked seemed designed to point out my lack of experience in critical areas such as not having directly worked with businessmen on a regular basis. I will never know if this was just his way of conducting a shrewd interview or if he really didn't want me there, but he was to become the Japanese staff person that I worked the most with and knew the best.

That last sentence in no way should indicate that Saito and I became friends. By virtue of the fact that he was the Japanese manager of the English materials section, he simply was the person D. and I had the most contact with. Saito was a classic example of a Japanese businessman in many ways. He wore the proper dark suits and ties. He was physically indistinct for a man of his era - a bit short with a petite physique. He rarely called in sick or took much in the way of vacation time, showed proper deference to the shacho (president) at all times, and worked late.

Saito was a nervous sort when it came to his job. He had ended up in a small company with few chances for advancement and had a skill set based almost entirely on serving that one particular company. This situation is one that is extremely common in Japan and a huge part of the reason why the labor force is greatly less mobile than that in the U.S. or other Western countries. While we hear lots of talk about "loyalty", a fundamental truth is that most workers are groomed specifically to deal with their companies and other businesses tend not to want them.

Saito was sure that, if he had to leave the company, he'd never get a job as good as the one he had so he did absolutely everything he was asked no matter how much he hated it or how unfair the request was. In fact, I later learned that Saito started off as a salesman and was transferred into the English materials development section against his wishes. He complied, and they asked him to do it because his English was better than any other person currently on staff who was not already in that section, but he didn't want to be writing text books, proofreading, and doing translations.

Saito knew that he wasn't qualified, but the company preferred to shuffle the players they already had around than to recruit new ones who were more capable. This, too, is common in Japan. They hire workers and move them around to various sections even when their skills lay in a particular area. Rather than build great text developers or fantastic salesmen, they'd rather breed a mediocre jack of all trades.

It wasn't just tiny companies like mine who did this, but major corporations like Honda and Sony do this as well. It promotes a certain amount of inefficiency, but insures "loyalty" by making employees good at being at their company rather than good at one particular thing. It keeps the labor market from seeking higher wages based on higher skills.

It wasn't that Saito loved sales so much as he lacked confidence in his abilities. He soldiered on, but he was relieved when the company's tanking fortunes shrunk the materials development section and he got transferred back into sales. Once he no longer worked with the foreign staff and felt he had to oversee us and fret over inconsequential details like whether or not our red pens had enough ink to make corrections look dark enough on student reports, he loosened up and I got to know him a bit better as a person.

Though Saito seemed like an enormous straight-laced dork, he was actually very much into rock and roll music. When he found out I had been an enore told me that he liked KISS's "simple rock music" and he played the keyboards at home. In fact, I gave him one of my old Macintosh computers when I retired it because he was into MIDI at the time and couldn't afford a computer that would let him work with it. This "donation" stunned him because he perceived it as incredibly generous, but the truth was that it was such an old thing that I couldn't sell it if I wanted to.

I should make it clear that Saito wasn't paid less than me - far from it. The difference was that he had bought a condominium and he and his wife, who worked part-time, were on a budget trying to get it paid off as quickly as possible. They didn't have any children, and in fact it was through him that I learned why a plastic storage box I had was called a DINKS* box, but I think he was all too well aware of the relative insecurity of working at our company. If he got laid off or forced to quit, he knew they'd be in enormous difficulty so he lived as simply as possible, including growing his own potatoes in a little garden that was a part of the condo deal.

When you look at most Japanese businessmen sitting on trains or walking in blue- and gray-suited masses in the more crowded areas, it's easy to reduce them to the worker drone stereotype. You imagine them being formal and professional, working late at night, and being deferential to bosses. It's easy not to assign them the thoughts and feelings of a normal person because they seem so polished and together on the surface - or at least they do if they aren't getting home from a bender and falling asleep on the train or upchucking on the platform.

Though Saito fit the stereotype of a normal Japanese businessman in every way, I got to see many of the little human cracks and quirks through time. This is no easy feat because most Japanese people hide who they really are when they're on the job and they push foreign workers in many cases to comply with rigid rules such that you start to feel they are no more than their jobs. Though they may not show it, many of them are just as real, possessing of complexity and depth, and afraid of bad things happening as you are. Saito didn't dye his hair yellow and hang out in Harajuku, but he did have his own personality. It was just usually hidden behind a mask when he was on the job. (to be continued)

*Double Income No Kids

Random Memories #55

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

Given the parade of temps, there are going to be a lot of people who I won't write about in detail, but I do recall a fair bit about certain ones and would like to note what I remember here briefly. This forum is for me to tell people about life in Japan for some people, but it is also about my keeping a record of my experiences for myself. Each of these people left an imprint on me for one reason or another. They told me something about the human condition and how various people respond to circumstances. In no particular order, here are the remaining temporary workers who I had a significant impact on me:

Natasha and Lisa - These two women don't actually belong together in any way except for the fact that they served together. It's important to note that the manager, D., preferred to hire women as they tended to be less troublesome and better workers on the whole. This wasn't always the case, but it often was so it wasn't unusual for there to be only female temps when it was possible to hire women.

Natasha was a common breed in Japan, but very uncommon in our working situation. She was the only expat that ever worked at our company. That is, she was the privileged wife of an American man who was stationed in Japan as part of his job in the finance industry. They lived in the Azabu area and had all of their needs lavishly looked after, at least by the standards of those of us who had to do things the hard way (i.e., for ourselves and with limited or minimal support).

From the very beginning, it was clear that Natasha had no idea what she was getting into. She was both intimidated by the situation in which she felt like a fish out of water and displayed a sense that she was better than the job. On more than one occasion, she overtly stated multiple statements to the effect that the work was beneath her, but she was not going to break the contract anyway.

I don't think Natasha was a bad person because she betrayed a certain level of snobbery. In fact, I think that attitude was a defense against the alien environment in which she found herself. She worked with my husband, D., me, and Lisa and all of us had been in Japan for awhile and knew the score. She had just come along and was in a pampered environment that felt like complete hardship. I think she rejected the job because she was scared and the atmosphere was one in which it seemed we belonged, but she did not. She helped me see that sometimes an attitude of superiority is actually a manifestation of internal terror.

Fortunately for her, Lisa was on the same shift as her and she was the sweetest person one might ever know. I'm still in contact with Lisa on Facebook so I know that things in her life have been a bit of a roller coaster, but she's done her best to ride it along. When I worked with her in Japan, she was an ardent fan of Kevin Spacey. These days, she's even more into Stephen Colbert. Her preoccupation with an American celebrity, charming as he is, is curious since she's British and probably doesn't have much of a vested interest in the political humor that he uses.

Lisa came over to our place for dinner several times and she and my husband would go to Costco together on occasion during the years when my back was too screwed up to travel much at all. She was also into various small rock bands and would travel across the world at times following a group I'd never heard of called "Gene". At the time that we were both in Tokyo, Lisa was married to a British man, but it turned out that she wanted to go home and he did not. Their marriage could not stand the stresses of their divergent lifestyles and they divorced. She returned to England and continued to teach English there (I believe she had proper ESL qualifications).

The interesting thing about the Lisa/Natasha pairing was how their morning shift had such a different dynamic than the Brant/weasel one that I spoke of in last week's post. Brant made things worse for everyone by complaining and demanding. Lisa made things better by offering a balanced perspective and a grounding in a gentle and kind perspective. The temporary workers, when they worked a different shift together, formed their own little cultures based on the person who had the most personality power. It could end up a disaster that threatened to destabilize the whole group of instructors, or as a buoyant experience that made everyone happier to go to the office.

Lola - Lola worked with Scott before he stayed on as our final "permanent" worker (besides me). She was an older woman, or at least she was older than everyone except D. She was in her early 40's at a time when I was in my early 30's. From the start, Lola practically vibrated with anxiety. She also had the misfortune of arriving at a difficult time for me when I was prone to complaining about the illegal and unfair practices at the company.

I didn't realize that telling her about how we were often fired after three years for no reason and were not given our legally allotted vacation time was going to create so much stress for her. She was another person who was there with her husband, though he was an (American) academic and not a coddled expat, and she had no plans to stay on after the busy season work was over. I'm not sure why she should care about the conditions there so much, but one day she flipped out and started crying and speaking with agitation in an uncontrolled fashion about a variety of things which were upsetting her.

One of the strangest things which she was worked up about was how D. and I teased Scott. As I said in my previous post, Scott was a goofy fellow in the nicest possible way and we ribbed him a lot. He seemed to take it well, but Lola had concluded that we were mercilessly attacking him. When she fell apart and started ranting about how horrible we were to him, Scott was just as shocked as D. and I were. We made it clear, as did he, that this was all in good fun and no one was hurting anyone or feeling hurt.

Lola had a lot of health issues including a disease which caused her internal organs to slowly degrade and her fingers to lose circulation and grow incredibly cold and numb. I think that the stresses of her health issues and the difficulty of life in Japan were creating pressure in her that she vented out at an inappropriate time and place. That being said, I certainly learned that people often do not hear what you're saying, but rather receive a message that you do not intend.

The way in which someone wears their own colored glasses and filters everything through them came through loud and clear with Lola. She saw us as hurting Scott. She saw our long-term work situation as one that she had a vested interest in when there was no rational reason to believe that was the case. Neither of these were true, but that was the filter she passed everything through. After this situation, I became much more cautious about what I said and who I said it to. Her outburst and emotionalism was such an unexpected shock and I learned something about perspectives and how the internal workings of other people could be vastly different from mine.

Marnie - Marnie was a major "wild card" among temporary workers in that she was not only a temp, but a part-time one. She was this incredibly sunny person who fulfilled the stereotypical image most Japanese folks had of "friendly" Americans. She lived with her Japanese boyfriend and seemed to be in a bit of a holding pattern with the direction of her life at that point in time.

It was very easy to get along with Marnie and she and her boyfriend came to dinner at our apartment once. During that visit, she talked about how he, a "100% Japanese" person was often mislabeled as being some other flavor of Asian. She and he both told us that he was mistaken for being a Filipino based on his skin color and eye shape or some such thing.

I couldn't see it, but then I never was able to point at one person with typically Asian features and say he or she was Korean, Japanese, Chinese, etc. It wasn't that they all looked alike or anything as offensive as that. I just didn't think that there were particular physical features that distinguished them. There were behavioral ones, of course. I could tell by demeanor quite often if someone was or was not Japanese, but not by scrutinizing the shape of their eyes, height of the bridge of their nose, etc.

Marnie's boyfriend was the first Japanese person I'd ever known who faced some discrimination based on his appearance. He wasn't getting much of it, but occasionally his true lineage was questioned because of how he looked. I'm guessing that people who look rather remarkably different, but are Japanese nonetheless saw more of it than him. Prior to this experience, I assumed that the Japanese were all united as one big happy family by blood. It was a silly thing to conclude, but not quite so ridiculous when you consider how many times I heard the words "we Japanese" uttered as if they were a monolithic entity united in thought and purpose as well as language and culture.

Ultimately, my experience with Marnie also confirmed something about women that many men already know and that was that they sometimes got pregnant in order to force a man's hand. She told us about how she had to get her birth control pills from America because it was so hard to get them in Japan. That let me know that she was in charge of the protection. She also had stress in her life over her visa because she had difficulty finding sponsored work.

She wanted her boyfriend to marry her for a number of reasons. He said he wanted to anyway, but was sitting on the fence and refusing to get off. She expressed frustration with his indecision on more than one occasion. Getting pregnant (surprise!) fixed her issues across the board. Her boyfriend finally agreed to marry her. She got her visa and didn't have to worry about how she'd remain in Japan.

While it is possible that the pregnancy was truly accidental, I have my doubts considering the circumstances. Japanese men are notorious for "taking responsibility" after getting their significant others pregnant by marrying them. Unlike American men, the idea that a man should be married to the mother of his child is still common there. Marnie was the first foreign woman who got a ring on her finger when she got a bun in the oven, but wasn't the first or last woman who I knew in Japan who got a marriage license when she got pregnant.

Looking back over the parade of people who I worked with, I can more clearly see what I learned from the experiences with those people. My maturation process was accelerated by knowing them. While many people look at working in Japan, and especially working in anything to do with English, as a static process in which one parties at night, works an unimportant and stunted job during the day, and rakes in the cash, I had a very different experience. I learned a lot not only from the foreigners, of course, but also from the Japanese. (to be continued)

Random Memories #54

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

There are some people out there who have a reflexive response to explain away the bad behaviors of other people. If someone behaves rudely, they'll say, "oh, he's just had a bad day". There are others who never exercise empathy or understanding in the face of bad behavior. When they are treated badly, they say that such people are choosing to be rude and could be different if they tried.

The truth behind why people behave poorly is likely a moving point between these two sides. That is, sometimes people are jerks because they've had a bad time and their emotional and impulse control are compromised at present, but they may behave better on another day. Their ability to tolerate stress or consider the feelings of others is low so they just act out. Sometimes, they are oblivious to the fact that they are behaving badly or actually consciously choose to do so because they feel justified in some fashion.

My husband and I had an experience recently while going to a local donut shop which illustrated this. The shop has a sign at the register which instructs patrons to form a line at the back of the shop. Two people entered the shop before us and stood just inside the door instead of forming a line toward the back. We followed the proper instructions, but we weren't going to attempt to horn in on the people who got there first. I should note that they "beat us" by a hair and actually hurried to rush to the door when they saw us approaching to insure that they were able to cram in in front of us a few seconds before we arrived.

While we hung back enough to allow them to go first, the shop clerks told them to move to the line at the back. One of the two people, an older man, told my husband and I that we "had to move back" because he was there first. He could have politely said, "excuse me, but would you mind stepping back," but instead, he issued an order. This is the sort of person who I'm inclined to feel, based on the petty rush to get there before us and the language he chose to use, is probably just an asshole because he feels entitled. Some people are just like that.

One of the temporary teachers at more former job was also such a person. Unlike the temp. that I wrote about last week who had a very hard time in life, this guy was simply a swaggering, arrogant jerk. His name was Brant and he was Australian, and one of the younger people that we had employed at around 24 years of age.

During this particular busy season, the company's business was on an all-time low. There were only three temps, Brant and a weaselly little blond American guy whose name I've long forgotten were on the morning shift. My husband, the manager, D., and I were on the afternoon to evening shift. That meant that Brant and the weasel tended to socialize together since they shared phone cubicle time and breaks whereas my husband, D., and I were on a different schedule.

During this particular time period, I was having horrible back pain. I would get up in the morning and struggle through my agony to get to work. My company's office was located about a 15-minute walk from Shinjuku station and I couldn't make the journey all at once because of the pain I suffered after traversing a short distance. I'd struggle about a third of the way and have to sit and rest then force myself along for another third and finally make it there. Sitting, unfortunately, became nearly as unendurable as standing and I was spending the first five or six hours of my eight hours at the office with searing pain running along my lower back and legs. After awhile, it would abate, but easily two-thirds of my day was spent in terrible pain.

After enduring this for about a month, I finally went to a doctor and he said I almost certainly had a disc problem and had to stay in bed for at least two months and allow it to heal or risk permanent damage. That meant that I could not come in to the office, but I arranged to work from home. I corrected reports from my bed and received phone calls from there as well. During about one and a half months of the time Brant was there, I wasn't in the office and he took it as a cue that he was king of the cubicle we had briefly shared.

When I returned, he was incredibly rude and demanding toward me. Though my husband and I had been there for years before he ever graced our office, he acted as if he were the senior employee. He had moved around the documents and maps that were pinned to my cubicle for reference and put up his own personal pictures. When I took some of the magnets he'd appropriated for the items he was amusing himself with to put back the work-related reference documents he'd removed, he complained bitterly to D. that my husband was "stealing" them to mess with him.

He was too stupid to figure out that I was restoring my cubicle to its business-related state. He could only see what was happening as some sort of pissing contest in which his authority was being challenged. The fact that he, as a temporary teacher who was on a three-month contract and had no experience at the job felt he possessed any sort of authority was also a reflection of his particular personality type. In fact, he consistently acted to intimidate me by angrily and aggressively speaking to me about what he saw as unwarranted changes to "his" cubicle.

At one point, I remember this guy, who was easily 8 inches taller than me, standing in my way and blocking my access to the bathroom and yelling at me aggressively over one of the perceived challenges to his dominant position in the booth. I remember this experience well because it was the first time in my adult life that I had a "fight, flight, or freeze" reaction physically. I remember feeling so shocked at the aggressiveness of his behavior and actually feeling frozen to the spot. I wasn't afraid of that asshole, but my body had other ideas.

Brant's behavior was thoroughly inappropriate, but D. hated conflict with a passion and did not want to confront him. The swaggering idiot knew this and he provoked D. as well as a way of further trying to prove his alpha male status. Brant sat there at the correction table one day and told D. aggressively that he felt that his and the weasel's opinions were not taken as seriously as those of us on the later shift and that it was not fair. The notion that either he or his scrawny buddy knew enough about the job after a couple of months there to have an informed opinion was laughable, but D. wanted to be equitable about things.

D. asked him what sort of things he had ideas about that he felt were being ignored. After a pause - most likely in shock that he was being called on his nonsense- he finally managed to fabricate something which was appropriate to the job that he might remark upon. The huge bull moron said, "you know the fourth telephone call about the weather, I don't like that call." I'm sure that one can see just how informed that opinion was and how useful it was to us in terms of improving the programs we offered our students. D., who continued to be respectful and egalitarian, asked why he didn't like it. After another longish pause to allow his sluggish synapses to fire, he said, "it's boring." D. resisted the obvious response, which was that the calls didn't exist to amuse the instructors, but he did essentially shut Brant down at that point.

The truth was the Brant wasn't interested in anything other than being the top dog. He had no opinions about the actual job. He just wanted to consistently be given his way and to not do anything he didn't want to do. He took to sitting in the cubicle and reading the paper rather than doing his job and he made sure that everyone could see that he was doing what he wanted to do by flapping the pages loudly and unfolding it such that it was nearly a waving flag for all to see. Most people who read in their cubicles tried to body block anything not related to work. Brant filled the space around him with that paper and made as much noise as possible.

Oddly, the president, who usually had a tantrum when teachers did personal things during office hours, took no interest in Brant's flagrant disregard for the rules. When we weren't busy, we were supposed to at least pretend otherwise if we couldn't find actual work to do. Brant would read the paper when there were reports to mark and he did so from a cubicle right in front of the president's office. He simply had decided to do whatever the hell he wanted and the president didn't seem to mind in his case. It was my opinion that this was another one of the president's idiosyncratic preferences for an employee based on appearance. Brant was tall, young, and probably what many people would consider attractive - if you like your men to look like a Ken doll. He was not my type, but maybe he was the president's, so he let him carry on with his paper reading without protest.

D. blamed me to some extent for Brant's behavior because he felt my absence allowed him to believe he was entitled to be the big cheese. I think he felt that, had I remained, Brant may have respected me as the senior employee in our shared space, but I think that his need to show he had the largest penis in the office was going to be an issue whether I had been there in agonizing pain destroying my back or not. In the end, he was the biggest dick there, but not in the way he believed he was. (to be continued)

Random Memories #53

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. This is a continuing series talking about the time I spent working in a Japanese office. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

After my final "permanent" coworker flew the coop, I spent most of the time as the sole instructor at the company. It was just me and my Aussie manager/boss, D. Fortunately, D. and I got along well and were both hard workers. Unfortunately, D. didn't always have the best of luck with temporary teacher applications. This was especially the case in the "early" years when there were more jobs in Japan and we didn't pay particularly well or offer the same sort of job security as other companies. Sometimes, he had no choice but to take whoever applied, and this could create some problems.

As a brief reminder, I'll say that my company had a "busy season" during the winter. It varied in length, but it tended to last from some time in November to the end of March. During that time, we hired extra instructors to teach telephone lessons and correct the reports the students turned in. The work tended to be pretty oppressive at the beginning of the week and level off by the end. Temporary instructors needed to get up to speed after about a week of training and many of them struggled to manage the workload in terms of the reports at the beginning. Most eventually got better by the end, but that wasn't always the case.

There were a lot of memorable temps, and I can't go into a complete profile of all of them nor do I think it would be especially interesting if I did. I will, however, focus on a few of the outstanding ones. The best ones, of course, were converted into permanent workers who stayed on with me (Scott and Amelia) up until we no longer needed them. The manager, D., and I breathed a sigh of relief when the worst ones finally hit the road.

It should be noted that, due to visa issues, it was easiest for a company that didn't provide sponsorship to people who were from countries that allowed for working holiday visas. Since a company can only sponsor if you're on a contract of a certain duration, a place that needs you for three or four months needs employees who walk in with a visa already in their passports. That meant we saw a disproportionate number of Canadians, Australians, and people who were married to Japanese spouses. The first two groups qualified for working holiday visas and did not need a visa sponsor. The latter had spouse visas.

I mention this because it may appear that we had our worst experiences with one group in particular, and that statistically did seem to be so. However, I think this reflected, at least in part, the distribution of visas more than any nationality-based problems. The fact that some of the most dismal workers were Australian was something that D. often said embarrassed him, but when you have a bureaucratic situation that means you get more particularly young people from a certain place, it's not surprising that you'll see more problematic employees from that country.

There were two Australians in particular who were incredibly disruptive to the workplace. The first one was a woman named Vanessa. Vanessa was married to a Japanese man who had once had a good job and had been stationed in various countries around the world. She said that she and her husband had lived in New York City for a time, and it was through her that I learned that, as bad as the roaches could be in Tokyo, they were very much worse in New York. She said that the place they stayed in was absolutely infested and that she was shocked one day to find that the entire underside of her kitchen table was covered in them one day. To me, this sounded like something out of a horror movie.

Though I hit it off pretty well with Vanessa at first, there was one thing that I knew from the start about her. That was the fact that she had lied on her job application about having a university degree. Though our company didn't need to sponsor her, and that was the usual reason to require a degree, they required one because they promised their clients that their instructors were educated to a certain level.

I didn't "know" that Vanessa had lied based on intelligence, but rather based on behavior. I do not believe that people who have gotten university degrees are necessarily smarter than those who do not. However, there are those four extra years of discipline that they go through which creates a personality change in most (but not all) people. I would hesitate to call it "maturity", but I think that it may come across as being that aspect. There should be a special word for this quality, but there is not. Whatever it was, I knew Vanessa had never spent years applying herself to achieving various goals and come out the other side accomplishing them.

At first, Vanessa seemed to be doing okay with the job. She wasn't stellar at it, but she muddled through on the reports as many people do initially. I talked to her some about her family life, and she was only too keen to tell me how troubled it was. Her husband had lost his regular job and now was doing work for a delivery company. They had intense arguments that sometimes resulted in them hitting each other. What was worse than this was that they had a son who witnessed all of this and would often beg his parents not to fight or be mean to each other. Neither she nor her husband seemed to have much emotional control and, while she felt bad about subjecting her son to this instability, she felt that she could not stop participating in these verbal and physical altercations.

I tried to be supportive of Vanessa. In fact, we even had telephone calls in which we seemed to be building a friendship. I even tried to help her deal with her recalcitrant iMac when it kept crashing or disconnecting. She had a habit of just turning it on and off all of the time rather than using proper shutdown techniques and I advised her to stop doing this as I was sure it was not helping things. During one of these calls, she spontaneously confessed what I'd already figured out - she had lied on her resume about a university degree. She not only didn't have one. She had never attended university at all. I started to feel a bit close to her and then some very strange things happened.

After a few weeks, Vanessa simply did not show up one day. The following two  days, she also failed to make an appearance at the office. D. and I wondered if she'd simply flown the coop and failed to give notice. On the fourth day, she returned and was unapologetic about her unexplained and unannounced absence. In fact, she was belligerent and hostile at the fact that some of the work that was set aside for her to do in terms of reports had started to pile up while she was gone.

As the days went by, she did less and less of her report correction and the pile got bigger. D. had put me in charge of the report sorting and I always balanced the workload equally among all of the instructors. There were three levels of difficulty and the highest level reports (level three) were very time-consuming to correct so it was incredibly important that each teacher be given a fair number of each level.

Vanessa did not do all of her level three reports each day. In fact, she accumulated an increasingly large stack and got very pissed off at me for giving her more each day. I was giving her the same as everyone else. The rest of us were just getting our work done and she was not. She expected that, if she slacked, we'd all do more work to cover for her. D. explicitly told me not to permit this as it would be unfair to everyone, but Vanessa "blamed" me for this pile of unfinished work that she felt increasingly  frustrated by.

In the end, Vanessa did as so many people who couldn't manage the job did. She just walked away without so much as a word and we scrambled to cover for her. A few months after she vanished, she called me at home. She was completely drunk and disoriented and apologized for being so bitchy with me. She said that she didn't know what happened because we had been getting along so well before and it all seemed to fall apart. Most of what she said was incoherent, and I felt sorry for her, but I never contacted her nor did she contact me again. I think I may have tried to call her at one point in time a month or so later, but the number was disconnected.

My experience with Vanessa put me in touch with a side of life in Japan that I rarely had access to. That was the part in which there is domestic violence, economic hardship, and family dysfunction. I'd had more than a little experience with foreigners who had bugged out on jobs because they'd found better offers or just decided they wanted to move or or go home, but I'd never worked with someone who had her personal life fall apart.

I strongly believe that the three days that Vanessa vanished were due to alcoholism and her domestic situation. They may have been the equivalent of a "Lost Weekend", or it may simply have been that her life was so stressful that she couldn't face the job during those days and had no wherewithal to manage it when she returned.

The veneer to life in Japan is often slick, smooth, and polished, but I think that if you pick up one of these indistinct pebbles and turn it over, there is sometimes a pretty ugly scene underneath it all. In Vanessa's case, everything was complicated by the way in which she was powerless to leave her husband. She told me that she was fearful that, if she tried to leave him, he'd get custody of their son and she'd never see him again. She also did not have the money to just pick up and leave. I imagine she also doubted her capacity to find a job in Australia such that she could support herself and her son if she did leave.

All too often, we hear stories about foreigners who seem to behave poorly in jobs in Japan and they are judged for being disloyal, bad workers, or for simply not taking life in Japan seriously because it's not their home country and they don't fear the consequences. What Vanessa's situation illustrated was that sometimes the bad behavior of a foreign employee isn't brought on by a casual disregard for the country or the culture, but because his or her life situation is painful or difficult. What makes it worse is that it really is harder to walk away when one is in a situation such as hers. It's not so simple as someone being a disrespectful or selfish employee, though my next story will show that sometimes it is actually just that. (to be continued)

Random Memories #52

This is part of an ongoing series that I've been doing about my memories of working at the same place for 12 years. This is a continuing series talking about the time I spent working in a Japanese office. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

As the company's fortunes continued to decline, the necessity of having a third full-time employee started to diminish. When Amelia left, my final permanent (as opposed to temporary, not as in actually there "forever") co-worker was hired. This final fellow was another Nova language school (eikaiwa) refugee.

Scott was a very affable fellow who did not take himself or the job too seriously, mostly the former. That is in no way an indication that he didn't do the work. He did what was put in front of him without complaint, but he rarely got too worked up about all of the office antics and ridiculousness that went on around him.

The fact that Scott didn't take work too seriously in terms of how he approached it was revealed in what he told me about his time at Nova. Like many new teachers, he was scheduled to work on the weekends and hated working on Sundays in particular. When he didn't want to work, he'd simply call the head office on that morning and say he was sick. Of course, he wasn't sick. He just didn't want to work on Sunday. This happened so often that the people in the office came to expect his calls and recognize his voice. They'd say, "oh, hi, Scott", and anticipate what was coming.

When Scott did this, he wasn't paid the wages for that day of work, but this was before the days when Nova initiated economic penalties on teachers for short-notice calling in sick. I'm sure that people like Scott were a part of their rationale for instituting policies in which they'd dock teachers several hours of pay for being marginally late and requiring proof in the form of a doctor's note when a teacher claimed to be ill. I wouldn't be surprised, given how reactive the Japanese management could be, if Scott single-handedly didn't motivate this policy. After all, Draconian responses to single incidents were hardly uncommon in my experience.

Fortunately for us, Scott didn't hate working so much that he'd call in sick on a regular basis with us. The truth was that he appreciated the job as much as I did for the lack of face to face content. However, that didn't stop Scott from toying with the students at times, but not in the same mean-spirited and condescending way that John had. He mainly messed with them at his own expense by continually changing his personal data to elicit new and different questions.

On his profile sheet, Scott stated that his hobbies included watching movies, listening to music, and dance. When the students asked him questions about what sorts of these things he enjoyed, he kept things interesting for himself by giving different answers. Sometimes, he said he like Ska music, even though he didn't know what it was. He said his favorite actor was Harvey Keitel, but he didn't know enough about him to say which movies he'd been in and he at one point said he liked ballet even though he had zero interest in it.

Scott was someone who seemed to just fall into whatever he ended up doing. When I asked him about his former work, he said that he was a sports commentator for basketball for a local entity as well as a sports writer for awhile. We're not talking someone who was a Howard Cosell or even a Jack Buck. He was more like a glorified emcee at a high school basketball game. The odd thing was that he didn't even like basketball, but this was a job he could do so he did it.

Scott's real passion was writing. In fact, during his tenure at my former company, he worked on a novel by the name of "The Man With the Golden Penis". I had a tendency to make fun of Scott for his goofy demeanor and speech habits, so that was one that I couldn't pass up and I'm sorry to say that I perhaps had a little too much fun with this easy target. He allowed D. (the manager) to read it, but understandably had no interest in allowing me to take a gander at it. I wasn't exactly offended by this and D. pronounced the work decidedly odd.

I don't know if Scott ever finished this work and published it online or through a personal publishing house, but I can say that someone with his name has done some baseball writing. I can also say that I'm too afraid of the search results if I use the words "golden penis" to see if his novel ever made it online.

In terms of his telephone relationship with students, Scott dealt with them relatively respectfully and he didn't take the job too lightly, though he did have some ways of talking about the students which were unique and apt. One of the problems that all of us instructors struggled with when we did phone calls was that they would insist on calling us by "Mr." or "Ms." plus our first names.

Time and time again, I would hear Scott wrestling with a student who would call and ask to speak to "Mr. Scott". He's say, "just 'Scott', no "Mister". He's say this two or three times and give up. On one occasion, the student, after saying, "Mr. Scott" several times and hearing "just Scott" in response, finally said, "just Scott!" At least it was better than "Mr. Scott". After such episodes, Scott would say that sometimes talking to the students was "like talking to a dog". They just seemed to lack the ability to comprehend what was being said, even when their textbooks and pre-telephone lesson training materials primed them to do the right thing.

Scott lived with his Chinese girlfriend who worked as a dental hygienist and one of the weirdest misunderstandings that I ever had with him occurred over a discussion that related more to Jolene's situation and that of other coworkers I'd known that his. D. and I were discussing the hardships of cross-cultural relationships and how they presented particular challenges that must make life difficult for those involved in them. At one point, Scott said with great agitation, "now that's enough!" Apparently, he thought that we were trying to send him a message and he and his girlfriend weren't going to work out. The truth was that his situation was nowhere in our minds at all.

The president, who could be incredibly mercurial and unpredictable about how he regarded the foreign employees, liked Scott quite a lot. I'm not sure if it was his affability, his goofiness, or the fact that he was tall, but Mr. O. liked him and let him do things he wouldn't allow other teachers to get away with. One day, Scott sat in his booth and surreptitiously tried to eat a banana because he was hungry. The president noticed his attempts to hide his eating and said, "Eat, eat!" This was in stark contrast to what the big cheese said to another teacher who he docked 10 minutes of pay from for having the audacity to eat in his cubicle.

I can't recall exactly how long Scott was with us, but I think it was either a year or between a year and two years. He decided to head back home to Michigan and try his luck at finding a career there. This created a bit of an issue for him because his girlfriend had a great deal of difficulty going to the U.S. with him. He got in touch with us about a year after he left and told us that, even if he married, she wouldn't have been allowed into the country because the doors were not open wide for Chinese immigrants. I have no idea what became of their relationship, but I did feel bad that two people in a legitimate relationship were being kept apart by immigration laws.

Scott actually returned to Japan to visit and popped by our office. He used to wear glasses, but had lasik surgery, so he came back with two fewer eyes than when I last saw him. I think he might have liked to return to the company and work again, but it had shrunk in size sufficiently that they no longer needed more than my presence as a permanent instructor. The last I saw of a now glasses-less Scott was at our old office as he bid us goodbye and headed out back into the city. Like all of my former coworkers, even the ones who hated me, I attempted to track him down, but have not had any luck yet. I'd like to think he married his girlfriend and found a career suited to his particular talents and nature. The world needs more affable goofs and they deserve to be rewarded. (to be continued)

Update: I contacted Scott via Facebook and he did marry his girlfriend and essentially has lived happily ever after with a 12-year-old daughter and is running his own business along with his wife. I'm always pleased when someone who deserves a happy ending gets one!