It's rainy season now, and apart from a day or two here and there, it has been raining a lot. And it's hot, low 30's. It'll stop raining soon, and then it will just be unbearably hot for a couple of months. Summer does have a special feeling here though. There are lots of festivals and fireworks, which I'm going to make more of an effort to see this year. I might even buy a yukata (a summer kimono, but not like you think. More like thin loose pajamas), even though I know I will look like a dickhead.
I've been looking at stuff that we can do over summer, maybe some new parks or pools or something. I have been looking at some blogs of people that come here to study. Okazaki has a pretty well-known Japanese language school that people from all over the world come to to stay for a few months. I went there myself for two months, and it was okay, but I'd already been here for years, so doing the whole tea ceremony thing and going to the sushi restaurant didn't do much for me. Mainly it's for well-off American and Canadian kids who like manga to come and experience Japan. It's pretty expensive. But anyway, a lot of them start blogs, and they talk about places they go to in and around Okazaki. They do a lot of stuff, and everything is strange and new, and they are single, so they definitely get out more than I do. But the overwhelming impression is that they would give anything to be able to stay here, and they study their asses off and have no fear of speaking Japanese. Me? X, X, and X.
I have to do something about my own attitude to this place. I should start thinking of myself as a tourist, and let go of my pride and be prepared to make mistakes and smile more and have fun. That's my mission this summer. To see more of this place, and to share it with William. Also what I want to start doing is presenting a picture of the day. I will start carrying my camera around and snap anything that takes my fancy. And hopefully I will do a few big rides over the Summer, and I will present some ride reports. Like I said, become a bit more of a tourist and less of a jaded, 9-5 wage salve immigrant.
My workouts have been going well, though my numbers are down and so is my motivation. I think it's the weather. The humidity just saps the energy out of me. It might take a few weeks to get used to it. The other night I did Yoga, and it was the strongest I've felt since I finished working at the factory a month ago. Got to back there in two weeks, though the boss has put in a request that we stay here in our own department because it's busy, but our boss is a pussy and they will tell him no. I am not looking forward to working there again. When I hear speeches from the president and the boss trying to gee everyone up and let's do our very best and all that stuff, I just think of all the sleepy, lazy Japanese people I work with and how I'm going to the factory to do the lowest job in the company so they don't have to.
Starting tomorrow (the first day after the Friday of a week in which a new month began) I want to concentrate on another couple of things. First, is diet. I want to cut down on the amount of chocolate I eat and coffee I drink. It's not a large amount, but it's become a habit, and I'm sick of it. They can't be doing any good for my mood. It doesn't help that, inexplicably, imported Coke cans have appeared in the vending machine upstairs. I cannot drink Coke out of pet bottles. Only glass and cans, preferably cans. So I had a can today. Very nice.
Update: Welcome to a Japanese Company
As you know, the English translating team has been selected to take it in turns to each go and work at the factory for two weeks at at time picking parts. It's a sucky job, and I'm sure all the Japanese guys in our department were relieved that it's us and not them. Why were we chosen? Because our group had done the least amount of overtime out of all the groups in our department ( which includes the manual group, Chinese translation group, parts list group, web group), and our department has done the least amount of overtime in the company.
We have all had a turn, and are scheduled to go round again. We said we were very busy, and maybe someone else could go instead this time? So the boss asked his boss and so on, and we had a meeting today.
That's when we found out that our department does the least overtime out of all the departments. You have to understand that this is a bad thing. It doesn't matter how hard or how efficient you work, all that matters, all that is measured, is how long you work. And the longer the better. There are guys that do 50 or 60 hours of overtime every month without fail. One guy I met at the factory does 100 hours a month overtime. Management pay lip service to "work/life balance" and we even have "No Overtime Fridays" (Japan's equivalent to "Wacky Hat Day" I think), but these guys are heroes. The amount of work they do is irrelevant. They are killing themselves for the company. Wow.
So the English group sat down with the boss. Here's how he explained it. We didn't have to go back to the factory. Yes! But there's a problem. There's usually four people in the English group, and there's a certain amount of work shared between these four people. Take away one person, and this amount of work is shared among fewer people, meaning more work per person. The problem is we still don't do overtime. Which is not exactly true, but anyway. We tried to explain that we all have young families, and we want to go home to help our wives, and we manage to do the extra work by organizing our time better, and working harder throughout the day to get the work done. I said that I know this isn't Australia, but if it was, our boss would think this is marvellous and would probably use us as an example of an efficient, effective group. But the boss said that when the personnel department sees this, they wonder if there really needs to be four people. I know the boss doesn't think this, but he's just saying that this is how it looks. So by helping out at the factory, which we were chosen to do because we appeared to be the laziest and least busy people in the whole company, we have effectively exposed ourselves as even lazier or less busy than they thought. It must be a source of amazement to these fuckers. I'm not sure which they would find more incredulous; how it looks, or that we don't know/care that that's how it looks. So, bottom line, we all need to do one or two nights a week overtime to show that we are busy, regardless of whether we are busy or not, and then people will leave us alone. This will cost the company tens of thousands of dollars a year, but hey, appearances are all that matter here.
I know this, but it is hard to except this as the reality. I keep thinking, well, perhaps they might take into account the volume of work we do, the quality of it, but no. The numbers don't lie. You can show them study after study proving that working long hours does not mean more work is done, of that it is done any better. They just won't believe it.
So we have to play the game. I have a question: Why do the Japanese people purposefully make their life harder than it needs to be? Answer: Because they are all insane.
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