Little House In Ise

I try not to proselytize about Aikido. Really, if my first thought is, “Wow, that person should try Aikido” I try to morph it into, “maybe they should try bujutsu” or even more generically “a little exercise would probably help their xxxx”. I do my best not to let those thoughts out lest I sound like a snob and an ass. The fact is though, I often think that people could help their bad backs (or bad whatevers) by making a habit of better posture and doing stretches… A little Aikido perhaps?

Even though I actively try not to sell the gospel of Aikido, it seems that I do talk about it quite a bit — possibly too much. Everyone and their cat knows that I am an Aikidoka. At home, having a pile of wooden training swords and staffs by the door is normal. In the neighborhood, nobody gawks when I pedal up the street in my dogi. At the office, people regularly ask if I am going to practice tonight and laugh when I tell them, “No I trained before work already”. Damn! I must be a boring conversationalist!

Anyway, the office jokes took an extreme turn today when I was attacked by a dude from Sales. The attacker was “BD”, an ex-Bosozoku (motorcycle gang member) and kendo yudansha. All in all, BD is a fun guy who is amongst the most willing to tease me about the silliness of my hobby — usually whilst pretending to swing a golf club. I was chatting with another Sales guy when I noticed a weird motion out of the corner of my eye. It was BD doing that weird Kendo gallop and swinging shomen at the left side of my head. I quickly but, I hope, casually, stuck my fist out to where his face would be if his course completed. My timing was on and as his downward swing started to accelerate, his head started snapping back out of the way of my fist. Before reaching his target BD was already stumbling backwards. We all got a good laugh out of that.

It’s the closest thing to Aikido that I’ve done in two weeks now. My recovery from appendix surgery is going well though I’ve another two weeks before I’m allowed to train. Just watching practice is frustrating!

* Dave Barry

I complain about the cold and report about the bathroom here too often but they are closely-linked, painful topics. The lack of insulation in this office building makes it very uncomfortable to work without several layers of clothes. Since corporate uniforms are mandatory for all, except upper management, everyone wears as many layers as can be made to fit under their polyester crap-wear. Fortunately, the clothes are so ugly that even the most vein among us have given up trying to look nice in these things and can concentrate on adding more lumpy layers of undershirts.

Adding to the discomfort is this company’s policy of not activating the heat until December 1st. This doesn’t really apply to me or my team as the heating ducts don’t reach to our end of the office so we froze our asses off all last winter. At any rate, for some, there will be relief in the next few days but for me, I am counting down the days until I leave this company (30 more).

Most people seeking employment are interested in salary, benefits, corporate position and office location. I am also interested in these things but I have found myself focusing on other details when visiting offices for interviews.

1) Is the place heated/air-conditioned?
2) How are rank-and-file dressed?
3) How do managers dress?
4) Are the desks/workstations made for computers or are they sharp cornered battleship gray 1950s style beasts guaranteed to leave creases in your forearms?
5) Is the bathroom ventilated?
6) Is there a ventilated smoking area?
7) Do I have to walk through the smoking area to get anywhere for work purposes?

These may sound trivial but every one of them has made my working life uncomfortable over the last year. Perhaps it is the combination but all, and worse, are fairly typical of Japanese companies so I am on the look out when interviewing. Another thing I should probably watch out for is harder to spot. Modernizing and improving the trivial while neglecting bigger issues.

An example of this here is the Mitsubishi Jet Towel installed in the visiting men’s rest-room. Since the bathrooms in my office are not insulated and windows are left open for ventilation, in winter they get very cold. Right now, it is about 8 degrees C. Given an airspeed of 90 m/s blasting out of the jet towel, the wind-chill on wet hands is about -2.6C. I salute the reduction of waste and the improved hygiene afforded by this tool but there are implementation issues that should be addressed. For example: WHY CAN’T WE TURN ON THE HEATING ELEMENT UNTIL DECEMBER FIRST????

GRRR! Of all the days to forget my hankie …

There is a store selling modern and antique swords across the street from the main office! Dozens of beautiful, master-crafted pieces of steel with glorious waves and ripples were on display. The cheapest 日本刀 (Nihontou) I saw was ¥2,100,000 (steel only, tsuka, saya, tsuba etc… all sold separately). Saving my lunch money would be a start but assuming bento every workday for the next 16 years, I’d only be able to cover the cheapest model. So, my lust for good cutlery could easily drive my family to the poor-house or, at least, back to the family farm.

Megumi has been happy that I don’t care much about cars, gambling, local/national sports franchises and generally don’t drink to excess. From her perspective, my martial arts-and-crafts interests have tended to be a plus for the family (health and well-being wise anyway) and it is down-right cheap, especially since we moved to Japan. If I take this job that could all change.

“Honey, there is a special on mid 19th century tanto, how many should I pick up?”

Maybe I can write-off a couple swords as business expenses…? Maybe? No?  Damn!

Oh yeah, the job looks interesting and the company seems nice.

Training in new dojo with new instructors and different uke is one of the few things that I really enjoy about business trips. The problem, as usual, is timing and logistics. I am in Albuquerque, New Mexico and have found two Aikikai (some sensei are purists — it’s best to be polite) dojo that have class hours that I might be able to fit into my schedule. Now, how to get there? We’ve had to shuffle vehicles and two of the people with the least need for rental cars actually have them so I may need to bum a ride from the “Sleazy Uncle”.

My coworker, the Irish Dude, had to listen to all of the planning discussions for this trip and began calling it “Dysfunctional Family Vacation”. He assigned less than flattering titles to several members of the group for whom he has little use. I laughed as the sales guy got pinned with “Sleazy Uncle” and semi-retired-but-we-can’t-quite-get-rid-of-him former manager as “Senile Grandfather”. Senile Grandfather got the other car. I don’t really trust either of them to drive in the US but Sleazy Uncle doesn’t drop his head below the level of the dashboard to program (figure out) the GPS while driving. Anyway, a taxi ride probably won’t kill me but it will break my recreation budget for this trip so I’ll need to work something out.

More later …

When work invades my dreams I take it as a sign that things aren’t going too well on the job. My current project has been turning up mixed with zombies (“28 Days Later” style fast zombies not the lumbering “Shaun of the Dead” kind).

The project itself should be pretty normal if a bit rushed. However, due to a corporate culture of understaffing and over-promising, I am rushing like a high-school kid scribbling a report on the bus the day it is due. There have been some fascinating, to me anyway, little wrenches thrown in to add color to an otherwise drab set of accomplished milestones.

1) A key sales dude in Israel was called back into the army for a couple of weeks but no-one told head office.
2) A key leader in the U.S. quit at what seemed like the last minute (he gave three weeks notice). It turns out that he had a bad case of short-timer-syndrome and had done no work on any of his assigned tasks.
3) A key VP here in Japan promised my customer that they were the most important, bar none, and then pulled senior engineers out of a long scheduled visit to the customer site. The issue to which they were responding was critical but customer expectations had been set too high too quickly.

The list could go on but these illustrate my point: communication failure is the most common problem in a project and it can be easy to correct.

1) The sales guy in Israel was doing his duty and no-one faults him for it. Had he told his co-workers or his boss to notify the head-office, there would have been no trouble at all.
2) Had the manager of the fellow in the US told the head-office not to assign mission critical tasks to him, confidentiality would have been preserved and the tasks would have been completed by someone else.
3) The VP could just stop over-promising but that may be why he is the a VP…

Other than #3 where bad communication may be an element of the person’s position, none of this was necessary. Had it just been a matter of covering for a VPs exuberance I would not be wishing that zombies would come and “save” me from this project.

I haven’t written much about business in Japan lately and am mostly shying away from that topic. The office is a sore spot and writing about it feels like poking a bruise. Today’s funkiness was more like a whanged funny-bone.

I do a lot of project scheduling so MS Project is a tool that I use frequently. My company, however, has traditionally done all of its planning by hand-drawing Gantt charts in Excel. Very few managers even have Project installed. Yesterday, I was asked to share some project details with the manager of a different team . Without thinking about it, I sent him my most up-to-date project schedule file which had all the data I thought he needed . This guy, known un-affectionately as Kim Jong Il, had one of his senior reports manually copy the data into a new Excel spreadsheet. When asked , “Why” he responded that it was a better way to share the data.

I should have guessed that this fearless leader would not have a tool made for planning projects. He was right in believing that sharing a schedule in a spreadsheet would be better, assuming that no one has Project. Aside from the fact that I manage unrelated products and projects and need the flexibility that this tool offers me, I should have known all of that. However — here comes teh funny — the reason he needed my schedule in the first place was that he wanted to paste a screenshot image of it into a PowerPoint presentation …

This is how my company does most things. They don’t even know how much effort they waste. I’d laugh but whanged funny bones aren’t that funny.

The best practical advice that I can give you for life in Japan is to not put either it or Japanese Aikido (your martial art goes here) on a pedestal. Life here is frustrating and often disappointing. Keep your eyes open for the good stuff, we all have things that make it worthwhile. It is different enough that you will spend a lot of time saying, “WTF?!?!”, “why would anyone think that?” and “NOT ALL FOREIGNERS ARE ____!!!”, etc … You will also spend quite a bit of time, at least at first, saying “Whoa, cooool!”, “DELICIOUS!”, “It’s really OK to do that in public?”, etc…

Bring a towel, hoopy froods always know where their towel is. Actually, I’m serious here, bring a couple of hand towels/handkerchiefs — you will find almost no paper towels in public toilets. Restaurants provide only the tiniest most useless pieces of scrap instead of real napkins, so a kerchief will go a long way to making you more comfortable!

The job department is a toughie. English teaching is not as lucrative as it once was and it is not as easy as a non-teacher might think, but it is an option. If you go that route, try the larger, relatively reputable schools (GEOS, NOVA, Aeon) before smaller private places. The big schools offer more financial safety and can take you to many cities.

Finally, this is a cash based society. Do not expect credit cards to work in most places and don’t even think about bringing checks. Yen denominated travelers checks may be converted to real money at big hotels and banks in bigger cities but they aren’t as useful as you’d hope. If you must count on ATMs then use the ones in post-offices as they are more likely to work with your bank network.

I just hit another one of those work stoppage “moments”. I think it’s related to all the chocolate I’ve eaten today. One of the “Office Flowers” brought around four loads of snacks from folks returning from business trips. The old bring back chocolate-from-foreign-visit custom would be killing me if it were not for the prison gym we’ve got here.

Any good prison movie will feature scenes with “cons” out “the yard” pumping rusty old weights and generally being beefy. With the possible exception of my butt, “beefy” is not quite the way to describe me — but I do like to get a sweat on at lunch. With a 45 minute “lunch hour”, pass required to leave the factory grounds and a daily all hands meeting after lunch, getting to the gym is a challenge. However, the guys from the former parent company have a bunch of rusty, greasy old weights that are combined cast-offs from at least three different sets. They’ve even been pushed out of the “cushy” space they were in when I discovered them before Christmas and are now occupying a covered parking space behind a row of airconditioners. So, I’ve been going out in the yard with the cons and violating a ton of workplace health and safety regulations just to get a work out. You might think that I miss my old gym with clean machines, heated and air-conditioned facilities and showers, well <SOB!!!> OK, yeah, I do. But it still seems kinda macho-cool to be out in the cold sweating and grunting with a bunch of grease covered factory dudes. At any rate, that’s the spin I’m trying to put on it.

Does anyone in the States still worry about ergonomic work areas? Is it just a given that when you go somewhere for your next job you will have an enviroment where it is not physically painful to work? Perhaps I am spoiled by that kind of thinking. Maybe I’m just an unusually high-maintenance person.

Aside from the technical stupidities of my company there is also an element of physical abuse that goes along with working here too. I’m not talking about beat-downs, there are several folks who are in desperate need of that, but more simple things that rank as abusive that the locals take as normal. For example, my office is only partially heated. At the far end of the office there are heaters but at mine there are none that work. So, the temperature is cranked up to the maximum allowed by the company at one end (a comfy 28 degrees) and at my end its not un-common to see your breath all day long. Try typing with gloves on and you’ll know why Darth Vader uses the force so much…

Hearing of my chilly office, Megumi gave me a pile of kaero. Kaero are these little sticky pads that contain chemicals that react slowly and exothermically. They stay warm for about eight hours if you believe the advertising. I stick one in each shoe and one on the seat of my torture chair (a 1950s vintage looking grey office/interogation chair). It is uncomfortablly cold in my office in the winter and insanely hot in the summer.

My Japanese co-workers endure and complain only when the batteries in their laptops fail to ignite (damned foreigners didn’t realize that was a feature!) and keep their desks warm. Ergonimic issues are an ongoing bad joke for me. One other issue revolves around a battle with my desk that I finally won. You see, I barely fit under it. There was a cross-bar thingie that went exactly where my legs think my feet should be when I am sitting up to type. The distance from side to side where my legs go is narrower than my knees when I sit normally. All that said, today I scored an ergonomic victory! I removed the damned crossbar and all of a sudden life at the office is much more comfortable. It really is a lot like taking leg weights off and feeling as though your feet are floating.

My next step is to set up a kaero vending machine at my desk and maybe start a fire.

Lately I have been crying into my pillow thinking about corporate inefficiency in my company but no more! The brilliant ineptitude of a large foreign company (for the sake of anonymity, I will refer to them only as “HP”) has won, hands down, the corporate inefficiency heavy-weight world title.

I have been trying to negotiate a new contract with HP to provide services to a subsidiary in the US (Woohoo! Don’t you just love stories that start with contract negotiation?). I started my quest using contact information we had for both US and Japan branches of HP. Upon making my request clear (e.g. “How can my company give you more money and how much would you like?”) both sides of the Pacific immediately began pointing fingers at the other. After several rounds of vigorous finger pointing, HP Japan won. So, I continued my inquiry with the US contacts graciously provided by the Japanese finger pointing champions. Though unhappy with having to deal with a real customer, the HP US side shook and writhed and finally admitted that it was snowing and they needed to leave for the week (who in Colorado Springs can’t drive in snow?). So, I stepped up the pressure and started a polite email barrage to each and every individual who could possibly help asking for contact info for the next ranks up the chain. This was of course fruitless — or so I thought. No one wanted to admit that they had a contract with us except the guys in Tech Support who happily connected me with sales people in charge of ink cartridges. No one wanted to admit responsibility. Until, one day, completely out of the blue, my phone rang (I didn’t recognize the noise as it happens so infrequently) and a very earnest man from HP Japan was anxiously trying to get me to explain to him what I needed — a first! He took it down carefully and then told me a story.

Apparently, I managed to irritate someone in the US who was responsible for something-or-other. That person actually did try to track down my contract info and apparently couldn’t. So they had HP folks all over the US portion of their little empire tortured and locked in Colorado Springs until they came up with a plan. Which was to pass the buck — a brilliant strategy. At this point the story becomes fuzzy but somehow the buck got passed way up the chain and sideways until it landed on the desk of a VP of Janitorial Services (or something) in Singapore. This person was clearly not interested in my service contract, may have had no idea where Aloha Oregon, Chandler Arizona, Albuquerque or even Qiryat Gat, Israel were. What he did know was how to motivate his counterparts at HP Japan, I assume that he spoke loudly in Chinese (I’ve _got_ to learn how to do that). The Japan side of the evil HP empire bubbled with turmoil as more nasty looks and internal finger-pointing ensued. A sacrificial intern was selected but rejected due high proficciency in English. This is where my new best friend at HP came into the picture. He hemmed and and hawed tried to send me to two other perfrectly innocent companies before giving in to the overwhelming power of the Singaporean Head of Janitorial services on one side and the other kind of gaijin (me) on the other.

No contract yet. But at least I know that the old one ended in November. Oops.

And that’s the way it is. If anyone asks, I gave up on psychotropics LOOOONG ago though it may not seem that way.

Discalimer : No garden gnomes were harmed at any point of this process.