Saturday, January 29, 2011

'Hey I got a schedule to keep here!...' - A Year in Fukushima #6

Last month I stumbled across a job opportunity in Florida that seemed right up my alley. This was pretty exciting for me as jobs and my alley don’t normally hang out in the same neighborhood. The position, involving fingerprint analysis and expensive-looking machines, would jibe perfectly with my advanced (mostly in age) education. What tipped my stubborn work/life scales though was the prospect of living year-round within a short bike ride of the sand and surf. This was a place I could almost imagine being gainfully employed. So immediately (meaning within a week) I got to work on the application process.


As with any application to a law enforcement agency, the paperwork involved a lot of swearing: I swear I don’t have any objectionable tattoos (or a forked tongue, a condition actually spelled out in the ‘no bodily mutilation’ section); I swear I don’t smoke (drinking, by its non-mention, is fine); I swear I have no history of repeated marijuana use beyond ‘experimental’ (Bill Clinton clause); I swear I have no recent DUI convictions. No problem, I’ll swear to all this and lots more, just hook me up to that polygraph. Oh and by the way I’ve got that ‘high school diploma or GED’ thing covered.

Imagine my concern then when I remembered that not two weeks before all this came my way I had agreed to teach a year-long English course at one of Fukushima’s zillion product manufacturing companies. I didn’t agree, exactly; Mr. Sato, an extremely nice guy who has a habit of dumping jobs on me, took my not outwardly disagreeing to take the job as a yes, and had already had three meetings and eight phone calls with the people at ‘Kaisha A’ about this upcoming contract which, it had by now been exhaustively determined, would last for one year. Obviously I needed to be more aggressive in my passively not agreeing to take on this new job, because unless there was an overload of applicants in Florida with high school diplomas or GEDs and no forked tongues I was going to have to take my practiced soft shoe to a higher level. ‘Well you see, Sato-san, right about when class is going into its third month here I’m going to be falling asleep to the soothing sound of the Gulf of Mexico…’

Through my world wide web of inside contacts I found out that this was the second posting for this position in Florida…in a town right on the Gulf…with amazing white sand beaches…and supermarkets with peanut butter… The second posting! It made me wonder if bodily mutilation was more common than I imagined among Floridians with GEDs. How could this position remain unfilled? More importantly, how much longer would this bit of good fortune last? Because now it seemed possible that my timely (read: slothful) application submission might actually spare Mr. Sato the grief I had been planning to trot out for him. This applicant evaluation was going to require a comprehensive background investigation, a polygraph exam, medical checks and my mother crawling through the attic back home to dig up my high school diploma so I could include a copy of that along with my graduate school transcript. For any normal governmental agency this process would take months and months. This was going to work out perfectly! I'd be evaluated, accepted and on a plane heading for Tampa even as I was still recovering from my hangover after the year-end party where my students, after a glib 'Hi Kevin I'm fine how are you?' would chug their beers and spend the rest of the night acting like I didn't teach them a thing.

But then the Kaisha really started pouring on the procedure.

Allow me to explain a bit about Kaisha A’s streamlined approach to admitting visitors to their high-security complex, surrounded on all sides by five-foot-high chain link. Through June of last year I taught a beginner’s course there. Before the start of this course they had requested a resume from me – in Japanese. Fair enough. They think a year with me is going to turn their mumbling employees into global communicators then why wouldn’t they believe I could scratch out a few legible Kanji? It’s all just protocol anyway; nothing I wrote resembled the characters for ‘fork’ and ‘tongue’ so they just stuck my standardized form with attached photo in a file somewhere and got back to scheduling meetings to schedule more meetings. Now, eighteen months later, they are requesting another resume from me. Two, actually, since now they want an English version as if this will make them or me or anyone believe these classes are helping transform the goings-on there at the plant into a regular UN gathering. Mr. Sato – did I mention he was a rally nice guy? – pulled out a photocopy of my first resume and told me he’d add a line at the bottom about the work I’d been doing for him in the past year and a half and send it in to those Kaisha A curmudgeons. That left me to handle the English version.

Which I have yet to get around to.

At the start of my first gig with Kaisha A, unlike the other teachers, I didn’t have a company-issued ID card to politely flash to the retired guy working the security gate. No problem, I’d get the standard guest pass in the plastic holder. ‘Please clip it either to your jacket or on your shirt pocket,’ Grandpa-san told me. I went with option three and stuck it in my backpack. On top of the ID Card / Guest Pass, we were each given a gray card to slide through this small machine at the gate, which produced the same buzzing sound as Japan’s new tsunami warning system. Of course this was all simply a test to make sure these gray cards could make the machine buzz properly every week.

Halfway through the course-year we were herded into a room of tables piled high with boxes and wires and cases of green tea in cans. ‘We are taking your picture for your new ID cards.’ These efficient little beauties (not a reference to my picture), once we got them two weeks later, acted as both our personal ID and our buzzing machine tester. No more wasting class time fumbling for the correct card at the gate. We were our own buzzing machines now, on the job, working to get our students to stop answering ‘How are you?’ with ‘Yes.’

This one-card system lasted exactly one week.

‘This gives you access to the hallway,’ Old Security told me, handing me a new type of card to stick into my backpack. I actually needed it though, as there was for the first time no one standing by in the lobby to guide me to the same classroom I had been using for six months. A beep and a click and I was alone in a first stage restricted area. I peeked into my classroom; no one had shown up yet. So I decided to see how deep this little card could get me into the bowels of the Kaisha. But I only made it through a second door and around a corner when I encountered a man who had the acuity to see I wasn’t a regular employee, certainly not one with second stage clearance. It must have been the lack of stress lines on my face. Bouncing on my toes I asked him for nearest rest room – denoted clearly by the blue and red figures on the white sign halfway down the hall behind him but he turned me around and marched me back out to the first stage boys room. He waited by the door as I faked taking care of business so he could show me the way – all the way – to the classroom I had been using for the past six months. Then he told me to please sit down, walked out of the room and closed the door.

The following week the tsunami warning machine was gone, with no explanation.

With this superhuman mindset driving efficiency through the roof at Der Kaisha, it should come as no surprise that the start of our year-long course has been indefinitely delayed. Just like last time there are three classes planned, for three levels of English ability. Some of those from the previous groups will be returning (though all six of my former students are nowhere to be seen). Each of the new students has been assigned to a class based on his or her TOEIC scores, by no means a reliable barometer of anyone’s English skill but still the litmus test in Japan for determining who gets promoted faster through the company ranks. (‘True, Kazu has a way with people but Hiro over there in the corner scored forty points higher, he’s obviously the guy who will help us better compete both domestically and globally.’) The Firm, though, in their incisive wisdom, set up ten-minute one-on-one interviews with yours truly to make sure each of these newbies ends up in the right room for their skills. Miraculously all eight of them would be available on the same morning, and I was going to rip through them and get everyone in line and get this course started and ended before someone with a GED and an intact tongue made it to Florida.

The bummer was that I was going to have to get going on that English resume – until someone in a nice chair in a nice seventh stage office decided more meetings were in order before these crucial interviews could take place, potentially shifting the future of the company in an unanticipated direction, or in any direction.

Mr. Sato and I are standing by.

In the meantime, I have put my own razor-sharp brand of efficiency into effect. Surfing this particular law enforcement agency’s website, checking out all the nice photos of the beach and the sun setting over the Gulf, I happened to notice there was a 3-5 years experience requirement for the job I wanted. Normally I wouldn’t pay such brazen statements any mind, but somewhere in the application papers sitting under the lemon cookies on my desk it said I was going to need to get three separate pieces of paper officially notarized before sending them in. Evidently they needed me to totally swear I didn’t have any recent DUIs or mutilated body parts. Living where I do, this notarization process was going to take a bit of time and money. So while I was waiting one evening for my buddy to text me back I whipped off an email to Florida, asking them if a Master’s degree was an acceptable substitute for 3-5 years experience in saying ‘no these fingerprints don’t match’, and oh by the way can my mom come down from the attic now.

The answer was a polite and firm no (to the Master’s, not my mom, she can come down anytime).

So now I’m in no rush to rock the Kaisha and get this course finished. As a matter of fact I’m not all too keen on getting it started. If and when these inner stage meetings end and I can finally sit these new students down and ask them for ten minutes if they know of any good ramen shops nearby, I think I’m going to nix the Fuhrer on the English resume idea. This will set off a whole new slew of meetings and tsunami warning machines - which will give the polite, firm folks in Florida time to realize that no one with a GED and a normal tongue is coming their way in the next 3-5 years and they might as well hire me.

I hope they are as efficient as I am; my open ticket to Tampa is only good for another eleven and a half months.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Time Management 2011 ('Hey where are my keys?')

Barely three weeks into 2011 and I can already hear the shatter and crash of people everywhere tossing their new year’s resolutions out the nearest window. Normally I wouldn’t notice it over the sound of the toilet as I flush my own promises away, right along with the back end of the year’s first Tuesday afternoon beer. But this January there’s a new kind of noise around the Kato household. Yes, that sound you are hearing is the smooth, even drone of methodical, almost superhuman planning.

I’ve thrown a few resolutions on the table this year. Not casually tossed under the kotatsu, or mindlessly slipped onto my desk, under a pile of what may be last year’s city tax forms and trail of related notices and summonses. No sir, I’ve been cultivating my powers of concentration in preparation for what is shaping up to be a landmark year for me. This year, no more minutes and hours will be wasted, lost forever in the vortex of inefficiency. This year, things are going to get done, frequently and fast, with none of my valuable ‘Run & Gun Time’ wasted on YouTube or dental floss or barely-bleeding kids.

It’s 8am as I sit down to pound this out. The kerosene heater is empty again and there’s frost on the insides of the windows, but I’m not going to squander a single moment on wimpy creature comforts. I just cranked out forty quick push-ups (all right, the last few weren’t too quick), and the kids can do the same when they wake up. Go push your trains around, or crawl back and forth across the living room a hundred times if you’re that cold, I’ve got work to do here. Talk about efficient; not only am I getting down to business several minutes sooner thanks to my brand-new razor-sharp personal management strategy, but I’m simultaneously teaching my nine-month-old kid the value of both time and exercise.

Well it’s coming up on ten o’clock now – I got a little too vociferous waiting for this idiot laptop from the Jurassic period to warm up and sort of woke the kids. If the apartment was so darn cold they should have stayed in bed, but out they came to destroy my first precious moments of the day. The older boy was screaming his tonsils out about the box of elephant cereal I let him get yesterday, while the little one wouldn’t stop bitching about his wet pants. Okay his wet and foul and putrid pants. With the wife up all night again trying to appease her motherly instincts, the parenting would fell once again to me. So I stuck my one kid and his dumb-o cereal in front of a Curious George DVD and sat my fresh and clean zero-year-old on my lap, ready for a little morning multi-tasking. Then the runt reached out and slapped the keyboard and the dinosaur inside froze.

I refilled the kerosene tank to help warm my 2004 Brontosaurus back up.

Okay, ten-fifteen and the house is quiet again, the wife having hauled the kids off to some sort of pre-school or another. (I don’t bother asking about the details, they only get in the way of my efficiency.) On today’s docket is this post of course, followed by a bit of editing for an e-book I want to get out this week, a few targeted emails and some time devoted to reading and commenting on strangers’ blogs so they will do the same for me and then go tell all their friends to check out my stuff. (This is the centerpiece of my ‘Wildfire’ approach to cyber-notoriety; a couple of witty, thoughtful comments on a few select pages and my world will be set ablaze.)

Ah, I just remembered, I have to go out and get something for Mom today. Her birthday is coming fast and with my laser-like focus I seem to have let that tidbit slip from my sights. Better get it done now while it’s still on my mind.

This should only take a few minutes.

I’ve figured out the best parking lots to cut across and which traffic lights are the safest to run in order to get to the department store down the street in the least amount of time. I think I just broke my own personal best, although when I got to the register I realized I’d forgotten my wallet and had to come home and get it. The silver lining to this is that I could make a second pass through that foo-foo bakery in the supermarket on the first floor. I snag a few free samples of their maple almond bread every chance I get, that stuff is amazing.

Anyway, Mom is now taken care of, back to business for this self-employed wolf. Where was I? Oh yeah, Wildfire. So the sheer amount of blog content out there is beyond human comprehension. A lot ranges from adequate to enlightening, so a discriminating reader like me has a huge palette of options worthy of my valuable time. But news and politics and gossip don’t feed my ‘2011 Time Compression’ resolution needs. So I am eternally searching for

Doorbell! And there’s a postal van outside, which means a package. I’ll be right back.

You know, I’ve been pondering this one for nine years now. If the law really states that every household in Japan is required to pay this television fee why don’t they just bill everyone, or better yet simply deduct it from everyone’s paycheck or welfare check or bribe money? Why does the NHK continue paying these otherwise unemployed people to go door-to-door trying to extract 2,400 yen from me when all I have to do is tell them very politely to piss off and close the door?

The package was for the girl next door, by the way.

I was just sitting back down to my laptop when someone from another tax-funded do-as-you’re-told agency called. Their timing is flawless like that. I think they’re in cahoots with those change purse toting NHK mercenaries. They can probably guess as soon as I say ‘moshi-moshi’ that neither am I Japanese nor am I very good at faking it. Yet they launch into their dokuhaku anyway, replete with all this specialized and ultra-formal lingo. I can barely understand the flood of syllables gushing out of their mouths. Heck I don’t even know if they’re talking about them or me or the girl next door. Just introducing themselves takes the better part of a Daniel Powter video (say what you will, I think Bad Day is a great song). They’ll go on reciting the entire prefectural tax ordnance bible if I don’t interject with an unmistakably foreign ‘um…uh…’ Then they spend the rest of the video apologizing for my being foreign and promising to call back when there’s a full-fledged human around.

And suddenly it’s lunch time.

Spitting bits of tofu and soy sauce onto my computer screen while I yell into the kitchen for my son to sit in his chair and eat his lunch is hard to reconcile, even with my new year’s ‘Food is for Wimps’ slogan. So I have to chalk up this time to ‘Family’, one of my resolutions that has yet to develop any clarity. I maintain my edge by keeping a pen and a piece of paper next to my plate and making loud slurping noises to fend off any distracting conversation. The afternoon is always a crap shoot; the wife may whisk the kids off to afternoon playtime or leave stinky pants with me or keep them both home for hours of raucous, docket-killing fun. In this last case I look for mindless chores to keep the circus mentally at bay; today it was speed-drying the last load of laundry over the kerosene heater to clear the hangers for tonight’s batch. And in between the shifting of socks and extra small shirts and cloth diapers I can sneak into my room and peck away at this post.

Here I redefine incongruity. I can’t float between laptop and laundry without my train of thought constantly derailing. Yet in the process I can forget about the laundry long enough to merit a call to the fire department. My ‘Take Control in 2011’ resolution appears to be finding a foothold, but a little while later the fire chief showed up anyway for a mandatory (according to some law everyone knows about and no one has ever actually read) on-location lecture about fire safety. My wife served up some green tea as Chief Yakitori was launching into his spiel, but somehow we got on the subject of cycling (‘Roll Like a Lion in the Year of the Sheep’) and by 3:30 the Chief and I were cracking open the beers I found under the steps.

He left an hour later when one of his men came to drive him and the fire engine back to the station.

The wife then asked me to go get some onions from down the street. Can’t have miso soup without onions when the older boy has a cough, picked up from one of his friends at school. With this I realized I hadn’t checked email all day and tried to log in for a peek while changing my still-smoky clothes, but my dinosaur was stuck in the tar pits again. So I shut him down and sped off into the dusky afternoon. This time I was only into the first parking lot when I realized I’d forgotten my wallet again. When I got home to a locked apartment I found that I had also left my keys and my cell phone inside. Where was my family all of a sudden?

I sat freezing on my front steps for thirty minutes before my wife emerged from the apartment of the girl next door with a small bag of onions. ‘Didn’t you get my text message?’

I spent dinner silently cursing George Stevenson and promising my son ‘Yes I will play trains with you after dinner now please eat your soup!’ Then after three trainwrecks and eleven rounds of ‘Daddy stop touching the trains!’ it was dirty dishes, bath time, throwing out burned clothes and charred pieces of wallpaper, milk, stinky pants and hanging more laundry. It was 10:30 when I got back to my laptop.

It was quarter to twelve when I closed out my email, put away the coconut cookies and pulled this post back up on screen. Now it is almost 1:30am.

What was I talking about?

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Ringing in the New Year in Japan - A Year in Fukushima #5

That I rang in the new year five days and fifteen minutes ago means a few things. One, the synapses should be firing like jiffy-pop up there, making my aluminum foil head explode with ideas for resolutions so outlandishly ambitious I won’t feel bad about breaking them; two, my mother-in-law’s mochi cakes – all fourteen varieties, including the one with the dried bits of squid entrails mixed in – should have mercifully, magically disappeared by now, from both the fridge and the walls of most of my major arteries; and three, I should have written my first post of the year four days and fifteen minutes ago and gone to bed.


I have excuses none of this is happening. Their names are Yamato and Seiji.

My older boy won’t stop making me play trains with him, or take him to the park. I wish he’d get creative and say something like ‘Daddy, just get out of my face if you can’t turn me into a dinosaur.’ Then I can get down to some serious resolution-making – after I fiddle with the settings on my blog page a little more. The younger kid thinks he’s off the mochi hook because he only has four teeth, and cries like a baby until I give in and fix him some pulverized peas instead. This of course means it’s another plate of cooled-off, brick-of-chalk mochi for papa. Then all day they tag-team mom with screaming poopie pants and glue-eating competitions, and in an apartment this size I can’t fake not noticing that the god of hellfire is shooting out the wife’s mouth again, and suddenly I’m back on daddy duty and another day of writing is shot. So here goes another late-night typing session – evidently I didn’t place the prolific writing resolution bar high enough to justify crying a quiet ‘impossible’ to myself and just crawling into my futon.
But really, I’m glad I’m feeling motivated, because I can’t wait any longer to say that my New Year’s Eve was, in a word with countless connotations, amazing.

In Japan, in case you are ill-informed, it’s all about tradition – meaning nothing has to make sense to anyone taking part. Putting it this way lends some vague sense of consolation as I look back on a New Year’s Eve that still has me reeling in the part of my brain responsible for understanding what the hell is going on.

On any other night of the year, and I think I can include my birthday here, I’m more than happy to have the wife fall asleep with the kids at nine. Then I can avail myself to the unclaimed beer, sake and snacks lying in every dark corner of the in-laws’ house. Or fire up some coffee and chocolate and bang out a few more pages of the next novel. Maybe even listen to a CD wholly lacking in songs about perky animals or talking choo-choo trains. But in Japan New Year’s is supposed to be one of the most important family events of the entire year (the others being O-Bon, the return of the spirits of the deceased to the home, and Doyo-no-Ushi-no-Hi, when everyone escapes the summer heat by eating eel). So I was anticipating something at least a little out of the ordinary from my normally-sedate relatives, even if it was going to require my polishing off the plum brandy that has been sitting around too long. (Plum brandy, it has been proven in certain controlled living room experiments, can increase one’s ability to fake comprehending conversations in garbled Japanese dialect and thus delude oneself into enjoying them.) But this past Friday night, up at the old peach farm, my mother-in-law, the last holdout, only made it to eleven. And this only because she was doing laundry.

By the time she said something sounding like ‘good night’ and disappeared into the darkened hallway I had enough sake in me to drown any chance of writing anything halfway intelligible (my standard benchmark). But I had not yet begun to find the humor in the people in the foam costumes on TV playing slapstick pork and rice trivia. Strong-willed reveler that I am, I found a solution. I cracked a can of happoshu and toed the sobriety line and got a jump-start on my Happy New Year cell phone texts. Everyone else in Japan types out the exact same message. They use the same three government-approved New Year’s expressions and send these happy, icon-laden, totally emotionless messages en masse to everyone on their address lists, time-delayed to coincide with the stroke of midnight. This of course sets repeater towers all up and down the archipelago on fire, which is an impressive sight to say the least, and my favorite part of New Year’s in Japan. I can’t believe my wife doesn’t stay up for it.

Now, as I am a writer and therefore determined to be unique in even the most pointless of situations, I began sending individualized texts to everyone I thought might be planning on sending me a New Year’s message. Then I got started on the B-list. My superior powers of concentration were on full display (though no one was around to witness) as I kept thumbing my phone right into midnight. It was a bit of a shock actually when my mother-in-law crept into the room to say ‘Akemashita omedetou gozaimasu, kotoshi mo yoroshiku onegai shimasu,’ leaving out the state-mandated ‘Ii toshi ni narimasu you ni’ because she’s just crazy like that sometimes. I looked at her, then at the clock, and saw it was already 12:03. So far I’d received not a single New Year’s text. Those repeater towers must have really been going up in flames out there.

‘Can you hear the fireworks?’ she asks. I listen, above the sounds of the people on TV laughing with themselves, and hear a faint boom-boom. ‘To the north,’ she adds, and I follow her into the kitchen to lean out the side door with her. There are no sparks, no colors, just flashes in the sky like far-off heat lightning. ‘They’re in Kunimi and Iizaka,’ I am told. Apparently Fukushima City, the prefectural seat of government, is too busy for fireworks as they are monitoring the airwaves to make sure people are using the proper three sentences in their New Year’s text messages. (Violators are firmly, politely reprimanded.)

I wasn’t the least bit disappointed in the heat lightning display because, like it was scripted by the ghosts of past generations who celebrated New Year’s without bad TV, or any TV, it had also started snowing. And this, standing in the cold doorway of my in-laws’ cramped kitchen, nobody conscious but me and my mother-in-law, made my New Year’s something to remember, at least in some small but comforting way.

But then mom fired up the stove.

Ten minutes later I was slurping down soba with my wife and both her parents. Sleep until ten past midnight, then wake up and eat. Do the Japanese have to do everything backwards? Twenty minutes later I was back in the living room, just me and the TV, my in-laws all having gone back to bed. They’d apparently decided to forego the traditional New Year’s bath at midnight, followed by an offering of fruit or sake or fourteen kinds of mochi to kami-sama sitting up in his altar above the hutch. I guess getting up for the soba is good enough for recent generations though I’d say they’re playing with fire.

New Year’s Day is a traditional day of cleaning in Japan, similar to the customary (and, perhaps like the midnight bath, quietly ignored) spring cleaning deal in the States. Now, I get the symbolism here: a new year, a fresh start, and all you Shinto demons get out from under the spare futons in the closet. But what do you say we stay up on New Year’s Eve instead, split the plum brandy and sleep in on January 1st instead of waking up early to throw all the windows and doors open to the snow still swirling in the breeze? I am just now beginning to think that it’s been more than just wanderlust that has compelled me to spend New Year’s in Malaysia, New Zealand, even New Jersey in recent years. I can deal with the mindless exchange of mandatory New Year’s greetings, but can you please shut the god damn doors? It’s like, one out there.

I tossed back the rest of my happoshu and was about to call it a night when a voice told me to switch the channel on the TV. (Okay, I was having a hard time finding the big red OFF button.) On the screen was Ichiro Suzuki, whacking another of his trademark singles through the infield. I watched for a moment as it sunk into me that it was not baseball season. Then a clip of another Ichiro hit, this a double to the gap in left. Then another single, then a slap home run, against a different team. A few more hits and I realized what was happening: they were replaying in order every one of Ichiro’s 2,244 Major League hits. With this I knew it was time to wish the empty house a happy new year and crawl into my futon – which I did after watching about one year’s worth of Ichiro highlights. Like I said, amazing carries many connotations.

Well now it has been six days and five minutes since I rang in the New Year. Teaching manufacturing company workers English, having two little boys who I can’t get to not like me no matter how well I imitate the wife’s god of hellfire routine, and the daily odds and ends of trying to sell my books to libraries, tracking down a notary public and eating a meal occasionally, all make it very difficult to get in ample writing time. But it seems my jiffy-pop is popping. I know exactly now what my New Year’s Resolution is going to be, starting this very moment.

I’m not going to sleep for the rest of the year.

I may make it, now that the plum brandy is gone.