When Confession is Bad For the Soul

A lot of my tales from working at a Japanese office will likely focus on what other people did rather than one what I did. However, I don't want anyone to think I believed I was perfect and didn't make my fair share of mistakes. One of the problems one has working in a cross-cultural situation is that there are varying expectations on both sides and each assumes the other knows the score and will act accordingly. This results in a lot of disappointment on both sides.

I'm of two minds about cross-cultural working. One is that a company which employs foreigners must understand that they are not Japanese and cannot be expected to comply with the unspoken "rules" of the company. Any part of the culture which they want foreign employees to adhere to should be explicitly stated before a work contract is signed. Unfortunately, one aspect of Japanese business culture is that they don't see contracts as binding nor do they feel it's necessary to offer up an accurate job description.

The other part of my thinking on this matter is that those who live and work in foreign cultures should do their best to try and compromise in reasonable situations to fit with the culture. However, I've seen far too many situations where those who make the compromise are simply walked all over or expected to abandon their principles entirely. Just because Japanese employees are willing to offer up their free time to the company without compensation and to take less than half of the holidays they are entitled to is no reason to expect foreign employees to do so as well. I don't mind the expansion of job responsibility to include things like helping clean up around New Year's holidays, or even requests to work extra hours and be comped for them later, but I draw the line at becoming the company's bitch.

At any rate, after I'd worked at my former company for quite some time, I was able to better anticipate certain things. I knew what the Japanese wanted in certain situations and had the choice to comply or not. To be honest, more often than not, I didn't comply because I felt fairly disconnected from the rest of the company due to the fact that I was treated as the mentally deficient stepchild that was to be locked in the basement when company came round. Neither my boss nor I were treated to the perks of the Japanese staff, yet we were expected to carry out the same responsibilities. You'd be surprised how not offering someone a carrot will make them fail to respond to the stick.

One aspect in particular that I learned to predict after about 6-8 years with the same tinpot dictator of a president was how he would respond to mistakes. That is to say, he'd overreact and behave in the most hysterical fashion, particularly if that mistake was made by a foreigner. For example, one temporary employee came in and ate a carrot for breakfast at his desk one day and wasn't admonished. When that same employee took the further step of eating a bowl of cereal at his desk, the president went off on him and docked him a half hour's pay for his failure to understand that this was just not done. Mind you, I think that the president had every right to admonish him for having a sit down meal on the company's dime, but I think that there was a better way to handle it and that docking someones pay that much for what probably cost the company no more than 10 minutes was over the top. He could have simply asked him to make up the 10 minutes by taking a shorter lunch or staying 10 minutes late. Going ballistic didn't really do much in the way of smoothing cross-cultural understanding.

After years of the president's overreactions and sledgehammer punishment for minor infractions on the part of foreign employees who unwittingly made mistakes, I knew what sort of response certain errors might receive. Unilateral punishment for very human occurrences or misunderstandings in which everyone paid the price were not the least bit uncommon.

On Saturdays, I worked completely alone in the office so no one was around to witness an accident I had one day. I was eating lunch at my desk with a bottle of Diet Coke when I bumped the bottle and about 1/3 of it spilled into the keyboard on my ancient PC. Note that the foreigners were using 10-year-old (or more) Windows '95 computers while the Japanese staff had updated Windows XP machines. That meant that I couldn't have easily purchased a replacement keyboard, nor could the company without some digging through shops that kept antiques in stock.

I knew that there was a chance that the keyboard might dry out and work fine if I turned it upside down, let the Coke drain out, and allowed it to dry thoroughly. Because I had to work the rest of the day, I borrowed a keyboard from a computer that wasn't going to be used by anyone until the following Monday and set mine aside to dry. As I processed what had happened, I decided that it would be best if I did not confess in the event that the keyboard was ruined.

Before I go any further, let me say that, except for this one incident, I never failed to own up to a mistake I made on the job. If I screwed up, I told my boss that it was my error. And the truth is that I would normally confess to this type of accident as well and pay for a replacement out of my own pocket in the event that the keyboard was ruined. I had no problem with that possibility.

The almost certain possibility that I had a problem with was the type of punishment that would have followed a confession. That is, the president would almost certainly ban all foreign employees from drinking anything at their desks. Since we were conducting tests with students by telephone which required us to talk for hours, this would be a pretty serious punishment causing discomfort for all. Dry throats and mouths were not the least bit uncommon. If I told the president that I spilled a drink and ruined equipment, I was sure everyone would suffer for my little bump of a Coke bottle.

At the end of the day, I reattached my moist keyboard to my powered down machine and put the intact one back on the computer I borrowed it from and left for the weekend. When I came back on Tuesday, it had dried out and was working fine, so there wasn't a problem. However, had it failed to work upon my return, I would have simply claimed that the old thing had given up the ghost after so many years of use.

I'm not happy that I was planning to lie. Lying is completely not in my nature and I am awful at it. When I think about this incident though, I believe that it illustrates all too well how some people bring out the worst behavior in others by their abuse of power or disproportionate reactions to very human mistakes. If the president weren't so overbearing and unfair in his responses, I would never have pondered hiding the truth. The reason I could always own up to every other mistake I made without hesitation was that work errors were reported directly to my Australian boss and not to the president. Since he was a good boss who knew that no one was perfect, I never worried that any admission of an error would garner a disproportionate response from him.

Japan is so much more special when you're stupid

Some time back, I had a commenter who was new to Japan who I tried to be supportive of and help out as she repeatedly freaked out over her troubles in Japan. As time went by, she turned into one of those foreigners who finds everything in Japan so precious and unique and ragged constantly on her home country (which happens to be America).

I quit reading her blog, but occasionally something will compel me to take a peak back and see if she's found some balance in her life here. Unfortunately, I can't say from my latest peak that she has. While certainly it is any person's right to bash their home country and praise Japan as being just so precious and wonderful, the lengths to which some people go leaves me flabbergasted.

One of the recent posts by this person was bubbling over about sugar syrup for coffee and how wonderful it is that you can buy little plastic tubs of it in Japan and pour in your cold beverages to sweeten them. 'Why doesn't America have this syrup,' she exclaims. Well, America does have sugar syrup for cold drinks. In fact, America has far more of it than Japan does. You can get such syrup in dozens of flavors and as both a sugar and sugar-free version from more than one manufacturer. One of the ones I buy it from (via the FBC) is Da Vinci. The main difference between Japan and America on this front is that the Americans have a vastly greater variety of it and the Japanese have it in one flavor (plain) only and sell it in excessive packaging.

Certainly, there are things that Japan has that can't be had in other countries, but the gaijin Uncle Toms are so myopic that they either don't know their own country well enough to know what isn't worth gushing over or simply are so blinded by their infatuation with Japan to see reality. I try to be patient with people, but these people get my goat because of the ridiculous lengths to which they go in order to keep Japan on a pedestal. And yes, this is the same stupid person who was clapping her hands at an article that said that racism was right for Japanese people. One of these days, I swear I'm going to pop by and find her talking about how wonderful it is that Japan handles prostitution by essentially sexually enslaving women from other Asian countries. I'm sure she appreciates that it keeps more Japanese women out of the profession, and the Japanese are the important ones, aren't they?. :-p

Most Contrived Pose Ever

The Japanese company I used to work for had what must have been a thousand color, A4 size (about the size of a US letter sheet of paper), multi-page brochures made up during the years of the bubble economy. I'm sure it cost a fortune at that time to make so many large color booklets to hand out to customers, but they were produced back in the days when Japanese companies were buying up real estate in America and artwork from around the world. Everyone had money to toss down the crapper on frivolous expenses.

There were a few things which I will never forget about the brochure. One thing was that it featured a panorama shot of young foreign people who supposedly worked at the company in front of the skyscrapers in Shinjuku and that none of them actually worked there. Another was that the founder and president (at the time) was shown smiling on one page and had written some long-winded statement about the business. The rest of the booklet was liberally peppered with pictures of people supposedly working around the office. All but one or two of those pictures showed someone pointing at something. They were so exceptionally fake and unnatural looking that we couldn't help but make jokes about them.

It's not that people don't point at things. Obviously, sometimes they do. However, pointing in photos when there is no focal point always looks, well, stupid. It doesn't help when the people who are posing are clearly uncomfortable holding the pose for the camera. They know pointing at phantom objects for the sake of the camera looks lame. That leads me to the political flyer that was left in our mailbox:

Look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Godzilla!
(click on the picture to see a bigger version)

This brochure takes the whole posing and pointing concept to it's nadir. The three guys posing with hands on hips and one hand pointing in the air look more like a stiff chorus line preparing to do a jerky choreographed routine than politicians leading the way into Japan's new direction in the future.

The guy in the center is the son of a former Tokyo governer. His dead eyes and stiffly set jaw make him look like he's a teacher pointing at a badly behaved student and admonishing him for texting in class. The guy on the left looks like he's having difficulties holding the pose and the one on the right looks like he feels embarrassed and is just counting the seconds until the humiliating photo session is over.

I realize that all promotional pictures for politicians are contrived and posed for, but this is one of the funniest ones I've ever seen in Japan. I really want to find some outlet to post this picture and ask people to make up a caption for it as there is so much fertile capacity for making up ridiculous descriptions. I guess I'll have to settle for privately mocking it. My husband plans to take it to his school and talk about it with his students to get their take on how it looks. I'm sure their responses will be interesting.

New Trek Movie (Japanese flyer)

The images are much bigger than they appear in this post. Click on the small versions in this post to see a full-size version.

About a week and a half ago, my husband went to see Watchmen at a Japanese movie theater. They showed a trailer for the new Trek movie and flyers were available for it. My husband noticed that Spock did not make much of an appearance in the clips at all.


I'm not sure why Spock isn't in it, but I also noted that he doesn't make much of an appearance in the flyer either. It's my guess that the Japanese promotional material is focusing on the blond-haired, blue-eyed captain. Most promotion in Japan comes with a pandering slant. For instance, all of the advertisements for Battlestar Galactica here focused heavily on the Asian actress (sorry, I didn't watch BG so I don't know who she is or who she plays). Also, the commercials for Law and Order: SVU showcase and talk about B.D. Wong a lot because he's Asian. Note that I've never seen ads for either of these shows featuring any of the other actors in those shows.


The back of the flyer mentions that there is a Japanese blog for Chris Pine. There are no other blogs for other actors. This further fuels my feeling that the pretty boy has been chosen to appeal to the Japanese audience. The fact that the header graphic has a big heart on it and he's posed like some boy band idol doesn't do much to dissuade me from my conclusions.

One interesting point for those of us who followed the original Trek series here in Japan is that two of the characters have regained their original names with the reboot. In Japan, Scotty was called "Charlie" in the original series broadcast here and the brochure now lists his character as "Scot". I don't know why his name was changed to Charlie, but the thought always amused me. Also, Sulu was called "Sato" in Japan. This is likely because "Sulu" is not a real Japanese name. He is listed as "Sulu" in the brochure.

I hope you enjoy the scans. Note my marvelous stitching together of the center! The seam running down the center is the fold line in the brochure, not a flaw in my Photoshop work.

A little postscript: There's a mention on the back of an "ID card neck strap" which one can buy for 1,300 yen (about $13) which shows Chris Pine as Captain Kirk. I'm not sure what the point of this is, but it's a limited edition movie souvenir.

Reality-Media Disconnect

Lately, I've been reading a lot about how the bad economy in Japan is forcing prices downward and how this is such a terrible thing. Supposedly, with consumers keeping as much money in their tight little fists as possible, competition is pushing merchants to lower prices which leads to lower profits which in turn means they lower wages and layoff staff.

I'm not a consumer of high-priced goods, and only buy big ticket items like computers, televisions, etc. when something breaks down or is outdated enough to cause great inconvenience, so I can't speak to how the market for luxury goods or pricier bags, shoes, clothes, and adult toys (no, not the dirty kind) is working. I can say one thing for absolute certain and that is that the prices of daily necessities has not been dropping. In fact, as of about a month ago, the price of dairy products and milk in particular went up yet again.

About three years ago, a liter (about a quart) of milk could be had in Tokyo at most markets for about 170 yen (about $1.65). The price went through incremental increases and was hanging at around 198 yen (about $2.00) until recently when it went up to 208 yen ($2.10). Similarly, 200 grams (about two sticks in America or 1 cup) of butter used to be available for around 260 yen ($2.60) and now you're exceptionally lucky if you find it on sale for as low as 300 yen ($3.00). Usually, the price hangs around 388 yen ($3.80) for the equivalent of 2 sticks.

The dairy prices are particularly curious in light of the fact that I read recently that Japanese dairy farmers are crying that they can't make a living raising cows. In part, I can see where their problems are coming from. Feed prices have gone up due to fuel prices (though gas prices have gone down) and increased global demand for grain products, particularly corn, as alternate fuel and manufactured products material. However, prices have continued to go up so it's hard to believe that they aren't compensating for increased grain costs through these hikes.

One of the farmers who was saying he couldn't profit in the dairy business said that he is going to switch over to the rice growing business instead. The reason why this is curious is that Japan is awash in a sea of rice. The government has so much stockpiled that they are actively encouraging people to eat more rice and to return to traditional Japanese cuisine to consume rice, which is relatively cheap in comparison to other grain products like pasta and bread, and vegetable starches like potatoes. If Japan is full to the brim with rice, why would it be profitable to become yet another rice farmer? The answer is that rice is subsidized by the Japanese government so it's a more secure choice. Also, you don't have to depend on the price of animal feed if you grow rice.

I find it relatively frustrating to read articles again and again about how prices are going down only to find that things at the market continue to creep up. Starting about 3 years ago, rather substantial jumps in prices for all sorts of staple goods occurred, and this was in anticipation of oil price increases and conglomerates buying up supplies, not in response to these changes. Toilet paper that used to cost 198 yen currently sells for 258 yen, for instance, and it has not budged along with changes in fuel prices.

My feeling is that companies know there are certain daily use products that people will buy because they have to or are extremely reluctant to give up and that they continue to take advantage of the average shopper by keeping those prices high. As Japanese consumers grow increasingly frugal in response to news of more job losses, diminished bonuses, and stagnant wages, they continue to shy away from buying new "stuff" that they don't need, and focus on the basics. My guess is that, given that this is the only area where people can't really hold back on their spending, the much publicized decrease in prices isn't likely to hit such items any time soon.

Two Boxes (and the non-existence of time)

There are many ideas that people accept as so completely obvious that anyone who questions the status quo is seen as being a little mad. I'm sure that anyone who thought space was anything more than a vast black nothing full of heavenly bodies was completely reasonable up until "dark matter" was hypothesized by scientists. Of course, dark matter isn't a fact, nor is there any direct evidence of it. It's something scientists made up to explain the unexplainable while figuring out the way the universe works.

At any rate, when you question what is utterly obvious to the vast majority of people, it's hard to make others understand where you are coming from. When I say that I don't believe in the existence of time, I find it a little difficult to explain to those who can't even begin to fathom such an absurd notion. Last night, I was having a talk with a student about the future and whether or not she believed that people could tell the future. When she asked me if I believed they could, I told her that it was complicated because I didn't believe time existed, so it's not a matter of predicting what has not occurred.

After the lesson, I was thinking about how to frame this feeling about time in an understandable and clear way. When I explained it to the student, I drew a time line of our life which is like an arrow shooting forward from birth to death. Our conception is that that is how we experience life. We move in one direction and we can't go back nor can we change the rate at which we move forward. The best I could explain to her at that time was to consider the smallest measures on that line as chopped up little slides what we existed in and were blind of the slices ahead of us. That is, we were walled off from the past and future, but they were still there.

Later, I thought about this again and a better example came to mind. Consider that there are two boxes on either side of you. You don't know what is in one of the boxes, but you know something is in them. You are given an item from the "future" box and you experience it. You can touch it, see it, smell it, or even taste it if you want. When you are finished with it, you put it into the other box, "the past". Once you put the item into the past, you can never access it again. Would you say that the box full of the past was empty because you couldn't see what was in it or access its contents? Do you really believe the "future" box is empty because you cannot see what is inside of it? My feeling is that just because you can't access the contents of the boxes, it doesn't mean they cease to exist. Time shapes how we experience this existence, but it is a construct that exists to feed us experiences in a manner which will not overwhelm the fragile body's sensory mechanisms.

This is how I view time. Because of the limits of our perceptions (due to our nervous systems' inability to process multiple "dimensions" without suffering a complete mental and likely physical overload), we can't have access to everything at once so we can only access life in a limited way. It's as if our bodies are designed to be "handed" items in a fashion that they can process so they can still function in this reality rather than being inundated with all experiences (past and present) at all times. I don't believe that means those experiences are gone, but rather that we aren't allowed to access them for our own "protection".

This relates to both predictions and past lives (if you believe in such things). Some people, perhaps because they are capable of handling it or have a capacity which is uncommon, have access to the contents of the boxes that we don't. The extent to which that access is distorted, however, is always an issue. That is, just because they can reach into those boxes, it doesn't mean they can clearly and accurately experience what is in them as they are fighting through a construct which is meant to protect our reality from others, so such things are rarely presented without the distortion of the psychology of the involved party and less than 100% clarity is present while processing them. The results of any such access will almost certainly be skewed (sometimes very badly) by the zeitgeist the person lives in and their own psychological need to view things in a particular way.

This is also, incidentally, how I believe ghosts, spirits, and other strange things show up for some people in our reality. I see it as a form of dimensional "leakage" which occurs when two entities (people) have a sensitivity to one another and can interact. Most of them are terrified and react accordingly. That is, they try to force one another out of their respective realities. Such experiences are inevitably full of perceptual distortions as well. Consider that a "ghost" that is telling someone in our reality to "get out" may be experiencing the other party as a similarly invasive and terrifying "ghost" in their reality.

I could be wrong, of course. I've never had an experience with a past life memory or what might be considered a significant premonition, nor have I ever seen a ghost. However, I'm not prepared to utterly dismiss those who have had such experiences as all being self-deluding, psychotic, or simply liars. Scoffing at them and waving away their experiences is a handy way of explaining away the unexplainable, but I question the psychology of the need to do this. Mainly, I think that it's rooted in arrogance and self-centeredness. That is, if it is unusual and I haven't experienced it, it didn't happen, so that person must be crazy or a liar. While I am sure that some people have psychotic breaks or neurological problems which cause them to see, hear, and experience things (as I've worked with such people before), I'm not prepared to believe that is always the case.

I don't believe that time doesn't exists as an explanation of the unexplainable, though it somehow does end up explaining some things. Though I guess that if I did make it up to explain the unexplainable, I'd be no different from those who made up dark matter to fill in the gaps of their theoretical notions of how the universe works.

The "Case By Case" Culture

Back in the days when such statements were not considered racist, people in movies, television, and various other media used to say that the Japanese were "inscrutable". I'm not sure exactly what aspect of Japanese behavior elicited this widely held observation, but the statement is supposed to reflect the idea that the Japanese are difficult to analyze and understand. One thing I can say for certain is that it does not have anything to do with language. Plenty of people learn to read, speak, and write Japanese language. Another thing I can say is that the idea that Japanese people are incomprehensible to outsiders is one that the Japanese themselves love to perpetuate.

Part of the reason I believe that the Japanese believe that outsiders can't understand their culture's depth and breadth is that they lack perspective on outside cultures. They don't know how their culture differs because they don't have intimate knowledge of other cultures as a point of reference. They can't explain the differences because they don't know what is different except in relatively isolated cases. Few people in either culture have a macro view of the mechanics of the cultures they're trying to understand so we are left with a lot of micro views of things like deference to authority, respect for the aged, notions of homogeneity and conformity, etc.

I'm sure that somewhere someone has written books explaining the things I'm about to say and that someone in an academic ivory tower has made it their life's work to understand and explain such things. I'm not attempting to compete with such authorities or to say I know what they know, but there are some things I've realized which have provided me with a different perspective and a better understanding of a particular aspect of Japanese culture which tends to drive many foreign people who live here mad. That is the way in which the Japanese handle matters of rule and law on a "case by case" basis. That is, they have rules which they will recite chapter and verse, but then they will bend those rules on a whim.

For foreign folks, the "case by case" culture is maddening because we never know where we stand and we always expect to be standing in the line which says, "you're going to get screwed over." The latter is a bit paranoid, and probably fueled by errors we make when dealing with Japanese business and bureaucracy, but I'm sure that prejudice is applied at times as well.

Just to be clear, I will offer an example of a typical "case by case" situation which affects our lives as foreign folks. This is the immigration situation and the requirements for visas and visa renewal. When you apply for a visa, you get an application form and a list of documentation that you must submit. In the vast majority of cases, you hand over the documents and you get your stamp and move along. However, as part of the information you receive, there is essentially a statement that the immigration office can demand any other documentation of you that they wish and can refuse you for any reason whatsoever. They don't have to point to any rule to demand that you offer up your mother's birth certificate, your foreign bank account's address, or your grandmother's marriage license. If they want these things, they have every right to request them because they have the power to handle every situation on a "case by case" basis. There is no promise that you will be treated equally to other applicants or that the same demands will be made of each applicant. Now, I don't think that such demands are made, though I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if certain people were refused renewals based on this flexibility and power.

The interesting thing about the "case by case" culture is that it can benefit as well as take away from you in a given situation. People who have power to make life harder for you also have the power to make it easier. They can waive punishment if you apologize or they can make your case an exemption when the other 1000 cases before you had to do exactly the same thing. This does happen in Japan and I think it'd probably happen more often for foreign folks if they knew how to show regret and accept responsibility in exactly the same manner as Japanese people do.

Unfortunately, we foreign folks, by and large, are accustomed to rules that are hard and fast. We like our rules this way because they guarantee that each person is treated exactly the same and that we are all equals. Without such rules, there is the possibility of prejudice and abuse of power. We like to have everything spelled out for us so that we can operate under the expectation that we can be guaranteed a certain result when we cross all of the "t's" and dot all of the "i's". Under such a system, we have the power to control the outcome because we know exactly what to do and we know that no one in an authority position has the power to deny us if we do everything we're supposed to.

If you compare the usual Western structure to the Japanese one, you'll notice that the Japanese situation places a great deal more power in the hands of the authorities making the decisions. You are, essentially, at the mercy of their whims should they choose to exercise them and you are powerless to do anything about it by tapping on a rule book or quoting a law because they have a trapdoor in most cases which allows them to say 'and whatever else we want from you or want to do to you.'

Fortunately, most of the time the people who have the power do not abuse it nor do they use their power to make your life difficult. Generally speaking, everyone just does what they're supposed to do and all goes smoothly. Mainly, in my experience, knowing about the way the case by case culture works helps when things go wrong. If you approach the person in authority in a manner which does not challenge their power and places you firmly as someone who is of inferior status, highly apologetic, and sincerely regretful that something has gone awry, that flexibility is used to help you rather than harm you.

Unfortunately, most expatriates don't approach dealing with various authorities and businesses in Japan in this fashion. Because we are accustomed to knowing exactly what our rights are and what sort of power we have, we get aggressive and insistent about what is supposed to happen and what is "right". In other words, we challenge the person in authority's right to make various requests and choices which only serves to make them all the less likely to want to help us or let us off the hook.

To us, following the Japanese way is degrading. It makes us feel like we're allowing ourselves to be cowed into submission or lowering ourselves in order to cooperate. In American culture in particular, the whole idea of figuratively kneeling before an authority in submission or putting yourself at their mercy is repugnant, cowardly, and a surrender of your independence and rights. In the end though, it's not about your ego. It's about a culture that is comfortable with having two faces, the true face (honne) and the public face (tatamae). The Japanese don't feel degraded by having to use a different face in order to make things operate smoothly in most cases. Their core ego structure is not centered around the public face. It's just something they put on when needed and take off when unnecessary. They oil the wheels when needed to make things go smoothly and move on to other things.

In the end, we can only be true to who we are. As an American, I don't know that I could ever be entirely comfortable with the "case by case" nature of Japanese life. However, one thing I've realized is that this system is not in place as an excuse to be prejudicial. It's about power, not prejudice, and keeping it in the hands of one group of people rather than in the hands of the average person. It's something that has developed as a result of Japan's history just as the egalitarian nature of America's laws has developed because of its history. If I want to continue living here, it serves me far better to accept that rather than to fight it.

Nobody Tells Us

Recently, my husband and I have been through a pretty stressful experience related to some elements of the bureaucracy in Japan. All countries have their red tape and rules, of course. The difference in Japan is that the rules are so vastly different for foreign folks compared to the average Japanese person and it can be confusing at best.

If you want to do everything right and get everything straight as a foreign person in Japan, you have to make a concerted effort to find everything out and even then you might fail to get it right. The tendency of most people in Japan due to communication differences is to simply tell you only what you ask to hear rather than enlighten you about an overall situation. If you fail to ask the right question, you may not learn what you need to know.

There are a few reasons for various problems that foreign folks have in dealing with the red tape here. One of the reasons is that most Japanese employees are of a different status than most foreign employees. That is, most are "company workers" and we're considered "temporary workers". The point of making us "temporary workers" is to stop companies from having to fork over the benefits to us that they pay Japanese employees like supplemented health care payments, pension benefits, etc. Since most foreign folks remain in Japan for a short time, I don't have too great a problem with this. Most of them don't really need those benefits or would likely lose any money invested in such systems should they be hooked into them, though I don't think the companies care at all about saving us money. They do it mainly to save themselves money.

The real problem arises because company employees get a wide variety of bureaucratic tasks completely taken out of their hands. For instance, most Japanese people don't file their own taxes or manage their payments. The company's accountant just takes care of the whole thing. When I ask Japanese people about filing their income taxes, most of them have no idea how to do it, when to do it, or what they're even paying. The average Japanese person can offer me no advice on such things. The average American, on the other hand, can tell you plenty about taxes and how they need to be handled and when they need to be paid because the responsibility is equally in every person's hands.

Such is not the case for the vast majority of foreign folks and the people at the companies we work for often do not tell us anything about what we should be doing. The best you can generally hope for is some vague notation with your salary statement that you may owe additional tax and are responsible for paying it, but with no guidance about what those taxes might be above and beyond the income tax you already have paid or how you should go about finding out what they are. Sending newcomers to a foreign country out into the wild blue yonder in search of random taxes to pay isn't really the best way to handle things in my opinion. The fact that the companies know full well what taxes need to be paid and could tell you what they are, where to go to handle them, and how to make sure you are sent the proper bills indicates that they are either too lazy or indifferent to offer guidance or that they don't want you to know about those taxes because the bite out of your paycheck (10%) may make you think twice about working for your current salary. My vote is on lazy and indifferent.

During my first few years in Japan while working at Nova, I was never told that I needed to file an income tax return. I don't even know to date if I could have filed and gotten some of my tax money back or if I owed money, though the latter is almost certainly not so. The issue simply did not exist for me because I was completely unaware of this need. My husband's school, which was a much better place to work, took care of the tax filing for him so I figured this is what all places of employment did. In retrospect, it may have been what Nova did for me, but I have no way of knowing 18 years on. Certainly the idea that I was failing to act properly never even occurred to me.

Foreign folks get criticized a lot for not following the rules, not paying their way, etc., but the truth is that there is no organized system in place to help us do so. You learn piecemeal, if you learn at all. There's absolutely no reason for this to be the case. We're all registered at our local government offices and they have our addresses. They could send us tax forms to remind us that we have to pay, but they don't send them to you until you first file of your own initiative. In other words, you have to first find out that it is necessary and do it of your own volition in order to receive a reminder. If you assume that the company handled it for you (as is so often the case for the majority of people), no one is going to tell you this is even necessary in your particular case so you blithely go about your business. Most foreign folks are not even aware that their cases are different from that of the Japanese when it comes to such things.

The part that aggravates me about this situation is that critics (mostly the "Uncle Tom" foreigners) will state that you can't expect to be treated differently simply because you're a foreigner. The thing is that the problems stem from the fact that you are treated differently already because you're a foreigner. You can't automatically place the vast majority of foreign folks in different working conditions than the norm (the norm being the company handles such things) and then expect them to figure out that they need to do something differently and then criticize them for not doing exactly what the Japanese do (which is nothing). In other words, you can't have it both ways. Either they are treated the same and expected to do the same or they are treated differently and offered guidance to assist them in their particular situation. The aggravating thing is that the solutions are relatively simple, but no one takes responsibility for implementing them. Nobody tells you how to be a good citizen, but they're all ready to get in line and condemn you when you make a mistake and fail to act like one.

Personally, I think the ambiguity is intentional. The government wants your money, but they also want to allow loopholes for certain groups of people. In Japan, they love nothing more than being wishy-washy. This may sound absurd, particularly in regards to taxes, but there is a level on which it makes sense. There are "temporary workers" who are Japanese as well as foreigners. The main difference is that there are very few company workers who are foreign. In fact, lately, the number of Japanese who are seen as temps is growing. These workers are cheaper for companies because they get no benefits and cost the companies less.

The ambiguity likely exists to allow the companies to continue to easily secure such workers because they are okay with working under less than optimal conditions (no security, no bonuses, no benefits) if they can keep more of their paychecks than company employees. It may sound absurd, but Japan is not a country that views contracts and rules of law as something to be adhered to strictly. They view such things as guidelines from which to consider each situation on a case by case basis. One of the reasons Western business and Japanese business often have problems working together is that the Japanese don't view contracts as something hard and fast, but Westerners do. If ambiguity and selective enforcement are seen as having an overall benefit to society, then they are left in place. This can be rather maddening for those of us who are accustomed to having rights and using the laws to let us know where we stand.

(As an aside: I will note that my views spring from the fact that there are some Japanese people who are "temporary workers" who willfully do not file their taxes even though they are aware that they should. I'm told that they don't do it because they are young and don't want to start paying into the pension system yet because they won't benefit from it for decades and that this allows them to avoid paying city and prefecture taxes. (For the record, most of us are taxed accurately or over-taxed on our income taxes so not filing means writing off a possible refund.) This is an entirely different topic, but I think their reluctance to pay into the pension fund is driven by the ridiculously low monthly payments and the fact that paying in more or longer has no impact on your benefits. In other words, they can spend 25 years paying into the system or 50 years paying in and they're still only going to get a flat payment of about 60,000 yen so they don't want to start paying any earlier than they have to.)

Fortunately for my husband and I, our issues appear to have sorted themselves out at this point in time. We won't know for sure for a few more weeks, but I'd say it's 99% sure that everything is okay and that nothing bad will come of the situation I've been stressing out over for the past three days. Being a nervous sort of person, I'm still losing sleep over that 1% though. And having a tendency to construct worst case scenarios, I'm still building mountains out of molehills. Chances are though, that it'll all be okay.