Two Months

1. Has it been two months already? It doesn’t feel like it, but then I guess it rarely does. Technically there are only 10 months of my contract left, and no doubt those ten months will fly by the same as the last two have.

2. After a multitude of adjustments, both major and minor, here are a few things I’ve noticed since I’ve been here:

  1. I get excited when I use a big word in normal conversation these days. The last big word I used was “transliteration”.

  2. I’m not an alcoholic, seriously! But, aside from the usual things you could do (museums, art galleries and so forth) there isn’t a whole lot to do besides drinking in Hiroshima. Not speaking Japanese doesn’t help either. So I get a bit of reading and writing done.

  1. On that note, I mourned back in Sydney that parties finished by 3am. But, now, I think that was a good thing…

  2. The stereotypical Japanese may well be reserved, but remember it’s only a stereotype. Some are certainly not reserved! And not all Japanese are nice either, typical Japanese attitudes to foreigners are circumspect at best and downright racist at worst. And on that note…

  3. …I always thought the concept of “White Trash” was limited to Westerners. But, no, there’s trash everywhere. Though the Japanese don’t have a special term for them. (I asked.)

  4. But, the vast majority of Japanese people are very, very polite, and unwilling to be direct or complain about things. So they end up being victims to businesses and anachronistic cultural stereotypes:

    Exhibit No.1: Japanese Telcos. You still can’t send SMS to people from different mobile phone providers. You can send email, but then they charge you sending the email, and then charges you retrieving the email. And, though the Japanese got their first with 3G networks, they charge the Earth for it. An equivalent service in Australia with Vodafone would only cost me between $50 – $70 Aud, here it’s more like $100 – $120.

    Exhibit No.2: Japanese banks. You don’t have to pay monthly fees, but damn do they gouge you on transaction fees! And for all their technical know-how, for some reason Japanese ATMs close, because they can’t guarantee the ATM will work after 10pm and they can’t send someone out to fix it. They work every one of their employees to the bone, so why not have one guy on call to fix the damn things if they break down overnight?

    Exhibit No.3: Women in the workplace. Actually, women in general. Feminism may have changed the world, but it went past Japan with little more than a wink and a nod. Sexual politics in this country is, for lack of a polite term, fucking backwards. Women are relegated to low paying, low responsibility jobs, but are put under as much pressure as the better paid men. Women can be fired if they are pregnant. Birth control medication were only made available a few years back (not sure of the details there) and it’s very expensive — one foreign teacher told me it costs her around 3000 yen for one month — which is about 3 times more expensive than it is in Australia. The pill is free in Britain.

  5. And speaking of stereotypes, not all Japanese kids are into crazy Shinjuku fashion. In fact, I’ve hardly seen any around — the vast majority of people seem much more interested in Hip Hop than anything else.

3. And while I’m doing a little myth busting, I should mention that the impression of Japan as techno-metropolis is a myth. There may be some evidence of it in Tokyo, and maybe Osaka, but technology isn’t that much more advanced here than anywhere else. Part of the problem is that while the Japanese can produce some mind-blowingly awesome tech, people here don’t trust those new fangdangled electrical gobbledygooks. Internet access isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as South Korea, and as far as I can tell there are just as many people who don’t own computers as those who do. Paper is still the dominant media for the workplace, and I dare say Japan maintains its low unemployment rate because there are so many paper shufflers.

4. Maybe all those movies and anime and TV shows about autonomous robots and computers getting together to destroy the world as Japan knows it really affected the national psyche… so Vote “No” to Automation!

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