Chinese Whispers

If you're not familiar with what "Chinese Whispers" is, it's the game where you say something and whisper it to another person who in turn whispers it to another and so on. By the time the phrase reaches the last person, it's distorted and incorrect. The less ethnically insensitive name for this game is supposed to be "Telephone", but I've never heard it referred to as such. My apologies in advance for using a name which may be offensive, but I didn't want to name this post "Telephone" because it'd be very misleading.

This game came to mind recently because I foolishly swung by one of the better-known and more widely-participated in foreigner forums. I had forgotten the forum was around until someone recently recommended that Joseph at Tame Goes Wild visit it as a resource for information about some aspects of life here. I have also been shackled to the computer on and off today doing telephone tests and ran out of things to read so I ambled over to see what was shaking. I won't give the name of this forum, but it begins with "G" and ends with "t" and has a word for a cooking implement as part of its name. You'll recognize it if you've heard of it before. If you don't, you really don't need to know what it is and I'll tell you why in the remainder of this post.

First of all, the forums are full of people who have nothing better to do with their time than to post about their contempt and derision for various other people. You name it, they hate someone for it. Most of all, unsurprisingly, they hate other foreigners and those who teach in particular. Presumably, the teacher haters live in Japan and aren't teaching so one must wonder what sort of profession is allowing them to waste their valuable time making angry posts about other people. I'm guessing such non-teaching jobs are not very fulfilling or they'd be a bit nicer people and have less time on their hands.

The primary reason for not bothering with such forums isn't the angry people. The big reason is that they are chock full of misinformation. I would assume that people aren't simply making up all of the "wisdom" they are imparting about all things related to life in Japan. I believe that all of the incorrect "help" can only be the unfortunate consequence of the equivalent of "Chinese Whispers". Someone read or heard something then told someone else who told someone else and so on until it reached the end of the line and no longer bore any resemblance to the reality.

I knew that the forums had this unfortunate tendency before (which is why I stopped reading them... that and all the ugly attitudes), but my memory was refreshed when I did a search on the name of my husband's current place of employment out of curiosity. I found about 5 posts about his employer and all of them were largely or completely wrong. I don't bother to correct such people because I've decided not to do that anymore, but also because there is no way for an astute reader to tell whose ship is sailing straight in a sea of misinformation. There would really be no point. I just want to caution anyone who visits forums for foreigners living in Japan to take anything they read with a giant vat of salt.

I only make it look easy

Over the past month, I've been teaching a woman who will soon head off to a European country for an extended period of time to work in the head office of her company. To prepare for this time, she is taking a series of 5 intensive lessons with me. We spend two hours on Sundays practicing possible real life conversations.

When I say "real life conversations", I don't mean small talk or actually having a chat, I mean short exchanges at the drug store, train station, office, etc. If you've ever taught from the plethora of textbooks on the market for learners of English as a second language, you know that these are the least popular lessons in the books. In fact, when I used to work at Nova conversation school 18 years ago, teachers would repeat the same lessons 6 times over with students before teaching the lessons centering around pragmatic exchanges at the market, a hotel, etc. While the content was useful, it was often a teaching cul-de-sac for the teachers and repetitive and uninteresting for the students. Even doing the dialog once where you're essentially saying, "Hello, I've got a headache. Could you recommend some medicine?" and getting a response and thanking the other person isn't all that interesting. Doing it enough so the student gets it down and can say it correctly is a slog through deep mud.

My particular student is advanced in level, but imperfect in her speech patterns. That is, she's too high level to need a textbook to tell her what to say in a particular context, but her grammar is sloppy enough that she needs to practice. That means we really couldn't use a book. The lessons have been just me using all the power of my brain to continuously come up with new scenarios to practice until she grew weary of that one and wants to move on to another. Imagine if you will how many one to two minute exchanges I have to take part in to fill up 120 minutes of time. Add into that that she wasn't even interested in any preamble to the lesson with chat. She just wants to dive in.

I'm sure from the student's viewpoint that I seem to be effortlessly tossing out scenarios and taking part in practice, but I only make it look easy. I was really exhausted by this as it's been a lot of improvisation. I had a fairly long list of real life situations and she had 4 that she had come up with, but I still was almost out of steam by the end. There just aren't that many things you need to do and she rejected some of the scenarios I had written down (like going to the bank).

People think teaching is easy because all you do is follow a book or just make small talk. It's not in the least like that. Books offer frameworks which you have to expand upon. Smalltalk only gets you so far, and it takes you a shorter distance the better you know someone. Students have goals and you have to be able to make a plan to meet them. It's not throwing things at a wall and hoping they stick or flying by the seat of your pants. You have to be able to think on your feet and make sure you're smoothly traveling down the right roads. You also have to make it look like you had the route perfectly mapped out all along or the students lose confidence in you or don't respect you. If you stumble, pause too long or lose your focus, the students know you don't know what you're doing at that moment.

Anyone who thinks that teaching is easy should have to sit through the same sort of grueling 2-hour sessions of short, pragmatic conversations I've been going through. Their opinion would change less than halfway through the lesson. I guarantee it.

Scon Japanese Barbecue Flavor

I'm not a fan of Japanese salted snack foods because many of them are bland (consommé) or come in flavors I don't care for (like seaweed). As I mentioned in a previous review, barbecue salted snacks are not what you'd expect because "barbecue" in the U.S. usually means some sort of super spicy tomato or ketchup-flavored potato chip. In Japan, it tends to mean the snack is meant to resemble barbecued meat.

The ugly granny mascot for Karamucho chips. She may scare you off, but they do make pretty good chili snacks. Image pinched from the Karamucho web site.

If you learn one thing about "Japanese tastes", it's that there is a general tendency to prefer mild flavors over intense ones. Therefore, it's rare to find a new product which is exceptionally spicy when you see the words "barbecue" (or in this case "バーベーキュー"). This isn't universal, however, as there are some super spicy treats out there like habanero rings and Karamucho (カラムチーチョ) hot chili chips and potato sticks. Karamucho, by the way, has what I believe to be one of the ugliest cartoon mascots ever. "Chili" and "barbecue" are worlds apart usually in terms of overall punch in spiciness with the former saltily beating up your tongue and the latter passively lying down and surrendering.

The same company that makes the Karamucho-brand chips, Koikeya (コイケヤ), makes the Scon snacks I'm reviewing today so I had hopes that they'd be strong enough for my American palate. I've seen corn snacks named "Scon" (pronounced close to "scone" with a long "o" as many Americans pronounce it) for decades and never bought them because the I couldn't work out why they'd be called "Scon" instead of, well, "corn". What was that silly "s" for? Was this going to be related to British tea time fare? At any rate, a look at the ingredients list reveals the "s" stands for "sweet" as in "sweet corn", which is the first ingredient. That fact that sweet corn is the first ingredient is encouraging, the fact the the second one is animal fat is far less so. The seasonings are not all spelled out, but, unsurprisingly, meat flavoring is one of them as is soy sauce. Stevia (a natural low-calorie sweetener) is also on of them.


The corn twists in the bag are very similar to Cheetos in appearance, but they're a bit lighter and airier in texture. To me, this is a good thing as Cheetos are a bit too hard for my tastes. The first whiff doesn't betray much. These have the same light scent of a non-descript bouillon cube as many Japanese barbecue-flavored snacks. The first bite has a bit of a chemical edge to it which is hard to pin down. This disappears after the second bite which leaves you with an intense, savory flavor. These are very spicy without heat. The flavor is meaty, though it doesn't taste like meat. It's also quite salty, and after you eat them for awhile, the sense of how salty they seem starts to pile up on the tongue. I can see where a beer-drinking sort might find these a really good accompaniment to imbibing.

I really liked these and have actually bought and consumed three bags of them in the past month. This is quite a bad thing as an 80 gram bag (2.82 ounces) has 446 calories and it's easy to eat half a bag at one sitting. That's a lot of empty calories to put away. Also, honestly, even though I like these because they're strongly-flavored, by the third bag the novelty was wearing down a bit and I was thinking that I had burnt out on them and probably wouldn't be tempted anymore. The sense of salt and soy sauce felt stronger the longer I ate them. Nonetheless, I'd still heartily recommend giving them a try if you're in the mood for something salty and tired of the "blander" salted snacks on offer in Japanese stores.

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As an aside, I've decided to mirror the food review posts on a separate site. I'm not sure why I'm doing this, but I think it'll help me keep tabs on how frequently I make these posts. I'd like to do them weekly as a means of encouraging myself to translate the packaging as well as sample new things. If you run across the blog, I just want it to be clear it's not a rip-off of this one, but intentional duplication. It's just started and needs to be tweaked, but it's starting up here.

Words on Shirts

One of my students showed up for a lesson with big numbers on the front and back of her shirt. The numbers were "69". Since I've seen plenty of shirts in Japan which contained words or content which have a different meaning in Western culture than they do in Japan, I didn't know if she knew what the implication was. In this case, she did and said that the same connotation was attached to the numbers in Japan as the U.S.

After discussing her shirt, she told me that she saw a shirt being worn by an American at a military base which had the Japanese characters (kanji) for "kichiku bei yei" (鬼畜米英). According to her, this means Americans and the British are like animals. Another student told me that he felt it meant they are "devils" (the first part of the word contains the Japanese characters for "oni" - 鬼 - which means "devil"). The first student indicated that seeing an American wearing the characters for a World War II epithet used by the Japanese made her wonder why he was wearing it. We both pondered whether or not the wearer knew what the characters meant, but leaned toward believing he probably did.

To frame this in a manner which may resonate a little better with those who aren't living in Japan or don't have any experience with it, I'd like to say that this situation is similar to seeing a Japanese person walking around with a shirt that says "gook" or "Jap" on it. My guess is that, if the American was aware of the meaning on the shirt, it was an attempt to co-opt the words much in the way African Americans have co-opted the "n" word which cannot be spoken aloud by any Caucasian nor written out in its entirety by one.

The other student who I discussed this with said that he didn't believe that Japanese people were particularly self-conscious about seeing epithets about foreigners being displayed so much as being reminded about World War II. This fits in with an experience the CH had when he wore a cap with the characters for "kamikaze" on it to work one day and the secretary at his school said he shouldn't wear it because of what it said. When I related this story to the student, he said he felt that it made people uncomfortable because it also harkened back to World War II, though he said that there was another meaning for "kamikaze" in Japanese history (where hostile ships were wrecked by a typhoon) so it depended on the interpretation the person placed on the characters.

It's been my experience that the Japanese are only too happy to talk about World War II as long as the focus of any discussion is on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's only when they are reminded of Japan's aggression or alliance with Adolf Hitler that makes the situation become uncomfortable for them.

Making a Colbert Special

A B.L.T., heavy on the T. and L.

With food prices going up, people are constantly going on about not wasting food and how much food is usually wasted in developed country. I read that about 1/3 of all food in the U.K. ends up being thrown out for various reasons. I'm sure that the statistics are similarly high in the U.S.

Some wastage of food is hard to avoid. During transport, things are damaged, rot, or are infested. It's impossible to avoid wasting some food on the production end. A lot of food is also wasted by restaurants and markets because of the higher standards and early sell-by dates they have to deal with. It's only on the consumer level that waste can be more actively avoided as we only need to apply our own standards and care to make sure we use things up before they go off.

I try to make sure to never waste food because it's so expensive here. Sometimes I can't keep on top of things which ripen faster than expected, especially in the summer, but I do try. The worst situation though is when meat spoils because it's so high on the food chain that you know that you've just damaged the environment for no benefit whatsoever.

Generally speaking, meat never spoils in our home with one exception and that's bacon. The main problem is that we can't eat it fast enough once a one-pound package is defrosted and opened up. I'm not a huge bacon fan and my CH is not a big eater so we tend to get through half the pack on the weekend and then it becomes a struggle to incorporate the rest of it into meals during the weekdays to finish it up before it gets nasty.

The only way to make sure it doesn't go to waste is for me to try and eat some of it for lunch. Up until Stephen Colbert reminded us that a B.L.T. is his favorite sandwich, I hadn't even considered using bacon in this way. It's one of those things which may be common enough back home but you forget is an option when you've been away from the food culture for awhile. I'm guessing some people would say that's probably a good thing since this isn't exactly a richly nutritious lunch. That being said, I think people are sometimes a little too hysterical about bacon. Yes, it's bad for you, but a little now and then won't kill you.

So, if you're not the hysterical type and you've got a taste for a B.L.T., I've got a few sammich-making tips for you.

Point 1: Toast the bread and leave it to cool in the toaster oven.

If you toast the bread and put it on a plate, it'll get "toast sweat" on the underside and get soggy on the bottom. If you use it while it's still hot, your mayonnaise will melt into it.

Point 2: Shake the grease off the bacon, but don't blot it on paper towels.

This may be slightly controversial but I believe it is best to use the little bit of bacon fat left on the slice after a few good shakes to act as a "dressing" for the tomato and lettuce. The acidity of the tomato and the oil from the bacon combine very well.

Point 3: Salt the tomato slices.

Even though bacon is salty, the sandwich is going to taste bland if you don't salt the tomato. Tomato can hold up to a fair bit of salt so I salt the slices normally and don't factor the bacon's saltiness into the equation. I also advise using very thin tomato slices to keep the sandwich from getting unwieldy.

Point 4: Apply mayonnaise thinly to one slice of bread and place it in contact with the lettuce.

The general rule with delis and sandwich-making is that mayonnaise must come in contact with the meat. However, since the bacon is oily and the mayo is oily, it just makes a slippery sandwich. Of course, you can just eat it on dry toast, but what fun would that be? Also, the mayo forms a thin oil-based barrier between the moist lettuce (though you should try to dry it as well as possible after washing) and the bread won't get soggy.

Point 5: Don't overdo the bacon.

The bacon should be just enough for flavor. This isn't a bacon sandwich, it's lettuce and tomato enhanced with bacon. I use as many slices as needed to cover the bread with about 1/4 inch gaps between the slices. If the bacon slices are touching or overlapping, you've got more than you need and the bacon flavor will overwhelm the vegetables. A really nice balance is more like a bacon salad flavor than a bacon sandwich.

Weird Things

After about 6 or so years in my former company, my boss (D.) and I were talking about the upcoming busy season and the temporary teacher pool he'd be hiring from. Each year, it seemed that we were getting fewer and fewer applicants and many of them were completely inappropriate. That is, about 30-50% weren't native speakers of English and therefore not qualified. If their résumés were any indication of ability, all of them weren't even close to being fluent in English either.

During the time we worked there, we hired a lot of people with little problems or who were just plain weird. One Australian girl, for instance, sat in her cubicle and meticulously "painted" the cord connecting the telephone receiver to the phone red with her pen (much to the irritation of D. who shared a cubicle with her). Another was rather anally-fixated on hygiene and when she ate any salted snack wouldn't put her hand down into the bag to grab bites. She tore the bag open along the top and back seam so it was flayed open and bits could be picked up from the exposed pile. This same co-worker was once aghast that my husband and I brushed our teeth at the kitchen sink as she thought it was appalling that we spit out our toothpaste in the same place where we washed dishes. However, somehow that became okay when we told her we only have one sink in the entire apartment and had no choice. Yet another temporary teacher ate a bowl of breakfast cereal at his desk upon arrival one day and was shocked that this would be considered inappropriate. When the president witnessed this behavior, he was incensed and docked the fellow's pay so we had to tell him the obvious - don't eat breakfast at your desk when you arrive, eat it at home before coming to work.

As we were discussing the parade of strange people we'd seen pass through and pondering what sort of oddballs might be coming our way in the future, I remarked that we really had to expect everyone to be weird because the truth is that we're all weird in our own ways. D. and I had worked together for so long though that we'd grown accustomed to each other's weirdness such that they didn't bother us so much anymore or seem particularly remarkable.

Sometimes I think it's useful to sit down and think about one's peculiarities just to be mindful of the fact that peculiar isn't only the purview of others. So, I present you with some of my particular weirdnesses at present. You may feel free to laugh at me or judge me harshly. Just don't tell me about it:

1. I haven't listened to music of any kind for at least 4 years. It's not that I hate new music or never liked music. I just have zero desire to listen to anything. This may be related to the fact that music has profound effects on me emotionally. I'm not sure, but it's odd even to me that music is just not a part of my life. That being said, sometimes I find myself singing songs to myself when I'm alone. This is very disturbing.
   
2. I don't like freshly made pasta, but I do like it reheated as leftovers.
3. I love being around people and talking to them, but I hate answering the phone and the door. I don't mind talking on the phone or having people visit. I just have an aversion to the unexpected and intrusive nature of either of them ringing.
   
4. I can't recall wanting to be considered "cool", even when I was younger. I'd rather be a dork (or dorkette if you prefer). I'm guessing I'm pretty successful at this.
   
5. I'm not embarrassed by my unavoidably "human" qualities and habits. For instance, I snore sometimes. Sometimes I snore loud enough to wake myself up. This does not embarrass me at all to admit. One of my coworkers once stated that everyone picks their nose (whether with a tissue or without) and anyone who claims he does not is a liar. This statement struck me as his having a refreshingly good attitude about the less savory aspects of being a meat sack with many unpleasant realities.
   
6. I don't like the use of the word "race" when describing people of different skin colors and ethnic origins so I always speak of "ethnicity" rather than "race" as I feel culture is a larger factor than blood in determining what people are like.
   
7. Despite never having lacked any of the basic necessities in life, I remember everyday that I'm very lucky to have clean and safe water, abundant food, a job which doesn't require hard labor, and comfortable, clean shelter as well as a husband who loves me. I take a moment to be thankful for these things at least once a day. I believe this contributes greatly to my happiness and satisfaction with life.
8. I love cats, but I enjoy looking at pictures of puppies more than pictures of kittens.
9. I haven't left for my local neighborhood for the past year. In fact, I think I haven't left it more than 5 times in the past 2 years. I used to travel all over the place every weekend and I think I'm utterly burned out and disinterested in travel now. This realization strikes even me as surprising, but it doesn't trouble me.
10. I'd rather go to the effort and hassle of cooking my own food and cleaning up after it than go to a restaurant where the environment is unpredictable and the meal experience might be ruined by smokers, bad air conditioner settings, loud or crappy muzak or poor service. I'm sufficiently annoyed at the idea of paying for a good experience and being letdown that I prefer not to even take "the risk."

Pervasive Politeness

On my former blog, I once mentioned that service in Japan is often over-praised and over-rated. I still believe that is true as I've had my share of bad experiences. One of the most recent ones this past week was with Acer Japan who ripped us off and lied to us albeit they were relatively polite in the process. I guess getting screwed is supposed to be okay as long as, in doing so, one conforms to socially-condoned business forms. I can say that Acer has now joined Dell as another company we will never make a purchase from again and I would discourage anyone from buying computers from either of these companies because of their troublesome after-service. Though they are not perfect, Apple is looking better and better by comparison to the dismal PC service.

One thing that is generally true is that most service in Japan is offered according to set forms and rules. I'd say that 95% of the time, you're dealt with in a reasonable or positive manner. People greet you, thank you, and offer your goods in a ritualized way. Their eyes may be dead and their hearts not in it, but they say what should be said and do what is supposed to be done in order to conform to what constitutes a polite exchange with a customer.

I hadn't intended to revisit this topic, but reading about Emily's experience with service in England got me thinking about why service back home can be indifferent, surly, and flat-out rude at times. Such experiences are not unheard of in Japan (and are certainly not outside of my personal experience), but they are rare. If I had to estimate, I'd say 2% of my experiences here could fall within a range of "rude" or at least inappropriate in some fashion (e.g., being ignored by cashiers, surliness, refusal of service, sloppy work, no greeting or expressions of gratitude, etc.). If this is compared to what my husband experienced back home when he visited a little over a year ago (and Emily's experiences in her post), that's a very low rate.

Part of the reason for this, I'm sure, is that the ethic is different in Western countries. I'm not talking necessarily about the work ethic as I believe the work ethic in many countries is just as strong as that in Japan (sometimes stronger depending on the individual), but tends to manifest itself differently in the West than in Japan. Mainly, I'm talking about malleability and the role adherence to rules, guidelines and form plays in Japan relative to Western culture. The Japanese do not promote or permit autonomy on the job in many cases and tell you how to behave and you just do it. In the West, they may expect you to be polite to customers, but they expect you to know how to be polite and won't be instructing you on precisely how to carry out every little action to ensure that you are doing things properly. Employers generally leave how you choose to interact with customers up to you until you prove your judgment can't be trusted because of customer complaints. Even then, they aren't likely to train you explicitly and are likely to issue a general warning to shape up or they'll just fire you.

Another part is likely that cultures where individuality and equality are stressed do things differently than cultures where group interests, conformity, and status are a strong element. The customer is not "king" (at least not in most establishments) in Western countries because we don't like to view our status as being inferior to that of the customer. Being polite is seen as kowtowing to the customer or being obsequious. We don't want to elevate others above ourselves by treating their interests as superior to ours, even when they're paying for the privilege so this sometimes produces indifferent, sloppy, or overly casual interactions with those who are supposed to be providing service.

Finally, and I think this is by far the most important, in Japan the crappy low-paying service jobs like being a waitress, clerk in shop, etc. are very rarely seen as an inescapable option for survival. Most people in those jobs don't feel "trapped" in them, but rather see them as a temporary job, a means of making extra cash which they have the freedom to abandon at any time, or a retirement job that they do as much to occupy their days as for spare money. Japan has a (currently eroding) social situation where people for the most part can still count on moving on to bigger or better things with income stability. When you work an unfulfilling job where you have to pander to customers, it's a lot easier to do it with a good attitude if you're not looking at a future of nothing but the same because you're stuck. Many people back home know that the only escape from one low-paying, demoralizing job is to move to a similarly unpleasant circumstance.

I'm not trying to justify people who are rude to their customers or the people they are supposed to help, but rather trying to understand their motivation and mindset. One of the things I always value about life in Japan is how the difference allow you to reflect on your own culture and gain insight into what makes each particular culture work the way it does.

Tales From A Japanese Office — The Interview and "S."

I'm 44 years old and I have, arguably, held 11 jobs in my life, so I've had a bit of experience with job interviews, but not so much as one might guess. I've only been interviewed 7 times and failed to get a job in one of those interviews. In chronological order, the 11 jobs were:

1. maintenance crew member at a nursing home (part-time, I was 15 and quit after a week because I had no idea what I was doing and never should have been hired in the first place)
2. assistant to a professor at my college (part-time, obviously, I was in college)
3. (Christian) camp counselor (full-time, stop-gap job for 2.5 months just after college - a story all its own just waiting to be told)
4. fast food waitress/cook (full-time, forced into it by my mother and quit after 2 weeks)
5. program worker at a halfway house for the mentally ill (full-time and in my field)
6. program worker for a United Cerebral Palsy assisted living home (part-time, in my field, and done simultaneously with job #5)
7. housing counselor (full-time, after moving to California, arguably in my field)
8. language instructor at Nova (2 years)
9. "instructor" at a correspondence school (12 years - the job title is misleading as it was a catch-all job that including writing books, laying them out, doing graphics for them, teaching company lessons on rare occasions, and developing vast amounts of course material for said company lessons-I still do portions of this job freelance now)
10. private language teacher (current freelance job)
    
11. professional writer (current freelance job, though only very much part-time)

For jobs 2, 6, 10 and 11, I was solicited for the jobs so there was no interview. For job 10, no interview was required as the referral agency doesn't screen the teachers it works with. The only interview I ever failed at was for some work in California which I can't recall right now, but it was some social service job in my field. The main problem with that interview was that my husband, who was driving me there because I was new to California and had no idea how to get anywhere, underestimated the timing on something and I was a half hour late. We all know that showing up late for a job interview is damn near a guarantee that you won't get the job, though I have no way of knowing if I wouldn't have gotten it even if I wasn't on time.

I do have enough second-hand interview experience to know that an interview in Japan isn't the same as one in the U.S. Several of my students have discussed interviews in Japan with me and I've been told that they rarely or never get asked questions that are already answered by the resume. The whole point back home is to probe the veracity of the claims on your resume as well as get a feel for the type of person you are. In Japan, they are interested in what you're capable of, but tend to take what you say on the resume at face value. There's generally (but not always) an expectation that the company may need to train you here to fit their particular way of doing things whereas companies back home want you to hit the ground running fast and hard.

Regarding my first hand experience with interviews in Japan, my first interview in Japan, for Nova, wasn't much of an interview at all. A Japanese man looked at my passport and said they could sponsor me and that was it. If anything supported the oft-held idea that all Nova wanted was warm bodies, that interview did. My second interview in Japan, which resulted in my long-term work at an office, was rather a different kettle of fish. First of all, I was only interviewing for a temporary position so perhaps the bar wasn't set incredibly high, though I do recall the interview taking a bit of time. Also, I was interviewed by two people - an Australian man (D. from henceforth) who would become my boss and friend and a Japanese manager type (S. from this point on) who could speak English.

D. handled most of the interview and asked me questions about my experience as a teacher, my availability, and questions about how I'd go about correcting certain types of written errors in students' homework. After he was finished, he invited S. to ask any questions he wanted to ask. I can't recall exactly what he asked, but the first thing he asked was something along the lines of, 'you've worked at a conversation school...so, you've never worked at a Japanese office?' When I heard this question, I had the distinct impression that he wasn't attempting to ask me anything useful, but rather focusing on some point to rule me out. This impression was strengthened by the fact that he repeated it after my first answer. It seemed to me that he wasn't focusing on how well I might be capable of doing the job like D. was, but rather on my lack of experience with something few foreigners who would apply for a temporary instructor's position would have had any experience with.

At the time, I recall feeling a bit "trapped" by the question because I felt it was designed to make me look bad and there was no escaping a negative answer. It appeared to be a deliberate attempt to focus on a lack of a qualification. After all, the only thing I could say was, "no, I haven't." I had the impression that D.'s questions were "reasonable" and that S.'s were designed to discredit me, even if he had to reach for something which no one would answer differently than I would. While I felt pretty confident during D's questions, I was left feeling as if I'd blown it by the end because of S.'s line of inquiry.

In retrospect (and now many years later), I realize a few things about that interview. One was that S. had no interest in discrediting me or putting me in a position where my answers would reflect poorly on me. As the manager of the section I was going to work in, his concerns were not with how well I'd do the job, but rather with how my presence would affect the office. He didn't ask me about my qualifications to do the job because that was D.'s responsibility, not his. He likely did not expect anyone who applied for the job to have experience in a Japanese office, but he asked the question because he probably would have preferred someone who knew what the dynamic was like and knew some of the unspoken rules of Japanese business situations. Someone with experience in Japanese ways would would be less likely to be disruptive or fail to conform to expectations.

As time went by and I learned a few things about S., I realized a few other things about his manner in the meeting as well. One thing is that he was (likely unintentionally) abrupt when he spoke English. I'm not sure if that was because he was insecure about his English (though I think that was the case to some extent) or if it was just this tendency among Japanese men to come across rudely when they speak English because they fail to make proper adjustments to be polite. I can't tell you how many times I've had to advise men not to say "I want you to (do something)" or to say "I want" rather than "I'd like" or make a polite request in situations like making a request from friends.

I also believe, in retrospect, that he was pretty nervous about things going wrong. I have a hazy recollection that he may have been relatively new at being in charge of the section. Well, actually, he wasn't at the top of it. That was reserved for the president's wife who was the head, but she didn't actually work all the time and only occasionally came around to write a bit and to rag on everyone else's work. I think if any real bad seeds had been hired, he'd have been held accountable because he was supposed to be making sure D., who was a foreigner and had been there only a year, didn't hire any axe murderers or deviants.

This suspicion is supported by (or confirmed by) the fact that S. was a salesman who was "kicked upstairs" by the president to keep an eye on the foreigners when the company was occupying two floors of a small building. There were other Japanese staff members there, but one was the president's wife and the other was female. Women weren't given positions of authority unless they'd had the misfortune of marrying the president and the woman who had paid that price for being near the top of the heap wasn't around enough to watch over those untrustworthy foreign workers. This was a fact that D. shared with me quite a few years later after S. got put back into the salesman pool once the office was consolidated on one floor (due to falling sales) and the president could station himself outside the area the foreigners worked and watch over us himself.

I always felt a strange vibe with S. because he seemed perpetually awkward. In fact, I often imagined that he was the perfect specimen visually of the Western stereotype of the "geeky" Japanese guy. Other than having a deep voice, he looked the part - short, slim, wearing glasses, short, straight hair (always immaculate) and in the requisite dark business suit. He also always gave off a vibe of not feeling comfortable in the office or around any of the authority figures around him.

That being said, I'm perfectly comfortable saying that this awkwardness may have manifested itself around me only. It was probably fueled by my lack of cooperation with certain wishes on the part of the company, but also maybe just by the fact that he always seemed like the sort of person who was uncomfortable in his own skin. When I made smalltalk with him about his work, no matter what job he was doing, he said that he didn't feel he was very good at it. That's not to say that this awkwardness meant that I disliked S. After all, I gave him an old Mac of mine to do some music-related work, but I worked with him for quite awhile and never did have what felt like a comfortable chat with him.

When I left, S. was surprised. He told me that he thought I would never leave the job. I'm not sure if he meant that as he felt they'd be stuck with me forever, or if he felt I had been around so long that he believed I'd become a part of the "family" and wouldn't leave the comfort of the position. The pessimistic part of me feels it's the former, but the part of me that is trying to be less negative about life in general would like to believe it's the latter.