Miscellaneous Thoughts

If it is not obvious, I really like Japan so far.

I like all of my coworkers: they are great to talk to, they worry about me and make sure I am enjoying my work/time in Japan, and even though they are more serious than my laid-back attitude they are easy to get along with. I can see how they relate a company to a family, and how the whole “in-group/out-group” dynamic that I learned about in Japanese language class really plays out.

An interesting thing I have learned about some Japanese companies that I didn’t understand before was the group/family company paradigm. So for example, before coming to Japan if you would have said Mitsubishi to me I would have immediately thought of the cars, or maybe also the chemical company that did not respond to my emails about a potential internship. But I always figured that they were completely separate companies that shared a name, because maybe Mitsubishi is a popular name, like Smith or Johnson in the US. And while that is true that they are different companies, they stemmed from the same “mother/father” company and are part of the overall Mitsubishi group/family. So Hitachi and Hitachi Chemicals are different companies altogether (although in this particular case Hitachi holds the majority of Hitachi Chemicals shares, I think, but let’s not get into business talk). Thus there is still some collaboration among the other companies in the group, as most of them are specialized (), but occasionally there is inter-competition. Korea has a similar system, but there it’s more “traditional” because it tends to actually be family-owned. So the president of the main company is the father, and the presidents of the branch companies are the children and other family members, usually.

I have noticed that many Japanese women wear a lot of make-up and enjoy dying their hair brown. It might be part of the way they were brought up or simply today’s fashion; I can only speculate as I have not directly asked. I personally am not an advocate of make-up and I enjoy dyed hair more if it is “weird” colors, as opposed to attempting more “natural” colours.

“Whoa! Did you just type in British?” Yes, I did. I am slowly getting used to seeing cars on the “other” side of the road and manoeuvering my way correctly on bicycle. Although unlike Boston where you can get a ticket for riding your bike on the sidewalk, here you can get a ticket for NOT riding on the sidewalk (no personal experience, but I’ve heard stories). Next topic: rubbish.

OK, I’m done with British…so trash. In Tokyo they are sticklers for separating trash when you dispose of it: paper, bottles, bottle caps, bottle wrappers, etc. Mostly, though, you separate the burnable and the not burnable, but I would say 90% goes in the burnable. I have a theory that Japanese people love packaging and packages, on everything. Sure sometimes packaging is necessary to preserve perishables or things like that, but sometimes they go overboard, I feel…individually wrapped fruit, multilayered-wrapped onigiri, wrapper within wrapper within bag within bag…oh my. And since many of the things are smaller sized (maybe for accurately, normal/human sized and not super-sized) this leads to a whole lot of plastic waste, which I think could easily be reduced.

Hmm what else.

One day a coworker told me that another unknown [to me] coworker commented that I looked like Tom Cruise from The Last Samurai. My theory is that I don’t, but since this is a movie that maybe many Japanese have seen (due to the popular main character played by Watanabe Ken) and Cruise-in-that-movie and I share long hair, facial hair, and non-Japanese-ness, I can see how they came to this conclusion. So that brings my current look-a-like status to Cap. Sparrow and the Last Samurai. Right…

Sometimes during work I do something that I usually never do, read the news. Or something like that. I occasionally read CNN.com and although I usually get the main ideas of what’s happening in the world, I sometimes question what CNN is thinking with their idea of journalism. Some of their stories I find un-news-worthy or poorly written, but I do enjoy reading most of the comments. Most of the comments stem from Americans, but there are occasional non-American participants. My estimate is that 85% of all comments are anger/hate-driven, 10% are positive or somewhat intelligent, and the rest are random or non sequiturs. Because human interactions fascinate me, this is a real treat especially since online interactions tend to be more brutal and raw due to anonymity and physical distance. It also shows how divided Americans (the world) are, politically, spiritually, hmm anything-and-everything-ally. Oh and there’s also the sea of misspellings and the stratosphere of grammatical errors, and the black hole of figurative imagery. So if your day is full of slow filtrations and there’s a long line to use the scanning electron microscope I recommend that you check out CNN.com, especially the comments for an interesting view of human interactions, assuming of course you don’t have access to hulu or youtube.

:P