Tokyo Spinning

Air Show

2006-07-27T06:36:00.000+09:00

Every year in Farnborough, the fast and the furious gather to show off the latest in aeronautic wizardry, and good ol' fashioned hotdogging. I paid £44 plus another £12 for the train (the traffic into that rather small town, with quite narrow roads, which are horrendous during the show, so even though it is only 10 miles away, we took the train). I am including a picture of the Airbus A380, the double-decker mammoth that will go into service some time next year, and will haul up to 800 people at a go.
Unfortunately, my normal digital camera with a 10x optical zoom lens gave up after a very few pictures, the battery running out. Pshaw! The image above was from my cell phone a Nokia N70, which isn't bad at all.
Unfortunately, after only about an hours worth of viewing pleasure, it started to rain and thunder, and we had to give up and go home, since we had no shelter, that only given to guests of the pavillions of various manufacturers. I actually have a guy working for me who used to build aircraft simulators, but forgot to ask him if he could get me tickets for one of the pavillions. One more thing on the list to do next time, in addition to taking folding chairs, waterproof wear, and earplugs. Oh yeah, and charging the batteries of my digital camera first.

Seat of My Pants

2006-07-21T08:38:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I had lunch with a colleague that I had known since Japan. We had both worked at the same company, but didn't really work together, since he had worked in finance, and I worked in IT. We met at the Tokyo English Lifeline (TELL) 'marathon' (only 5 kilometres). Our company had a large contingent organised that year (2003). He is from Singapore, but married to a Japanese woman, and had just bought a house in Saitama. Since I lived in Tochigi, we had a little bit to talk about, there, and both being foreigners, in a company where that was not the most common thing, was something else. We would occasionally talk in the hall, or have lunch.
On Monday he e-mailed me asking if I wanted to have lunch. We talked about his new life here, and life here in general, and moving and relocation agents, and some of the hassles I have had. And then the talk turned to work. I had noticed that he now had a 'PMP' after his name on his e-mail signature. That, in case you have missed it, stands for 'Project Management Professional', and is a professional accreditation from the Project Management Institute. It is somewhat the rage in Japan at the moment, which is hardly a surprise: Great! A set of rules to govern the ungovernable! Yeah!
I should say that I have been involved in managing large and small projects for the last 5+ years, and flirted at different points with becoming a PMP. But the thing is this: On the small projects that I managed, it added way too much overhead, and would have meant unacceptably high costs or delays. I played the game, with project plans that looked fine, and documentation like risk analyses, and so on and such, but I was not particularly impressed with how well PMBOK was for managing smaller projects.
And then I got involved, as the leader of a vendor managment team, and concurrently the leader of a change management team, with the mother of all projects. 600 people working on it. The thing is, what I saw many, far too many, really, of these 600 people doing was working on the project, not on achieving what the project had been meant to achieve, the new billing system. When the project was brought to a halt, I remember sitting dejected at my desk, surrounded by reams of documents that I had to shred, and others that needed to be archived, and thinking 'my God! We weren't working on a billing system at all, we were working on a project.'
I had actually hired a PMP, U, an Indian guy, to be on my team, and introduce PMBOK and project managment as a dicipline, to the IT department. He did really well on this project, though he quit before it was completely finished, and went to work for Cisco. He and I are friends, but he was one of the worst: Rather than worrying about actually producing something that would help the project come to completion, he spent hours a day worrying about and creating worry among others about, documentation.
And that is what we had when the project was cancelled; lots of documentation. Absolute shitloads of use cases. Oodles of defect reports, most of which were only defects in the documentation of test cases. Tons of bright red powerpoints.
Sitting there, feeling like a real failure, the absolute feeling of having participated in a real sham, an absolute crock of shit that had nothing to do with building a billing system, and did not, in fact, end up building the system, I took some of it to heart, thinking that perhaps it was partially down to me.
Having a year and a half to think about it, and of course to spin it a little, has given me a more textured perspective. A lot of what I was doing on the project was bringing the additional costs of the inevitable changes to light. It was actually that which led to the cancellation of the project. From that perspective, I was successful in my own area of the project. But it is absolutely difficult to feel that way when the project is such a collossal failure.
I am managing about five concurrent small projects at the moment. I got an absolute bollocking for not having documentation that was very good. Guilty. Depending on the project, some are more or less date driven, have many or fewer dependencies on other departments, require more or less bureaucratic process sign-off, and so on. I just can't be bothered to create the sort of documentation which at it's heart tries to hide the ever-changing complexity that exists in even a small project, in order that upper-management are reassured that everything is ok. That same sick feeling came upon me.
My comment today, to an English colleague was "to those who see these projects from afar, this seems like seat of the pants management, and it scares some of them awfully. To me, this is both the fun, and the only real way to manage. Life, and business as practised by our company, is seat of the pants, and there is no reason that projects wouldn't be. Now what I need to learn to do is to make this a little less scary for my boss." I can manage by GANTT chart with the best of them, create GANTT charts in Project, Visio, Excel, or PowerPoint, and quote the processes needed in PMBOK. I can talk about PRINCE gates, and I can manage lists of issues, take meeting minutes, analyze an SLA, and exhort one and all to "just follow the process," as well as anyone. But I am really not convinced that will help me in the end to achieve what the project was created to achieve in the first place. Projects are about results, and results are about performance. And, in the end, that is more important to me than the letters after my name.

Crybabies?

2006-05-26T06:48:00.000+09:00

Last night, while I was putting my son to sleep, he said something interesting. I should mention, by the way, that he is 8 years old, and had been used to sleeping with his parents in Japan. We needed to put a stop to that when we came here (much to my relief), but I still have to lay next to his bed until he is asleep.
Anyway, he said 'papa, English boys are really weak.'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
'They are just weak?'
'How are they weak? What do they do that is weak?' I asked.
'They cry at anything,' he said.
The fact that my son who demanded to be put to bed still at 8 years old was calling English boys weak for crying in no way seemed ironic to him.
Japanese children in general are called crybabies, even by their parents, if they cry about silly things. Actually, the Japanese word is 'cry bug' or 'naki mushi', and is pretty negative. W, his friend, though, seems to have no problem or stigma in shedding tears, which is what prompted my son to mention his thoughts. I told him that just because someone cried, it didn't make them weak, but he has 8 years of socialisation to overcome, and I don't think this swayed him. Children are wonderful mirrors of the things that are taught without even thinking about it. Japanese assumptions of correctness are so absolute, that they rarely think about them. While I was there, neither did I, very much. Hearing my son talk this way, I wish I had...

Island Hopping

2006-05-25T04:09:00.000+09:00

It has been a number of very busy months since I last blogged. A lot has happened:

I have now moved to England and am living in Hamphsire
My wife and son joined me last month
My son has started school at the local school, and is struggling with English
The company I worked for in Japan was sold off, and so I don't really have a return path (which I actually expected, to tell the truth)
The company I work for in England hasn't been sold off, but I now report to Germany, and that could be sold off at some point.
I have a new phone
My cat has died, only a few days after my wife left her in the care of a family friend. She didn't deal very well with change, and was rather sick, with kidney failure and diabetes. My wife blames me.

I guess those are the headlines, but if I am to continue to blog on this site (which I probably will, as I am rather busy, and not inclined at the moment to build a new blog site), it will need to be about what I am experiencing in England as a longtime resident of Japan, a citizen of the U.S., and a guy with a reasonable curiosity and intellect at work when viewing the world.

There is a lot to make up for, but I don't want to spend the next five months telling you about the last five months, so I will get it out of the way in this one post. Or at least most of it. Other things will probably occur to me as soon as I post this.

So, from the start. I came over here at the end of last year. I did that rather than enjoying the New Year holiday with my family in order to avoid paying one year's worth of residence tax in Japan. If you are in a certain location at New Years, you are expected to pay residence tax in that location. Actually, if you are registered in a certain location. In my case, this was a real issue. If I de-registered, I would have to give my alien registration card back, and would lose my permanent resident status, which took a long time to get, and which I really value. Luckily, I spoke with the local tax authority, explained the situation, and got them to agree to make a note on my record that I was no longer in the country, and not liable for residence tax (after confirming my story with my former employer). So, I get to be a permanent resident, and not pay residence tax! Not bad. I don't know if I will be returning to Japan, but if I do, I don't want to wait another five years for residence.
I rented a car, which was a little tricky, since I had always only kept my company credit card, which debited my own account, and was actually a charge card, which I had to pay back every month (which is why I liked it: It kept me out of debt). But I had handed it back. Renting a car without a credit card is a bit of a challenge. The thing is, actually driving the thing got me in trouble: About a week or two after I arrived, I had to make a trip to Dusseldorf, and the flight was a 7:30 flight. I was quite tired, I admit, but Heathrow has a lot of construction going on, and I could not, for the life of me, find the long-term parking lot. (I have since learned that there is no single long-term parking lot, but a bunch of private lots scattered around. This is nearly exactly the situation at Narita, but I had assumed somewhat more organisation in the UK. Silly me.) I accidentally drove into an employees parking lot. The only way to get out was in the bus lane, so I was in that lane, probably going a bit too fast for a parking lot (car park), but had right of way, when this older Indian woman came barrelling out of one of the rows, going the wrong direction, and ignoring the stop sign (because it was backwards maybe, since she was going the wrong direction). I smashed my almost-new Benz E280 right into her Golf. I totalled her car, did not have 'Super CDR' coverage on my own, and so had to pay 750 pounds deductible, even though it was certainly mostly her fault. (ok, ok, I was in a bus lane, and I was, probably illegally, in a secure airport employee car park, but her driving was definitely at fault). I also missed my appointments. Oh, and argued with the HR woman about insurance. In Japan, travel from home to work is always covered and is always liable by the employer. That is probably one reason that most employers highly discourage commuting by car: The liability is too high.
I also had some adventures just getting a bank account, but those are more of the absurdist sort. I had thought that only Japanese bureaucracy had this surreal fixation on checking everything four times, and sending things back as a matter of course. Wherever HSBC have their back office operations center, somewhere in South Asia, I think, the people seem to have a somewhat similar approach. I finally ended up going in to Barclays, and setting up an account on the same day, just using my U.S. driver's license.
Which reminds me of the other bit of stuff I had to do: Get my license changed. What a pain! U.S. license holders have to take the test, which I didn't really want to do, while Japanese license holders could 'simply' exchange their license for a U.K. one. I guess simplicity is relative. I had to first send in both my license and passport in to the Japanese embassy to get my license translated, paying 35 pounds for the privelege. I then had to take the translation, my license, my passport, two photos, and the application, and, oh don't forget (!), another 35 pounds, to the DVLA (don't ask, because I don't know). I was told that if I did this in Wimbledon, because I was a Japanese license holder, I could get my passport back on the same day. This turns out to not be the case if you happen to be a Japanese license holder who is American. And in any case, I found, when I got to Wimbledon, that I had forgotten to bring my Japanese license with me.
The reason this mattered is that I actually travel a fair bit for my job, and the DVLA said to expect not having your passport for two weeks. So, I had to time it just right. Again, I forgot something rather important, but luckily, they came through a little early. One thing, if you have a Japanese license, is that I actually only had an automatic license in Japan, and that was translated correctly by the embassy, but I still got a full license in the U.K. I don't know if this was just a fortuitous mistake by the DVLA, or whether everyone gets one. But I am happy!
Actually, if I would have known that beforehand, I might not have bought my wife an automatic. Finding a decent automatic car that is cheap in the UK is quite difficult. Mostly only higher end models seem to be automatic. Since my wife only has an automatic license, I looked hard for one. I finally ended up buying one on eBay for 880 pounds. It is a 1994 Vauxhall Corsa, otherwise known as an Opel Corsa, otherwise known as a Chevy Nova. I can't really say it was the best deal, but it runs. I did spend a lot to get it up to spec, though, which is not really a happy thing. Hopefully it passes it's MOT (Ministry of Transport) test in October. One thing I can say about Japan, is that you have lots of choices when buying a used car, most of them very cheap, and with plenty of automatics. In fact, some of the automatics that I found here were imports from Japan. The problem with that is that the insurance on imports is really high.
Well, I have sort of wandered around the last five months, and definitely not covered everything, but I have to go for now.

Tokyo Spin Off

2005-12-02T07:26:00.000+09:00

I write this from Newbury, England. It has been a busy couple of weeks since my last post. I have turned in my resignation to my company in Tokyo and signed a contract with my new company, actually the same company, just the global version.
It has been busy, a little scary, and a challenging three weeks. I spent Monday and Tuesday in Dusseldorf, because I had to be out of the UK on the day they applied for my visa. Newbury is not a metropolis, and without a car you end up depending on very slow-to-respond taxis. On Saturday I walked all around Newbury, and met a guy I had worked with in Tokyo in the bookstore on the Newbury highstreet. Newbury is a sort of company town, so it isn't a huge surprise that I met him. I have seen tons of people in the last two weeks that I only knew before at conferences or meetings I had been to in Dusseldorf, Barcelona, Lisbon, Karlskrona, or Budapest.
On Saturday a couple of guys that I have had a lot to do with in the past, them at global and me in Japan, and a bunch of other people, Americans, English, a German, and a Greek, had a Thanksgiving party at one of their house in Reading. It was really good, a great pumpkin pie, turkey, cranberry sauce, the works.
Work has been interesting. The guy that I am replacing had some real challenges socially: He seems to have pissed a lot of people off. I am fully capable of doing that myself, but seem to have started alright so far. I spent yesterday with a consultant who works for me, but has tons more experience in this area than I have. I learned a lot by talking to him, and I think it is going to work out well.
I haven't had any recurrences of Meniere's despite two flights, and a day when I felt it starting to come on. Sleep is the key. If I can get enough sleep, I won't get it. If I can't and there are other factors, like flying, I will get it.
I will need to think of a new name for my blog, after I move to Newbury in January. How about Tokyo Spin Off...?

Lucky number...

2005-11-11T00:53:00.000+09:00

Have I mentioned that 11 is my lucky number? Have you noticed the day? Yes! I got the job in the U.K.! My wife is less than thrilled, but I guess that is just how it will have to be for the moment. I owe my current boss a lot. She really pushed hard to have me get this job. I am thrilled! I can be a full member of the species again! My son can learn English!

I will most likely leave next week for a couple of weeks, come back and hand my job here over to someone, and then go to the U.K. at the end of the year or beginning of next year, for good. My wife and son will follow in April. There are lots of things to sort. Time to get started. Happy 11/11, and goodnight!

Don't Speak to Soon...

2005-11-06T22:57:00.000+09:00

No matter how much I may have wanted to be over my Meniere's episode, I wasn't, it turns out. I should have known that, as this is also part of the pattern. Having insomnia really didn't help at all. I was a bit of a zombie on Monday, a worse one on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I would have stayed home just to try and get some sleep, if it hadn't been that I had my last interview. Yes, that one--the one for the job in the U.K.
I was really serious about it, scripting answers for the kinds of questions I thought they might ask, which I was told would be based on the 'performance drivers' used by global HR to identify the right people for the job. The problem was that I was nauseous, dizzy, had a raging headache, etc.
I discovered a very unexpected thing, in my desperation: Our company has a bed that you can use if you don't feel well. If there was ever a time I needed to use it, last Wednesday was definitely it. I wasn't actually able to sleep (I was so tired that I couldn't sleep), but laying horizontal for a couple of hours did me good, I think.
The interview was by videophone. That is appropriate, actually, as the job is the global manager for videoconferencing. One of my interviewers (herr Doktor A) was in Dusseldorf, and the other in England. I was quite happy with how well I answered their questions, actually, especially one of these 'I am going to give you 3 minutes to think of the 7 steps you would need to perform in this case,' variety of questions. At the end, Herr Doktor A told me what was good (most of my abilities were a good fit), as well as what he had questions about (my passion for this particular position). I assured him that I was very interested in this job indeed.
Thursday was a national holiday, which we have off. I sent a thank you letter to my two interviewers thanking them for their time, and assuring them that I was very interested in this job. Friday I took a paid day off, and slept in. It is now Sunday, and I feel like I have finally caught up on sleep.
Tomorrow I was told that there will be an answer as regards the position, which I am happy about: I hate waiting around for these things. My wife still is opposed. The thing is, I have really thought this through, and I think it would be the best thing, by far: For my son, it would be great to expose him to enough English that he is able to speak fluently; for me, it would be a great career move, as there is much more opportunity for me in our global organisation than there is in Japan; for my wife, actually, she needs to broaden her outlook if she is to not drive me nuts, and this is a good opportunity for her to see that the world does not revolve around Utsunomiya, Japan, and that her ways of doing things are not necessarily universal, nor are her ways of viewing things, though they may be very orthodox in a Japanese context.
I will probably be leaving nearly immediately if I do get the job, though I am guessing it would initially be for a couple of weeks, to take over from the guy currently in the role, and then come back here and take care of some things, and then back to the U.K. for me, while my wife and son stayed in Japan until he finished his school year, after which they would join me.
Which is all very nice to think about, but just as I started this blog with don't speak too soon, so shall I end it...

Who you gonna call?

2005-10-29T19:36:00.000+09:00

I can’t even remember exactly how I came across the page, but I found this page for a legal firm that specializes in military law. Digging slightly on the site, I found another page that gives examples of all the good work they do. It is a weird page for someone who is not a thief, a rapist, a sodomist, a pedophile, a drug user, a drunk, or a murderer to read. I guess with the number of people in the military there would be some bad apples, but my god! How many pedophiles can there be even among a million-person army? These guys got a least 10 of them off.
I guess that the page wasn’t aimed at me, but at the guys (and I think most of their clients are male) who are guilty as sin and want to get off or get a lighter sentence. Not the stuff of J.A.G. Makes me very slightly more sympathetic to the people of Okinawa, who want our military the hell off their island…

It's official!

2005-10-27T18:36:00.000+09:00

Yes, I got to talk to the 'dizziness specialist' today, and he concluded that I have Menier's disease. If you saw my previous post, you will know that is what I had concluded on my own. It is a relief to have my own diagnosis confirmed. Doctors speak, sometimes sneeringly, of 'self-diagnosis' as a problem with patients who have too much information and not enough knowledge. That is even more the case in Japan, where a patient daring to tell a doctor what he thinks is wrong with himself is treated like an alien. I would say that the biggest problem with Meniere's is that it is idiopathic, meaning that they have to eliminate absolutely everything else before doctors are willing to go out on a limb and diagnose it. So they tell patients 'yes, you have a problem, but we are not willing to put a name to it.' That causes stress, which is actually one of the triggers of Meniere's. A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, now that I know what is wrong with me, what is the next course of action? According to Dr. Dizzy, there is none: No medicine will cure it, and there is nothing to really be done about it. He said something like 'you just got born with the wrong body.' There is actually a $3,000 machine being sold in the U.S. (sorry, being prescribed by licensed physicians). It sends 500 Hz pulsewaves into the inner ear, which somehow help the problem. It is not too bad right now, so maybe I won't consider that, but it is nice to know that some doctors somewhere--definitely not here!--are not content to say 'being dizzy is your destiny'. I hope they find a treatment before my next bout...

Ninja in New York...

2005-10-27T08:40:00.000+09:00

A couple of years ago my friend J introduced me to a restaurant called Ninja, in the Akasaka Tokyu Plaza hotel. He didn't actually take me there, though, so it wasn't that easy to find, and was rather unobtrusively designed. I went there twice, both times with my son, and he liked it. In fact, last year we went there for his birthday. I didn't have such a good memory of that, as there was a massive earthquake that levelled big parts of Niigata, and shook the hell out of Tokyo. The restaurant is supposed to resemble the dark caves Ninja were rumoured to live in, and being in that atmosphere in an earthquake caused some claustrophobia even in a non-claustrophobic such as myself.
Apparently the restaurant has opened a New York branch. They got reviewed in the New York Times, and I read with some interest the review. Admittedly it was a hokey thing, with a bunch of young wannabe actors playing Ninja roles for diners. The location in Tokyo, however, actually means that a fair number of people in the entertainment world actually patronise the place, and an outstanding Ninja could get noticed, I guess...
Theme restaurants are basically unknown in Japan: No Farrells Ice Cream (do they even have those in the U.S. anymore?), no Chuck E. Cheese, no Rainforest Cafe. So the kind of places that you can take a kid for a birthday party and that are actually fun are rather limited. I will actually say that in our town, the McDonald playland is as good as it gets.
The Ninja restaurant was slightly expensive by Tokyo standards, but not overwhelmingly so. The Ninja were not world class magicians, but they weren't bad. The food was not superlative but it was pretty good, and they did some fun things with dry ice and smoke. Most of all, my son had a good time, which is want you want for a kid's birthday. Even my wife was happy, no mean feat. It is probably not the sort of place that I would take a restaurant critic to, because I would worry that they are too cranky to appreciate the fun parts. And, in comparison to some of the themed resaturants in the U.S., Ninja is a little immature. I think that was the case with the NYT critic. For my part, I give the Tokyo restaurant three smilies out of five. ☻☻☻☺☺

Tick that one off...

2005-10-26T23:16:00.000+09:00

And another one bites the dust. Having interviews in the middle of not being able to stand straight turns out to not be the best idea. The small company that gave me that weird sense of déjà vu sent me an e-mail today saying that they didn’t have anything in my field, and that they would keep me in mind if anything came up. Fine. The issue was that with them I was interested in a field that I am not specifically in right now, that I make a quite good salary, and that they generally don’t like to hire people, but have them work on contract. All fine and dandy, but what they would probably be able to offer me on contract probably wouldn’t be that much more than my current salary. Except I would have no security, fewer benefits than I have right now, and why should I even think about it? Vice versa, why should they think about making an offer? I have slightly more respect for them now.
Like sand in the hourglass, so go the days of our lives…

Standing...

2005-10-23T01:15:00.000+09:00

One of the good things, and there aren’t many, about being sick, is that when you get better, you appreciate things all that much more. I definitely appreciate being able to be a fully functioning human again, without too much worry of being toppled by the honk of a fire engine.
I worked out on Wednesday, and meant to yesterday, but instead met up with my friend Pierre (not, of course, his real name). We had dinner at an izakaya, a kind of Japanese pub (there are many kinds). He had beer, and I didn’t. Despite feeling better, I’m not taking any chances. Actually, in my past experience, beer wasn’t much of a trigger. The absolute worst thing is coffee. And it isn’t simply the caffeine, since I can drink tea and have no problems. So, no coffee or beer, two things that this pub was actually well-known for.
I did not get an offer for one of the jobs, in fact probably the second best of the lot, after the one at my company’s U.K. office. The manager I spoke to wants someone who can write Japanese contracts. While my Japanese is o.k., it isn’t that good. C’est la vie. I don’t feel that bad about it, actually. I am getting busier at my current job, and I would like to work harder on really getting the projects and programs I am responsible for really right.
One of the other jobs, I don’t think I would be interested even if there was an offer: There is too much déjà vu to my last company, the one with the sociopathic boss. It would actually be fun work, I think, but I don’t think I want to be working for that particular company. They are ISO 9001 certified, so they aren’t quite as bad as my last company, but on the other hand, I guess the lack of security is a bit of a turnoff.
So, for the short term, it looks like I stay put, which is fine. My back garden is beautiful, the lawn really coming in well. If I need to dash off to England for a new job, that would be fine, too.
My son turned eight today (technically today, but I still need to sleep and wake up for it to be Sunday for me). It was a very quick eight years. Speaking with Pierre last night, he said something that I have thought—I have made some very big changes in my life in a very short time, and have also been pretty lucky in how things have gone for me. He thinks that I have probably gone as far as I can in Japan career-wise, and that the country as a whole is crazy, and so really my only option to be sane and have a good career, oh, and by the way, to insure that my son grows up sane, is to get out of Japan. He may be right.
I think my sanity is pretty safe, by sheer cussedness: I refuse to do what I am told, or feel how I am supposed to. But I do worry about my son. My wife is a lost cause, and is often the one telling me what to do or how to feel.
It is easy to get, after 12 ½ years here, comfortable in the way things are done here, and uncomfortable with change. I have occasional bouts of that, but generally have gained my sense before long. My mother would disagree, and can’t understand why I am still here. I think, that, at this point, it is clear to me why: I intend to make the most of the opportunities I have here, and then move on, and away.
Every time I travel to Europe, I come back feeling like there is a big lifestyle deficit here in Japan: Holidays are about half those in Europe; Europeans tend to be a lot more active than Japanese in their free time, and there are a lot of activities going on; work is less of an all-encompassing thing in Europe than in Japan; there is a much more family-friendly environment, in terms of education, work, community, and social services.
Oh, and did I mention that my company’s car allowance would allow me to buy a Mini Cooper S?

Back...

2005-10-19T12:39:00.000+09:00

My one-week hiatus from blogging was mostly because I didn't have much to talk about: I was doing all I could to get it together enough to get to work and home every day. With the help of earplugs, to block out any loud noises, which made me nauseous and dizzy, an eye mask to keep me from seeing out the windows of the Shinkansen, and fairly slow movements overall, I was able to get to work, plant myself in my chair, which I didn't move from very much, and then pack myself home, mostly.
Though I had been invited to after-work eating and drinking every single day of last week, I didn't attend any, since drinking, especially, is out of the question. As the day progressed, and I got more tired, too, I got dizzier. A night out didn't seem like a good idea.
I spent all day Tuesday at my favorite hospital, Jikkei University Hospital, undergoing a variety of tests. The doctor who first examined me said something like 'hmm...I'm not really sure what the problem is, but if you get a lot of rest for the next week or two, you should be alright.' I told him that wasn't good enough, that I wanted a clear diagnosis. Thus the tests. The diagnosis, however, has to wait until next Thursday, when I get to see a 'dizziness expert'. It is good that I had the tests when I did, though, since I am now feeling better, though not totally recovered.
I spoke with my sister, and she has had similar bouts, though never the can't-stand-up, full-on vertigo.
So, I am back to same old tricks. I am plugging along at work, a little more willing than I have been in awhile to fight with co-workers, if that is what it takes to get progress. Had a good fight last night, in fact. I never would have dreamed this was necessary, but where I work now there is nothing close to a 'can-do' attitude, in terms of achieving shared goals. I am working to change that, but giving someone a good bolloxing is sometimes necessary.
As for the promise-of-a-better-life vultures circling, two sets are still circling, and one other set will probably be in contact with me soon. One are completely lame in their communication, and I have pretty much given up on them.
I will try to be a better blogger, though blogging, in it's personal nature, is by definition when you have something you want to say. When things are spinning, though, and concentration is required just to function, it is not a first priority.

Tokyo Spinning...

2005-10-10T01:16:00.000+09:00

I have had attacks of vertigo since I was a kid. They kind of make me feel as if everything is all of the sudden spinning, and I want it to stop, but it doesn’t, and then comes the nausea, and then the wretchedness and vomiting, which continues, sometimes for days.
It has started again. The fact that I can write this is an indication that it isn’t too bad: I can sit upright. But the fear of what it will be is nearly as bad as anything. I have been through this before, and there is no solution, no simple way that this will end tomorrow, all a bad dream. At minimum, I will be dizzy for a week or two, have a hard time riding trains because I will easily get motion sick, and generally be incapacitated. At worst, I will have multiple bouts of completely incapacitating vertigo lasting from six to thirty six hours. Nothing is set in stone, and I suppose that I should be open to the possibility that this time will be different. But why, in my experience as a sufferer of a chronic ailment that has always followed the same patterns, should I believe that?
There is not a name for my ailment. At least not one that boneheaded doctors are willing to give it. Menieres disease is the one I give it. And, to tell the truth, my diagnosis is probably at least as close to the mark as any that doctors have ever made. Which is to say that doctors have never been willing to go out on any kind of limb, except to say ‘gee, you seem really dizzy.’
My last bout was in 2002. It was really bad, with multiple bouts of completely debilitating vertigo. I went in to an ENT between the bouts, and he gave me all kinds of tests, and then concluded ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you.’ I told him that there most certainly was, and that not being able to stand and puking for a whole day was not a normal way of life. ‘Well, right now, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you,’ he corrected, ‘come back when the symptoms return.’ Getting in a car is the last thing one does when the world is spinning around. I did, though, driven by my wife. I was such a mess, that this time the doctor said ‘we can do this at some other time, if you want.’ I told him that I wanted answers, and if I had to come in the state I was to get the answers, he would just have to deal with it if I threw up.
I still didn’t get a clear diagnosis. He sent me off to a neurologist, who did a CT scan, bless his heart, which was more than any of the ENT jerks have ever bothered with. He said that there was nothing that he could see that pointed to it being a brain problem, or a physical problem with my ear canals. I went back to the ENT, with the CT scans in hand, and he then had the temerity, to say ‘what is it that you want from me?’ My god! Is anyone that stupid? I didn’t care even a little about him. I wanted to know what was wrong with me. At university, too, the ENT was an asshole. He seemed to think that there was some reason why I would fake complete hearing loss in my left ear, which had actually returned by that point, but which I wanted an answer for. Did I mention that hearing loss is another symptom of Meniere’s disease? I mentioned it to this ENT, and he pompously said ‘it is not possible to diagnose Meniere’s disease, so I can’t say that’s what you have.’
What he meant was that, medically, when they can’t figure out what is going on, and they have exhausted every other test, then they call it Meniere’s disease. Guess what, though? All of those tests mean squat when you know what it is you are experiencing, and just want it to stop. The reality is that it won’t stop, though. Movement, loud sounds, and stuff of that ilk make it worse, so the only thing I can do is lock myself in my room and hope that I feel better tomorrow than I do today, and especially that everything doesn’t start to spin out of control. For now, I just want Tokyo to stop spinning…

Ori Yori Midori

2005-10-04T23:36:00.000+09:00

...means that you have your pick, generally used with good-looking boys or girls, who have their pick of mates. I am not so good looking, and I do not know at this point whether I have my pick of anything except nice platitudes for rejection.
By far the most interesting for me has been a possible job opening up within the global arm of my company, in the U.K. I broached the possibility of this position with my wife this weekend, and we frankly couldn't keep our passions in check and the consequent fireworks flew.
Besides my obvious proclivity for digging in when someone tells me I can't do something, and my wife's equally obvious proclivity for telling me I can't do something, the thought of a big move out of the country is reason to pause and consider. Mostly it was me sitting in my back yard, looking at the beautiful little paradise that I had created. A year ago it was just dirt and weeds. Now it is a little paradise, with a beautiful lawn, lush flower beds and trees, a beautiful marble patio, a wooden deck, all courtesy of my hard work. When I started, one of my wife's friends asked 'why are you working so hard on your back yard? No one can see it.' This is a pretty Japanese thing. I told her that it was not for other people, it was purely for our own enjoyment.
My wife doesn't share this with me, and that is hard. I love to barbecue, and I bought a Weber grill about six months ago, which I try to use every weekend. My son is into it, too, but my wife is not, and invents reasons not to barbecue. See, for her it is not the beauty of our home, or it's mini paradise in the back that is important, but the idea of a steady, stable home.
I have thought this over, and come up with the following: My ancestors, only two generations back, were pioneers, giving up the comfort of the midwest and going to Oregon. Ok, maybe not comfort, but the point is that for them that movement was important. And their ancestors came from the east, and before that from Germany, Scotland, and Ireland. The inevitable push to the west is the common thread I have with previous generations, and one of the reasons I ended up in Japan, my sister, father, and mother in Alaska, and the most rebellious one, my brother, ironically, in California. The drive to keep moving is strong in me. Rolling stones gather no moss. Smoothe am I.
My wife has never lived outside of the city she grew up in, save our sojourn to what amounts to the northern suburbs. Movement is not a part of her psyche. Grasping for whatever security she can find, whenever and wherever she can find it is in her psyche, a pretty common thing here, especially in her parents' generation, growing up in the post-war poverty and deprivation. They passed that on to their children, and it has stuck. As a culture it is risk-averse, and change-averse in the extreme. Security, knowing where you will be in 10 years, these are the important things. Or so my wife says. My response is that there is no security in life, that we can't know where we will be in 10 years, unless we are psychotic and only focus on staying in exactly the same place we are now. This type of psychosis seems pretty attractive to her, and not very attractive to me.
I have another interview Thursday, the fifth this week, and another on Friday. It shall be apparent by next week exactly how good looking I am to these guys. Should be fun. But, like the garden that is not visible to others, the beauty that I see is more important.

When it rains, it pours...

2005-09-27T23:51:00.000+09:00

Back at work this week, I am finally, after several months of not being, busy. Meetings, presentations created, phone calls made, people and projects tracked, all kinds of things.
And, with that as the background, the situation outside of my current position, vis a vis employement, is beginning to heat up: I previously mentioned speaking to two different people at my friend's company about a position, and now I also have an internal possibility in the U.K., and another request to come in for an interview with a large U.S. web merchant, based here in Japan. Interestingly, none of these things were solicited in any way, shape, or form. This is cool!
Also cool was how I spent yesterday: Working in one of my company's shops. It was called 'meet the customer', and I met not only one, but a whole bunch of them. The shop was in Roppongi, so about half the customers were non-Japanese. I sold some of our products, and felt like I contributed something to our important company goals, which is a good feeling. I.T. is sometimes a little too abstract, and it is a really great feeling to get to meet the people who we need to please in order to be successful. I would actually like to spend a few months doing that, not just a day.
My whirlwind tour of Monday culminated with a too-short trip to the gym, in which I did 21 sets of weight training in 30 minutes. It's gotta be a record.
And I realised tonight on the train home that the report that my boss will be taking into the GM meeting at 9:30 am is missing some data, so I actually need to get in there and make sure I get her the right one. (hint-that means I need to go to sleep right now in order to wake up on time)

The man of leisure...

2005-09-23T01:19:00.000+09:00

...would be me, and so full of leisure am I that I haven't posted for five days! Shame!
In my abundance of leisure time, provided by national holidays this Monday and Friday, and paid holidays in-between, I have done the following:

Watched lots of DVDs of films captured by my TiVo-like device (which has a built-in DVD burner). I collected over 100 from NHK BS1 (no, not that sort of BS--it stands for 'Broadcast Satellite'), but had watched very few of them. My picks? There's Only One Jimmy Grimble, and The Wedding Singer. I am conflicted about Lulu on the Bridge: I like Paul Auster's work generally, and that includes this film, but think it was a somewhat amateurish effort by someone who has not mastered the medium. That having been said, the texture, the music, and the acting were excellent. I still want to know why an entire one minute of the film was dedicated to Celia unwrapping a CD.
Saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my son. Great flick! My kid was weirdly uncommunicative for a couple of days, I think owing to the effects of some cough medicine that he was taking, but he was watching, and as soon as he was off the cough medicine he wanted to talk all about it, and to know what the English word 'violet' meant.
Worked out. I joined a gym located in front of Utsunomiya station, and have been working out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. My membership is a night-time membership that only allows me to use the facilities on weekdays between 8 pm and 11 pm. That is inconvenient for a man of leisure, especially on holidays, so I am considering changing my membership type. In the mean-time, I have been there three days straight, since I couldn't go in on Monday or tomorrow, Friday.
Planted Kentucky bluegrass. Actually, bought it, too: I was in Joyful Honda, probably the greatest home center anywhere, and I was looking at lawn care supplies, and there was a video going, and on the video they showed how to plant a lawn. They showed rolled sod, which I have been looking for, and kindly told me that it was available from Nasu Nursery, which is about 60 km north of here. So, today I drove up there, and picked up my sod. They had just cut it, and I picked it up in the middle of the field. Very fresh. I planted half the lawn, and will finish up tomorrow.
Created a new resume, at the request of a friend of mine who is trying to recruit me into the company he works for. Ironically, after we had finished drinking last Friday, we met the guy who hired him into the company. I spoke to him after my friend had taken his train, which was going the opposite direction. He called me yesterday, and wanted to talk to me about job possibilities at the company. So, I have two different people from the same company trying to get to me. A reasonably happy situation, since it is a very well-known and reputable company with lots of opportunity.

That's about it. Not much to tell.

Queen's Classroom...

2005-09-18T01:05:00.000+09:00

Japanese television is in general an even worse wasteland than television in many parts of the world. The variety shows seem to dominate, with very little differentiating one from another. Japanese television in general does not have any long-run dramas and very few comedies, short or long-run. Most dramas last less than a year, even highly rated ones.
A fairly unusual show has been airing for about 6 months now, called JoOu No Kyoushitsu, which translates to Queen's Classroom. The drama stars Amami Yuki as Maya Akutsu, a sixth-grade homeroom teacher in a primary school. And it attacks just about every problem that the writers had with the current state of Japanese education. I don't know that I agree with the analysis of what all of those problems are 100%, but I respect the hell out of the producers and writers for coming up with a really gutsy effort to address some real issues in an entertaining way. The show, unusual for a drama, aired on Saturday night, which allowed parents and kids to watch the show together. It has had good ratings, but sponsors are apparently loathe to be associated with the program.
Maya, not Maya-san, is what the students call their teacher, and this absence of an honorific is indicative of the ambivalence with which they hold her--calling someone by their first name is a casual thing in Japan, especially towards a teacher, and calling her that without an honorific is worse. Of course, they don't call her that to her face. Her demeanor is what gives the show it's name: That of a queen. She challenges students by saying incredibly arrogant things like "only three out the forty of you will be successes in life," pointing to real statistics that show that is the number who end up in first-class schools and first-class companies. At first we don't know that this is a stretegic way to get the kids to open their eyes, it is just her being a bitch. As it goes on, we see the method in her adopted personae. For there is more than one: The queen, the bully, the guardian angel, the devil. The above photo asks the question well, which is she an angel or a devil. She is good at everything, from dancing, singing, fighting, drawing, whatever. One of the hallmarks of her queen persona is what she says--"Iikagen ni mezamenasai", which I would translate as "open your eyes to mediocrity", but which might also legitimately be translated as "stop being so stupid." It is said in an extremely haughty and arrogant way that is hard to love. And yet love is what we, and Kanda, finally have for her.
Tonight's special last episode lasted for 90 minutes, was where we discovered this, and from my point of view, the weakest episode in the series in some ways, owing to it's overly sentimental parting of students and teachers at graduation time. It was, however, very necessary, and even in it's formulaic sappiness was able to make a point that needs to get made.
It is hard to explain the whole series in one posting, and I hope for any of you that are interested in Japan, that it gets subtitled and shown outside of Japan. You might try this site, as I heard rumours that from here you might find independently subtitled versions on Bit Torrent.
Some of the topics covered during the run of the program were:

Bullying. This theme actually came up in different forms in different episodes, but Maya makes it clear that it is up to both the person being bullied to stand up for themselves, and for those people around to stand with them. It is not her role as a teacher, she seems to be clearly saying, to save anyone. That is up to the students to do for themselves (though actually she does save them).
Forgiveness. Even after being bullied, the main female student character, Kanda, forgives her tormenters. And she convinces other students to forgive a girl who stole from a classmate.
Setting an example. One of the other female teachers tries too hard to be friends with all of the students, forgetting what her role was--a teacher--and making her less effective.
Excellence. Maya stands for nothing less than perfection when students train to do something. Interestingly, she also teaches the lesson that it is up to those who are better at something to help those who aren't as good, through encouragement, teaching, or whatever. Excellence is not about someone else's standard, but about everyone working together to be as good as they possibly can.
Consistency. Even at the sappy ending, Maya could only say 'cut out your nonsense blubbering.' For her to have broken down and joined the students in their crying would not have been consistent. Students need to have teachers who don't get caught up in the moment, but who are consistent. They learned to trust Maya because she was totally consistent.

As a former junior high school teacher here in Japan, I can say that it is a mess. The way that teachers are trained, mentored, evaluated, promoted, and paid is a farce. The way that those teachers then teach, mentor, caution, scold, dicipline, coach, console, and prod is, as one would expect, also a mess. The public education system is definitely broken in some fundamental ways. I have a world of frustration that built up in my few years in that system, and some hurt to go with that.
This show made a strong statement, which is heard because of the medium--a fairly entertaining TV drama--in a way that I couldn't, especially as an outsider. This is important stuff, and I hope that this drama gets people talking, as it has, I believe.
I will end with my own observation, one that I made several times in my career as a teacher, both of junior high students, trade school students, and university students: With no possibility of failure, there is no possible way to measure and reward success. Students are not allowed to fail tests. If they get 0 points, that is just a hiccup. Because of the risk-averse, failure-averse, nature of the Japanese society that I have previously mentioned, they take great care to prevent their young from ever experiencing risk or failure, for fear that it would scar them, or brand them as failures. What this drama pointed out is that it is necessary to accept and learn from failure. Pretending that it isn't failure is not only not helpful, it precludes those kids from being real successes.
I hope there are more shows like this, as it made for some enjoyable and important conversations in our family.

T-shirt English

2005-09-12T23:20:00.000+09:00

One of the things that visitors to Tokyo laugh themselves silly about are some of the English that appears on t-shirts in Tokyo. As a high school student here in 1984 on a short 3-week trip, I recall a young woman in Asakusa wearing a white t-shirt, apparently oblivious, that said in huge letters "Fuck Me!" A horny (read 'male') 16 year-old, I would have been more than happy to take her up on the invitation, which was, however, apparently made unknowingly. This was a case where the English was actually correct, which is definitely not the norm for t-shirt English.
There are various theories on the origin of some of these t-shirts, but my favorite is the secret English conspiracy one: Such blatantly cynical t-shirts were actually designed by jaded native speakers, sick of the idiocy of their companies, and of the idiocy of consumers who actually purchased such inane products. There might even be money paid to them by the English school owners, who have a stake in furthering the poor English so prevalent here.
On the Marunouchi subway line this morning, I stood strap-hanging next to a guy with a t-shirt, yellow letters on a green shirt, which said "Advanced corn grown to order". He also wore a meshball cap with a foam front that would not have been out of place on a mid-western farmer, probably driving a John-Deere tractor. I was impressed with the consistency of the look: Inane English and his cap were certainly a set.
This evening, in Tokyo station, I spotted a t-shirt on a young woman that read: "Fuck juice gotten on this side". Hmm...I don't know exactly what the cynical native was thinking on this one...I think they must be working in groups, and that they are actually inside jokes for a group of sick minds.
When I become the jaded, bitter company employee that last week's fun leads me to fear, at least I know where I can turn for a second (third?) career...

Movie Review: Fight Club...Six Years On

2005-09-10T00:56:00.000+09:00

When it came out in 1999, Fight Club was a weird kind of cult hit, making far more money in DVD sales than it probably ever did at the box office. It was one of those guy films that struck a chord in 20-40 year old males. I didn't see it until a couple of years after it came out, and I think I was drunk at the time, because I didn't get it's central premise, that the film's main character, Tyler Durden, has a split personality.
It was on one of the free movie channels tonight, and even though I had one beer, I was hardly drunk, and I did get it this time. And I finally understood why guys of my Gen X age group, with their insecurities, their fears, and their hemmed in feeling, really liked the film. It really wasn't about fighting, except the metaphorical conflict that takes place in ourselves, and the equally metaphoric desire to destroy that which we identify as keeping us from being truly free. I say metaphorical, because there are a very few number of Gen Xers who blow up credit card companies.
Which brings me to my other observation of the film, which is that it couldn't be made now. Terrorism as a metaphor for rebellion no longer works in the same way as it did in 1999. A line in the film from Tyler--"This is it - ground zero. Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?"--just doesn't work for people now. The glib destruction of the current world order to allow everyone to start back at zero has consequences. In the film, the split-personality alter-ego Tyler says that "you have to break some eggs to make an omlette." These words are eerily reminiscent of some of the things Osama bin Laden said.
Seeing this film, I was reminded of the pre-9/11 innocence that allowed slacking Gen Xers to ponder the metaphysical in terms of revolution and violence. It is a great film, no doubt about it, thought provoking, with great acting, and an intelligent script that only becomes more interesting the more you watch it.
Four smilies for this winner. ☻☻☻☻☺

Low Moral Character

2005-09-07T23:38:00.000+09:00

I sat in my bosses place today for the General Managers meeting of the IT division. Our CIO always has some whoppers, at least at this one, and the last one I attended in my bosses place. At that one, he said that employees who were five minutes early leaving for lunch should be fired, for having low morals. He has, it should be noted, also unilaterally decided that flex time doesn't apply to IT, (who is he kidding? IT is who flex time was meant for!) and that those who used it at their own discretion should also be fired.
Today it was concerning working from home. The discussion was around encrypting employee PCs, and he brought up the example of an employee who worked from home and (shame!) dared to declare it on his time sheet. He used the phrase 'low moral character,' for that behavior. Telecommuting, it should be noted, is a behavior that our company is attempting to encourage in our customers. As my direct boss always says, we need to eat our own dog food.
I should note that I occasionally take off early for lunch--it is the only way to get a seat in either of the decent restaurants in our building--and I have, twice in the last 2 1/2 years, worked from home and declared it on my timesheet. I and my boss agreed that my starting time would be 10 at latest, because dealing with Europe leaves a very narrow window if I worked 9 to 6, the 'moral' work hours. The fact that I commute 1 1/2 hours each way every day, and often work on the train notwithstanding, it seems odd as a manager, who doesn't get paid overtime, that I would even think about needing to justify my working hours. I always put in an 8+ hour day at the office, generally logging between 9 and 10 hours, and on a project sometimes as many as 18 hours, for several weeks at a time.
I bit my tongue at the comment, but this sort of BS thinking does wear one down. I generally like and respect the CIO, but in some ways he is bass ackwards.

Hiding the Vision

2005-09-06T22:13:00.000+09:00

I wrote a book a few years ago, directly related to DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone company in the country. I remember calling their PR office to request help in getting interviews with the people who could best answer my questions. I had a publishing contract in-hand at the time, so it was a pretty-near certainty that the book was going to get written with or without their help. It turns out that it was written without their help. It was a lot more work for me to do it that way, but I didn't have any other choice: I had a book to write, and only three months to do it. I simply didn't have time for them to sort out their BS issues.
Fast forward to the present. We received an internal memo yesterday from our head of corporate communications, saying that there had been a leak to the media, and, it was strongly implied, whoever was responsible would be punished. Fine. Whatever. The irony, though, is that what was leaked was a clear, numeric, vision expressed by the president of the company, of where he thinks we should be headed. In the same way that the head of the Japan Football League set out a vision of Japan hosting the 2050 World Cup and winning it, this vision was clear, unambiguous, and, with a helluva lot of work, achievable.
The PR head's issue seems to be the leak, but that is absolutely insane: How are you supposed to have a vision if you cannot share it? The president must have known, should have known, that if people got really excited about what he was talking about, that they would share that with their spouses or talk about it with their co-workers. The news organisation that reported on this has their offices just up the street from us. In fact, on the same day that the story was reported last week, I bumped into a former colleague who now works in the IT department of this news organisation at the tonkatsu restaurant in our building. I also bumped into him on the train on the way over to the place where the president originally announced his vision. Add that proximity to people talking, like the visiting global IT chief, who mentioned the vision in a speech he gave, and to e-mails addressed to employees and non-employee (contractors) that make reference to it, and I don't see how you can keep this secret. Going on a witch hunt for the person responsible for the leak is probably a waste of energy.
But it highlights something that I really noticed about DoCoMo, too, when I was writing the book: Good communications and PR people would be wise to adopt the attitude of a very good friend, and the HR director at my last company: "Anything you write, you should do it as though everyone will read it. Maker sure that you won't be sorry when they do." That includes e-mails, blog posts, stories, and yes, even statements of vision. If you assume, correctly, that anything that is known by more than 10 people in the company is therefore public information, the trick then becomes to manage the communication of that information in the most advantageous way for the company. 'No comment,' and threats to employees simply means that you screwed up on that job.
I remember, writing my book, when the vice president of a company with close connections to DoCoMo, and who was acting as the technical editor, just about blew a fuse because of some technical information about NTT DoCoMo's network architecture that I had included. "Where did you get this information," he demanded, "this is covered by an NDA." Actually, I had gotten it off of their R&D web site, and didn't have and NDA with DoCoMo, one of the bright spots about them not giving me the time of day. This guy was so concerned that I was somehow illicitly using information, that he quit as technical editor, and I ended up with a somewhat silly French guy who didn't know much about the technical aspects, or about editing. c'est la vie. I had a book to write, and information to find.
I finished the book with my opinion of DoCoMo somewhat less than when I started, and that was reflected in the book. DoCoMo's PR department, and the paranoia that their corporate culture engendered in both their own people and their vendors hurt them. I have to be honest about that: I was under incredible pressure, internal and external, to finish the book on the schedule that we had set. I did. But when you work from 8 am to 10 pm every day, without break, through 9/11, through weekends, through everything, George Bush's phrase "if you aren't with me, you are against me," holds especially true. And DoCoMo was against me. Certainly it was passive, but by not giving even a minimal amount of help they impeded me. Having people know and admire their wonderful technology, a seemingly desirable thing to a company looking to achieve a worldwide customer base, did not happen nearly as effectively as if they had provided me the information I needed.
The reporter who wrote the story, my guess is, is a female reporter whose coverage in the past has hardly been flattering. This was actually our chance to talk about our vision, on our terms, and possibly get positive PR for a change. Instead, the vision was hidden, and when inevitably revealed, framed in someone else's words. A shame, and a missed opportunity.

Katrina vs. 11

2005-09-04T23:36:00.000+09:00

I mentioned the typhoon that hit the main island of Japan about 10 days ago, typhoon number 11. I think that it might be interesting to compare how disasters are dealt with in Japan and the U.S. I will admit that until last week my money was fully on the ability of the U.S. to deal with disasters. The shameful, slow, un-coordinated, and fully inadequate response to the Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, where thousands died in the earthquake, and at least hundreds died afterwards because of the poor response, made me happy to be from a country where they took things a little more seriously. Even in 9/11, horrific though it was, both citizens and emergency workers from a variety of organisations worked together in a way that made me proud.
First off--The preparations made beforehand:
In Japan, way more money than it seems prudent to spend is spent on fortifying the coastline with large concrete jacks called tetrapods, which mean that when a storm hits it is rarely slamming directly into houses or communities. Even if a ship is unlucky and gets thrown into the air and inland, it probably won't kill anyone (except perhaps any poor sailor who happens to be on it). I have, in the past, commented to friends that I wondered if there were any part of the Japanese coast line that wasn't fortified in this way. It is not a leisure-friendly approach to use of the coast.
In the U.S., even in places like Florida, you don't tend to see much fortification of coastlines, nor even zoning regulations that prohibit beachfront property from being used residentially. The coastline is obviously quite long, but actually so is the Japanese one. Considering the proclivity of hurricanes to hit Florida, it is surprising that more work is not done there. Louisiana may be another matter, I don't know. There is clear evidence that work on the levees that would have prevented this disaster, however, was neglected.
There are obviously a lot of factors at work, and a direct comparison isn't really possible, but in the case of disaster prevention, I think Japan clearly does a better job.
We next go to the time when people knew that there was a storm coming.
In Japan, for typhoon number 11, for example, there was extensive coverage for the couple of days prior to it hitting, and people were warned to stay indoors. Flood warnings were issued for Kyushu, which tends to flood when typhoons hit. On the day that it hit Tokyo, people were asked to go home early, and most major companies let workers go around two or three, prior to the worst of the storm. The train schedules were disrupted after that, but because the news of when the storm would hit and how strong it was, people had time to prepare, and get home prior to it hitting. Most people don't use cars to commute in Tokyo, and so getting home is not always easy in a disaster.
In New Orleans, from what I understand, there was also prior warning. The problem appears to be that the unexpected--a levee bursting--happened. People were expecting a very bad storm to hit, which it did, though it appears that the worst didn't hit New Orleans directly. While they may have had experience with bad storms, and covered windows with boards, etc., there aren't a lot of people who thought to prepare for a levee breaking. It was not expected. In this way, the storm actually served to take peoples attention from the much quieter, but as it turns out much more lethal, danger of flooding. Why FEMA would have been fooled is another question.
Again, the circumstances are not really comparable. But it should be noted that flood warnings were issued, along with specific instructions on what to do, in Japan. In New Orleans there wasn't someone, it seems, putting two and two together and saying to people that there was this other danger besides being blown away. I don't know who this should have been, but that fact alone means that I have to score this one for Japan.
During the onslaught of the disaster. People were given warnings in both places to get out of those places expected to most be affected. In the case of typhoon 11, this was Izu, and in the case of Katrina the gulf coast. The ability of people to do that turns out to have been a major factor in the real devastation Katrina wrought: New Orleans has a lot of people, many black, living at poverty level, and without a lot of means to pick up and go. Japan does not have a large poverty problem. There is a problem, however with an aging population, and older folks have a harder time getting up and going. In Japan almost everyone knows exactly where they should go in case of an emergency. Mostly it is elementary schools, though in my neighbourhood we are asked to stay in our own homes. So, in Izu many older folks made their way to the local elementary school. The resident of New Orleans didn't apparently have any sort of disaster plans or instructions on where they needed to go. I think I need to score this one, too, for Japan.
Then there is the emergency response:
In Japan there are unlikely to be rumours of gunfire and lawlessness that prevent rescue workers, who may fear for their lives, to go quickly to areas where they are needed. Sure, in the Kobe earthquake the response was far from adequate. The situation, however, even in the city with the highest concentration of yakuza gang members, did not devolve into lawlessness: People had enough faith in their leaders ability to pull through before it was too late, and did not, for the most part, take the law into their own hands, or panic. I would say that you saw this in New York after 9/11, too. You did not see this in New Orleans last week. I don't know that this is an issue of disaster relief so much as the poverty of the people hardest hit, and the level of trust they put in their leaders. As the week wore on, it was clear why that trust was at such a low level: A callous disregard for the poor was nothing if not self-evident. Nearby and wealthy Jefferson parish refused to act as a staging area for evacuation and relief efforts. The classist, racist, when-are-you-ever-going-to-learn-to-live-together-South. Shame! Hotel guests were evacuated quickly by bus, while those too poor to have their own transportation, or whose transportation was underwater, were left to sit on a highway for 4 days. Shame!
Though much more could have been done leading up to the disaster, none of that is any guarantee the severity of the disaster would not have been just as bad as it was. But once that disaster hit, the inability of government and the community to work together in a trusting way to attempt to meet the needs of all residents is apalling. The continuing failure of government to do it's job is criminal.
Maureen Dowd has a good opinion piece in today's New York Times. I think that she is right on.
No matter how much I might bitch about Japan, I trust the government to do whatever it can in a disaster. It is a horrible thing to not be able to say the same about the U.S., but that is what one takes away from the experience of Katrina: If you live in the right place, you will be o.k., but if you don't, well, sorry, that's your problem. When people are suffering, it is all of our problem. Please think about contributing to the Red Cross.

Book Review: Ten Big Ones

2005-09-04T01:20:00.000+09:00

I was in Tokyo station on Tuesday, flush with a little cash in my pocket, and wanted something to read. I stopped in at the Book Garden, which is right in the station. Their selection sucks! Unlike the book store in the Kamiyacho station, this one had only one spinning rack, and most of the books on it were 1.) Harry Potter, which I have read all of already; or 2.) Books about Japan and why things are the way they are here. I don't need books for that. At the very bottom of the rack, which I had to bend over and stick my big butt into someone to actually get at, was a book by Janet Evanovich called Ten Big Ones. It was, no doubt about it, the only real choice I had, and probably wouldn't have been my first choice. I am not that picky, though, and just wanted something to read that entertained me. Ten Big Ones certainly did that.
I have never heard of Ms. Evanovich, but she is apparently writing bestsellers at a fair clip. This book is in the Stephanie Plumb series, and the number in the title is an indicator that it is the tenth in the series. Each book title contains it's number in the series.
Stephanie Plumb is a bond enforcement agent (BEA), otherwise known as a bounty hunter. She is a smartass from Trenton, New Joisey, and tells the story in first-person, New Jersey accent and all coming through on the page. The book is half comic and half crime novel, and thoroughly entertaining. In many ways the female protagonist's fairly funny exploits, remind me of a sort of Bridget Jones character: She is able to make fun of herself, clearly define wants and needs, and tell the story in a way that let's us laugh both with her and at her. The originality of the voice that Helen Fielding brought to Bridget Jones derives at least partially from the novelty of female characters talking without inhibition about sex, food, and men. While the novelty may have worn off, Evanovich still makes it funny.
The other thing about this novel is the characters: The transvestite bus driver cum wedding planner; the sassy grandmother who is like a little kid the way that she tags along and picks up lingo that she then dishes out only partially correctly; the former 'ho' sidekick to Stephanie who carries a gun but disables two bad guys by sitting on them; and a host of characters who Stephanie comes into contact with as she picks people up who missed court dates and need to be 're-bonded'.
It is true, as one reader commented on amazon.com, that the bad guys arn't as well defined as characters. In one way this helps blunt the impact of when the bus driver runs over a bunch of them and then uses his Uzi to gun down a whole host more: There is no one that you care about or even really understand as a character well enough to be sorry in the least. But this is forgiveable for a book written in first person: We end up caring about the people that the narrator cares about, and not so much about a bunch of drug-dealing gang members who plan to first gang-rape her and then murder her.
I thoroughly enjoyed the telling of the story and the characters, and would probably have been reasonably happy to have read it for those two things alone. And that is good: The plot was reasonably thin, and really had only one conclusion if Stephanie Plumb were to stay in Trenton and continue on to book 12. In this, too, this book reminds me slightly of Bridget Jones: Do you remember the plot? I don't, but I do remember the characters. There definitely is a plot, it is just not what keeps you reading: That is achieved by the pure entertainment value of the telling of the story and of the descriptions of the characters.
I give this book three smilies. It is entertaining, and worth reading if you want to be entertained. It is not great literature nor is it a particularly finely-honed piece of narrative fiction. There are flaws in the character development and in the plot. It is definitely not at the bottom of my list of books I would reccomend, somewhere closer to the middle. ☻☻☻☺☺

Company Man

2005-09-02T22:29:00.000+09:00

Today on the shinkansen home, I started, with the help of someone who annoyed me considerably, to think about life, work, and loyalty. This annoying person was a 45-55 year old man. He got on the train, dragging about three bags, none actually held in the way they were meant, this guy sort of dragging them on the floor. He got on just as the train left, so, ok, I thought, he had maybe been in a rush. He then spent all the way to Omiya--about 18 minutes--fussing with his damned bags, putting them on the luggage rack, and then taking them down and messing with them, and then putting them back, on and on, all the while standing in the aisle and not sitting down, which I realised is rather annoying to those around the person doing this. He, unfortunately, did not seem to realise this.
I had passed the same guy on the escalator, because he was so damned slow. He was still, even after getting on the train, exactly that slow. I noticed that his hands shook slightly, and that he had frizzy hair sticking out from his normal salaryman hairstyle, indicating that he might have been through chemo therapy or something, which made me feel slightly guilty about my annoyance: I was just being petty. He finally sat down.
About 15 minutes later, as a conductor was passing through the carriage, the geezer flagged him. I couldn't hear what was being said, except that the geezer stood up and rushed to the end of the car, while the conductor stood in front of his seat, glancing every 30 seconds at his watch, and looking annoyed. I was annoyed just looking at the conductor.
When the geezer came back, he said "thanks alot. I used to be a kokutetsu man myself, for 20-odd years," and then went on to have a whispered conversation with the conductor, who looked happy to move on.
And I thought to myself, 'aha! A kokutetsu man! That explains it!' Explains what, you may ask, and I will explain precisely what it did explain: This relatively (45-55 year-old) youn man acted like he was 90; he was obviously coherent, saying some apologies to the over whose head he kept putting up and taking down his bag; and he was grey and his spirit apparently dead. Add that to the eccentricity of not trusting the guy in the seat next to him to watch his bag (or actively distrusting him enough to ask the conductor to watch his bags), and you have a kokutetsu man through and through. They are a bunch of intelligent people working at a mind-numbing bureaucracy, whose lives revolve around rules. They are salarymen.
Salaryman. A self defined by one's earning power. Horrible.
Today I got into it again with one of my least favorite people in the company. He started it, sending a mail to me and everyone else in his own department including his boss, that had an offensive tone and content.
One of the things he complained about was that I hadn't shown him a pamphlet that I had had translated and which involved his department. I had tried to meet him two or three times, and he had blown me off, and since his input was not required, I said to myself 'whatever--if he wants to blow me off, fine.' To tell the truth I hate the man. I used to think that I just didn't like him, or that we were different and there was something I just wasn't getting.
I went to his desk to apologise for any misunderstanding--I still need to work with him after all--and give him copies of the pamphlets. I had a couple of other things I needed to speak to him about, and addressed those things, and went back to my desk. About 30 minutes later, he came to my desk and threw pamphlets on my desk, and said 'what do I need these for.'
I was flustered, and stuttered a bit in Japanese, and said 'you said in your e-mail that your people hadn't heard of some of the applications in the pamphlets, so I..."
"I don't understand what you are saying, is that supposed to be Japanese," he said, turning his back on me.
Luckily my co-worker who sits next to me rescued the situation, since it would have definitely devolved. After talking to me through her for 10 minutes or so, he comes out with 'I don't need the pamphlets, I already received them before.' As*hole! Bakayaro!
I sat there, though, a plastic smile on my face, and nodded, thinking to myself I wish you a slow and painful death, but revealing nothing in my face. This is the Japanese way. It is also, one should note, the Japanese way to blow up occasionally, and if I have to deal with this joker again, it will definitely happen. I hate to deal with this guy so much, and I hate dealing with one of his subordinates even more, so that I avoid them when possible. This avoidance makes me feel weak, and when I do go to him, he somehow manages to render me invisible, small. This total lack of respect--turning his back on me--is the thing that really gets me about both him and his rabid subordinate. Sure, there is history. No doubt. Sure, there have been problems. But I have never gone out of my way to hurt him or her.
Sitting on the shinkansen tonight, at the end of a long day, when I did some really good work, but also felt the full might of a frustration and an anger building in me, I wondered to myself what I would be after 20 years. Would I be like the man annoying me so much, feeble, grey, slow, all the life sucked out of him by who knows what job? Would I be a beaten man? I am getting there. If I had seen him on the train tonight, my rage would have pushed me almost to the point of garroting him. But what about in five years? Will I just be a maké inu, a beaten dog? What about in 20 years? Like the annoying geezer?
This is, as my wife tells me after one of these days, and which is very little comfort, the life of a company man...

Book Review: Mr. Vertigo

2005-08-31T23:16:00.000+09:00

Paul Auster must be one of the best living American novelists. America definitely needs something like the Booker Prize to recognize fine fiction writing, and I have no doubt that Paul Auster would be the recipient of the award every three or four years. If you haven't read any of his writing, go to amazon.com right now and buy one of his works. You won't regret almost any choice you make.
Much of Auster's work has involved stories that take place in New York, and I am trying to remember if any took place as far back as 85 years ago, and don't think that any I have read were so far in the past. I wouldn't say that this work is a break for Auster, it is fully as well-told as his other works, and has a deft narrative full of humanity. Humanity is a good word, yes...That and chance.
All of Auster's novels narratives are driven, to some degree, by chance. Chance, as in 'this happened for a reason, and though it might not be visible in this one instance, the guiding hand of some deity must be involved, because we are not talking about random chance but chance as exercised by an organised and all-seeing God.' That chance.
In this work, Auster's narrative is the first-person narrative of Walt, a presumably deceased man by the time you read the story, who tells an incredible life story starting in the 1920's. There is not really any narrative fancy stuff here, just an old guy telling the story of what brought him to where he now is. Straight line, mostly, in very much the way that someone who was asked to sit down and tell their life story would probably do it.
The power of this work is in the story. Walt's straightfoward telling of how as a boy he learned to fly--yes, fly!--and how that shaped the rest of his life is riveting, and utterly believable as told. As a story, it flys.
Some of Auster's work, most especially for me, Music of Chance, are somewhat less deft in the other story that they are telling, the Message. This work is definitely less allegoric than Music of Chance, which is good. To some degree, though, the story of a man who learns to fly, and then learns not to, is allegoric in nature. We are not talking The Pilgrims Progress allegory, but Auster is obviously of a mind to tell more of a story than the actual story. In Mr. Vertigo, Auster's tendency displayed in Music of Chance to overplay this, his irrepressible urge to not only tell the front story, but nearly explicitly tell you the meaning as well, is thankfully repressed. So, he gets the meaning in without having to go to any great lengths or much awkwardness to pound the reader over the head with it. The meaning comes out of the story. As it should.
I give this work a four smiley rating. The only reason it doesn't get a five is that I am picky, as well as stingy, and don't think there would be much point in handing out a five unless it was the best book I had ever, up until that point, read. It isn't, but it is a damned good one, and I full-heartedly reccomend it. ☻☻☻☻☺

Fiber: It's good for you!

2005-08-30T22:09:00.000+09:00

Twelve years ago, when I was still living in Utsunomiya, and NTT still had a monopolistic stranglehold on all things connected with telephones, including being able to certify a phone or modem as acceptable to use (in fact, this acceptance was actually law: If you used a device that they found unacceptable, you were actually in violation of the law), which they had a disincentive to do, since they were also selling telephones, fax machines, and modems, I had this idea: I would like to use the Internet. As a student at Carleton College, I had used Kermit, FTP, Telnet, e-mail, and Internet BBS's. When I graduated, and was home in Eugene, Oregon, I dropped into the University of Oregon's computer lab. They had some DEC terminals, and I tried one in the off-chance that it would allow me to log in. It did! I still had an alumni account from Carleton, and using this far-flung terminal, I could access the account as if I were directly connected, which in fact I was. The big mainframe makers in those days--Sun, IBM, DEC--all had their own networks, which used the Internet to connect one another: DECnet, SunSite, and something Blue that I don't remember. If you were connected to one DECNet site, you could connect to other sites, if you had permission, of course.
After my very pleasant experience at the U of O, when I got to Utsunomiya, I tried the same thing at Utsunomiya University. The conversation went something like this:
"Hello, kind lab ass, could you point me to a terminal."
"Who the hell are you and what do you want?"
"I would like to sit down and use one of your terminals."
"And who the hell are you?"
"I am a fellow netizen, with rights to access a node at Carleton College. In order to do so, I need first to find a terminal."
"Well, fellow 'netizen' , who let you in, and why are you still here?"
"Look, Mr. Lab Ass (hole), I am not asking for an account, nor to compromise your obviously huffy security policy, nor to inconvenience you in any other way except to ask you once again WHERE CAN I FIND A F*CKING TERMINAL?"
The convesation degenerated somewhat after that.
I relayed this story to the owner of a computer shop that I frequented, and he laughed his head off.
I had to wait another two years before public Internet access came to Utsunomiya. It was accessed with a, wait don't laugh, 14.4 kbp/s modem, and I paid 3.33 yen per minute just in local phone charges. Non-negotiable. I upgraded to a Power Mac 8100 with GeoPort adapter, which ran at 28.8 kbp/s, which was heaven for a (very short) while. I then splurged on an ISDN line, which pissed my wife off, because it required us to change our number, our local exchange not yet supporting ISDN. The whole time, my phone bill kept climbing, until it hit a pain threshhold of around 20,000 yen per month. That is about 100 hours of access per month, though that wasn't counting my long distant phone calls, basic rate, etc., so it was actually about 60 hours a month. This was a bone of contention with my wife every single month. This kept up after I had move slightly north of Utsunomiya, in fact because I moved: Utsunomiya had ADSL from about 1998 onwards. My town didn't get it until October, 2000. I was one of the first recepients in a long line of people who signed up very quickly. Ironically, I had to change my number again, because for ADSL you have to switch back to analogue. This went on for four years, until I moved last August. This being Japan, the pressure to upgrade is everywhere. So, it was time for fiber. Yes, fiber.
One hundred megabits per second, upstream and downstream. No laws of copper physics to deal with, no thought that if they put too many people on the exchange my performance might degrade. Lightspeed. And actually, it cost very little more than ADSL. Fiber is about $40/month, and ADSL about $30. Definitely worth the extra.
Recently, I upgraded again, this time to gigabit speeds. No extra charge. I did, however, need to keep my analogue phone line: NTT's rules said you needed one 'real' phone line into the house in case of emergency. A rather self-serving rule, but some things never change, until, of course, they suit NTT. They do now: I get a VoIP number which has a regular city prefix (all VoIP numbers have had the 050 prefix until now, no matter where they are located), and doesn't require that I have a copper line. It's basic fee is 1/3 that of 'normal' copper rates, and the sound quality is actually better. This is how NTT does it: They create a frustrated customer, and then fill the pent up demand for that thing the customer craves.
I will say, though, that having this speed is great: My Tivo-like box takes mere seconds to download the TV schedules, I downloaded all six Redhat discs in less than 30 minutes (would have been faster, but the universities that I downloaded from seemed to have bandwidth issues ;), and BitTorrent rocks. There is one TVoIP (TV over IP) service which uses a cable-box-like gizmo to stream programs directly to your TV. This even uses IP v.6, the newest version.
Japan literally went from the Internet dark ages to clear world-leading status in about 6 years. It is mind boggling. It is now cheaper by about half to have a fiber line with Internet service, telephone service, and television service, than my copper 14.4 connection was 10 years ago. Having been involved in reactionary telecoms (in Japan, any telecom that wasn't NTT was reactionary, since everything we did was a reaction to their monopoly: Callback was a reaction to their price-setting; mobile was a reaction to the high price of buying the 'right' to have a line; cheap mobile service was a reaction to PHS; and so on) during much of that time, I have had the ride of my life. As a customer I have also had the ride of my life, though a little more bumpy, with alternately wonderous and frustratingly backward experiences (I wrote the first Mac modem driver for my TA/DSU). What a place!

New Logo

2005-08-29T01:16:00.000+09:00

I made myself a new logo! Check it out:
I figured it would be nice to have something a little original. I am still playing with it though, so...let me know what you think.
Also, yes, you guessed it, I was playing around with Photoshop and not translating or coding the Javascript for the personality test that I said I would have up this weekend. Sorry. Actually, I am tempted to give it a pass: It is already online in Japanese, and I think that because the scoring is aimed at Japanese, a disproportinate number of non-Japanese would score high on the controller or promoter side. My wife, by the way, scored very high on the controller side, which was not, of course, a shock to me, but serves of confirmation.

Typhoon Number 11

2005-08-25T19:36:00.000+09:00

After my two days of management-trainer-led enlightenment, I was ready for a holiday! The plan, carefully organised by my wife, was to spend two star-filled nights and three sun-filled days in Izu, Japan's answer to Cannes, the Costa Del Sol, and Mazatlan all wrapped together, a mere three-hour train trip from Tochigi, even closer from Tokyo. For three people, a mere 150,000 yen for these three days, or roughly 1,350 USD or 1,050 Euros. What a bargain!
It was with the upmost grief that I suggested to my wife that we may, considering that typhoon number 11 was to expected to hit Honshu precisely at the spot where our hotel lay, want to (gasp!) cancel our reservation. She put it off until yesterday, which actually turned out to be a good thing, since the hotel or employee social-insurance scheme's rules allowed us to cancel without penalty because it was very likely that trains would not be running, and that a typhoon would hit. Otherwise, we would have had to pay a 20% cancellation fee.
Amazing woman, my wife, and she was able to arrange, on a moment's notice, a trip to the only tropical place on Honshu this day: Spa Resort Hawaiians. In Iwaki, Fukushima prefecture, on the Pacific coast, the resort started, from my recollection, as one of those boondoggles spawned during the 'bubble' period in Japan. Why, one may ask, would people pay to go to a fake water experience, when they were right on the Pacific coast? I won't say that the local government and the companies that built the place were particularly farsighted, but on a day like today, near the end of summer, a typhoon bringing lots of rain, they made a bundle of money. No talk of overhead, costs, the far-from-mythical five dollar cup of coffee that costs that much because of the high cost of land in Tokyo. They are raking it in. Japanese summers are hardly ideal for laying on the beach: Seasonal rains start out the summer, until early to mid July. From Mid August or so there are typhoons. That leaves roughly a month of unimpeded summer, though it can and does rain during that month, as well.
The official hotel charges 23,000 yen per person, even with the social-insurance scheme's discount. Add that to the 2,000 yen per person per day entrance fee for the reason you are actually there, the water park, as well as, you realise only once you have already sunk so much money into it that there is no turning back, the 2,100 yen per person per day fee for the water slides. Luckily my wife had sticker shock at the hotel price, no mean feat considering her high tolerance for high prices, and found a much more reasonable hotel, which is exactly two minutes walk from Spa Resort Hawaiians.
What exactly is Spa Resort Hawaiians? A very good question, one that occurred to me, as well. And here is the answer: It is not Hawaii, and really has nothing that reminded me very much of Hawaii other than mobs of Japanese, water, and high-priced food and beverages (as well as everything else). What it is, is a building with a very high roof, something like eight different pools, five water slides, and the aforementioned mobs of people. There is a hotspring which is also included (amazing!) in the price, which I am is guessing because it was already there.
We started out poorly, at 9 am taking a road out of town which, as I told my wife before we left (and made sure she was reminded of later), is totally packed because it is on the way to Honda R&D, which has flex time, with core time from 10. We then proceeded to take a 'shortcut' that was all right, mostly, except the part that took us over a mountain pass on a gravel road with ditches on either side, and craters in the middle. Luckily our new car, a Murano, has 4WD, which actually came in handy. I think we are going to take the expressway back, no matter how much farther it looks on a map, it is closer, and I think my wife now believes me. Though, I think that the way things look, there is a good chance that the expressway will be closed for the typhoon.
Actually, 11 is my lucky number, so I don't know what I am worrying about: I am still 100,000 yen richer than I would have been, my kid is having a ball, despite shitty weather, and even my wife is happy, at this very moment watching hula dancing. A hui hou aku!

Another management Personality Test

2005-08-23T23:28:00.000+09:00

I am in Yokohama for a two-day training entitled "Coaching". I thought that, since it is being offered by the company, and they are putting me up in the very nice The Grand intercontinental Yokohama hotel, that it would either be 1) Dead boring, with the coffee in the lounge the only thing that saved me; and/or 2) Very specific and focused on certain corporate strategies or goals. I took it because I tend to have communications 'issues' with those who have worked for me. Before I get someone else working for me, I thought that something like this might help.
The introduction sort of was about 'Coaching' as a professional discipline. In this course, the instructor promised, we would learn this discipline. Hmm...at least I didn't fall asleep! Just to clarify for anyone who might be interested: I have taken goofy company-sponsored training courses from both western and (today) Japanese trainers, and there is no huge difference in their approach. We did a lot of role playing, which I generally enjoy, and near the end of the day we took a kind of personality 'assessment' (read 'test'). This test was called the CAPS test, with CAPS standing for Controller, Analyzer, Promoter, and Supporter. I looked it up on the net when I got back, and it looks like it is only given by the company that held this training, coach A. It does, however, look very similar to a test called the DPSA, which stands for Driver, Promoter Analyzer, and Supporter, which is given by an Australian company called Myprofile Pty Limited.
It is a bit long, but I am going to list the questions below (I sort of wish Blogger supported forms, because then I could let you take it, and generate a score, which would be cool, and kind of support my geeky nature that can't seem to be quite satisfied with mere writing...wait a second! Brain fart! I could do it by editing the HTML text directly, and using JavaScript! That will be another project, though, so I will first just put it up with no scoring):(ok, ok, I just started to translate this thing, all 40 questions, into English, and realised it is going to probably be a bit of work, so the whole thing becomes a new project...I will try to have it done by the weekend).
Anyway, basically the result was interesting, and points to me maybe mellowing out slightly: I scored higher on the Promoter side than on the Controller side, which sort of surprised me: When I took the DISC (I forget what it stands for) about two years ago, I scored on the extremely aggressively success-oriented side. The easygoing, creative, promoter side this time, was a bit of a surprise, but I still scored high on the success-oriented side.
Change is probably a good thing.
I realised something today, too: I came to my career fairly late, and via a fairly circumlocuitous (is that really a word? Yes, I think so...) route, and moved into a fairly high position in my current career fairly early. I spent many years doing more people-oriented, more creative things, and to some extent I have really focused myself in the last few years much more on the things that are success factors of what I am now doing, or at least what I thought they were. I think the truth is that I am a weirdo for an I.T. manager: I majored in Asian studies, taught, did magazine journalism, wrote a book, did programming (which is actually fairly creative), did development of websites, did pre-sales engineering, product management, project managment, and now, suddenly, I am in I.T. Though to some extent a natural progression, there is also something un-natural for me about not doing something more creative with my life. At the same time, I am a geek, and it was clearly my own interests that got me where I am at, so it is hard to say that I am not where I should be. One of those internal conflicts that I need to sort...

Hard Ass

2005-08-22T23:15:00.000+09:00

I have a friend, S (his real name, or at least the first letter of it). I have known him more than 12 years, since I have been in Japan, in fact. He is one of those somewhat needy friends: Bad things just seem to happen to him, at least in his own mind, and he is constantly assuming that he is a victim of something. There are too many examples, and anyway, I don't want to diss him too much, and prove him right!
Anyway, he called me last Friday, at work of course, and needed a favor: His friend from Oregon had moved back to Japan, and needed help finding a job. I knew why S was asking me: I have been reasonably succesful on the job front, and he has not. He changes jobs pretty much every two years, for whatever reasons, which of course involve a fair amount of victimhood and being wronged. I shouldn't be so mean, I guess, since I have in a lot of ways just been lucky. The thing is, he says I have been lucky, which kind of pisses me off, because even though it is true, it is also true that I have made things happen for myself.
Anyway, to tell the truth, I really didn't want to help his friend. I mean, what do you say to someone who calls you at work and you have a conversation like this:

'Hey, can you please help my friend find a job?'
'What kind of job?'
'Oh, uh, something about electronics.'
'Uh...S, I need more than that.'
'He needs a job, man, and I just want to help him.'
'But I can't help him if I don't know what he wants.'
'Semiconductors, I think.'
'Uh, ok. I know two people who have contacts in that industry, so I will look them up and send you their details. What's your e-mail address?'
'My computer broke last year, so I don't have e-mail.'
'Fine, how do you want me to get this information to you?'
'Can't you just tell me now?'
'I don't have it now.'
'Oh...can you send me a fax?' S loves faxes. In fact, he faxes people rather than phoning them. It is annoying, but his insecurities are pretty much all he has, and he thinks that he can't bother people with phone calls. He is also notriously cheap (with reason--he is also poor), so it could be that paying for a one minute fax transmission, and hoping for a 20 minute phone call, that he doesn't have to pay for, is the strategy.
'Yeah, fine, I will fax it,' I said, my heart definitely not in it. In fact, there is no way I would send S my other friends' contact information straight, which meant that I had to call them up and set it up, which I really have no desire to do for someone I don't know.
To make a long story short, S called me yesterday, and wanted to know where the contacts I had promised were. I told him straight out that I really had no desire to participate in a wild goose chase of introducing his friend who maybe had semiconductor exeprience to my friends who maybe know someone with a job. I told him to have his friend send his resume, so that I had some idea of what I was dealing with.
Back in the days when I first got here, and I was publishing a small publication in Tochigi, I helped everyone, really went out of my way to help strangers. The thing is, I committed to more than I was really capable of. I generally delivered, but was often not happy about it. This time I just said 'no, I am not going to go out of my way to help someone unless they are clearly committed to helping themself.' That was part of what had ticked me off before: The recipients of my efforts often didn't thank me, or thanked me by throwing away what I had given them. When my son was born, I said to myself, and to the community, actually, 'I can't spend my time and energy in this way anymore. I quit.'
So, what to do in this case? The guy actually has a lot of experience, and if his Japanese is good enough, is probably pretty employable. I told him that I would introduce him to my LinkedIn contacts with conditions: That he answer some of my questions, and that he meet me. S is a bit of a loser, and I don't feel like introducing him or his friends to my professional network unless I can personally vouch for them. S I wouldn't introduce: He has clearly shown that his ability to get along at work is limited.
Tokyo is a big city, one of the worlds biggest, but it is also a small town. I am not going to help someone get a job somewhere only to have them make me look bad (this has happened).
I think this guy is for real, and that makes me a little happier to help him. He answered my questions, and was really quick in putting his details into LinkedIn. I will meet him next week and decide if I feel like introducing him to any of the people in my netowrk or not.
When did I become such a curmudgeon? My wife would say that I have grown up, doubting that it was true.
Yesterday I took my son out to find interesting things in the neighbourhood, which is one of his assignments for the summer. For me, I was really methodical: I first taught him how to use the digital camera; I made sure that we had a pen and paper, in case we needed to take notes, and was very good and focused on what we were supposed to be doing.
These are my challenges: Focus, preparation, and follow-through. That is a lot of challenges. But more and more, I am finding that without these things I can't successfully get anything done.
So, I told this guy what was in scope and what was out of scope, what I needed him to do, and what I was willing to do. When I caught myself starting to make a promise, one that he would perhaps not even be grateful that I had made, I stopped: If he needed help, I could think about offering then, and only if I am satisfied when I talk to him next week that he is not a loser.
My son and I found the Utsunomiya University Riding Club stables. We took a picture of the horse in his stable, which you can see, and I made sure that we wrote down his name (Aregura). We wrote down the official name of the club, and looked for someone to speak to, but no one was around. On our way home, we drew a map of the way we got to the club. There didn't end up being enough room in the workbook for the map, but that is good: Having more than you can use is something that I learned the value of when I was publishing my little rag. Holding back isn't my natural inclination, but I am learning...slowly.

Tradition

2005-08-21T00:11:00.000+09:00

The distinct songs and dance of a place are one of the things that give that place it's flavor, along with it's food, clothing, language, and history. When I lived in Thailand, I lived in the Northeast (called 'Isan' in Thai). One of the traditional musics of the area is called 'mo rum', which I think means 'Doctor Dance'. There was obviously dancing done with the music.
In Japan, at this time of year, traditional 'O-bon' music and dances are performed. Each area has it's own traditional dance, which children learn in school. Songs are also specific to the area, though the sound is much more regional.
The bon odori, or o-bon dance, and the o-bon festival itself are mainstays in traditional community life in Japan. In villages, they are the highlight of summer. In Tokyo, they are less common, though there is a thriving one in Iriya, where I used to have an apartment, and in other places in the 'downtown' area of eastern Tokyo, like Asakusa. This reminds me, in a way, of when my family moved to Eugene, Oregon. We had previously lived in Hillsboro, at the time a fairly small town (now much bigger, and headquarters to Intel's reasearch facilities), which had a thriving 4th of July parade and the Washington county fair. This was really a community thing, and people would line their lawn chairs up along Main Street to watch, and various clubs would prepare floats, schoolchildren would dress up, and so on. Prior to that we had lived in Oakville, Washington, a very small town of about 1,000 people, who were all, according to memory, absolutely mad about 4th of July, and would put a huge amount of effort into it. Eugene, though, had no 4th of July parade! I couldn't believe it. I sarcastically asked a man if they even had fireworks, which at the time they did, but which were later cancelled because of budget or insurance or something. It was a paradox: Such a city, of 120,000 people, paradoxically, had less ability, because it consisted of not just one community, but many, to hold community-wide events. That has now been remedied by the Eugene Celebration, Eugene's answer to the traditional 4th of July celebration, which is more fitting with the bohemian nature of the town. It is more modern, less about history, tradition, and patriotism, and more about celebrating.
Tonight was the community festival, held at my son's elementary school. There was singing and dancing and food. The people organising the events were the community association folks, the same ones that had organised the volleyball tournament I participated in several months ago.
I saw the people I had played volleyball with tonight, and they couldn't seem to be bothered to say hello. I had a sort of warm glow, like we had really bonded, after the tournament was finished, so that sort of hurts. All of those guys I had played volleyball with were public workers, and then I look and see them participating in these kinds of events, sitting in the community tent, drinking and eating from the fees that everyone in the community pays, wearing costumes that the community buys, and perhaps it was just something I missed, but I don't recall seeing a call for participation, any notice of how that might happen, or anything like that. For these guys, it seems like these kinds of events are an extension of their jobs, with lots of backslapping, and cliques. Community is important to them, but it is one of those non-inclusive communities, that even people who actually live there have to make a lot of effort to join. It is, especially as a non-Japanese, easy to feel left out.
The song and dance, though, are there for everyone, and perhaps this is the point of them: The sort of formal 'community' is less important than that everyone share in the music and dance. If that is the case, it is definitely a tradition that I hope to see continued.

Roman Holiday

2005-08-20T01:03:00.000+09:00

I may finally be over the jet-lag: Last night I went out with co-workers for an Okinawan meal and drinks after work at a restaurant in Ginza, to celebrate the arrival of one person and the departure of another. I won't even try to pronounce what we had, as the Okinawan dialect derives from a different source than Japanese, and I simply don't know the words. It was good, but I returned fairly early, and was home by 10:30.
The night before, I had started to watch Dr. T & The Women, a movie directed by Robert Altman, with a cast of some of the nicest-looking women actresses ever, and Richard Gere. I had started it the night before, and fell asleep right at the point when he was sleeping with a female golf pro, played by Helen Hunt, because, one was left to assume, that his crazy wife, played by Farrah Fawcett, was well...crazy! She stripped naked (unfortunately obscured by the Japanese censor) and frolicked in the mall fountain! And he therefore needed a woman! Exclamation points, unfortunately, don't add up to a well conceived storyline, or premise, or even a point to this dog of a movie. A bit shocking considering the director and fine actors involved. I don't reccomend it at all. Unfortunately, I didn't know that, or wasn't quite sure, because the sleeping pill I had taken had kicked in fairly quickly. So, last night I finished it. I then took only one half of a sleeping pill, and was able to get a reasonable night's sleep.
I have been meaning to call my friend, J, who I haven't seen for a long time, or at least a couple of months. I guess that isn't so long, but we used to be housemates, so it seems like too long. She is now living and working in Tokyo, in fact quite close to my office, maybe a 10 or 15-minute walk. She suggested we have dinner, which we did at Roy's of Aoyama Cafe (not in Aoyama, in Atago). I really like talking with her: She is funny, smart, and because we really know each other well, we can talk about almost anything. Which we did...
She mentioned that in July (just last month!) she had had a 'Roman Holiday' in Singapore. I looked up 'Roman Holiday' on dictionary.com, and here is the definition:

Roman holiday n.

Enjoyment or satisfaction derived from observing the suffering of others.
A violent public spectacle or disturbance in which shame, degradation, or physical harm is intentionally inflicted on one person or group by another.

I don't think that is what she meant. I think her reference was to the sheltered princess portrayed by Audrey Hepburn, and the dashing newspaper reporter played by Gregory Peck. And I am to understand that this Gregory Peck lookalike, who happens to be rather short, round, and Chinese, and wears round glasses, was a good playmate for princess J's three-day stay in Singha Pura, city of lions. It was, she said, the best holiday ever.
Her husband had been invited, and things might have turned out differently had he accepted, but he said Singapore was boring, and why didn't she go by herself? Why do that when her perfect man, short, dark, and Asian, was waiting to ride her around on his Vespa, or at least in his Toyota?
I think we know each other a little too well: I am not shocked, don't feel like giving her any marital advice (taking holidays with men who are not one's husband might lead to trouble), and was more interested in whether they did the dirty. I am the amoral friend, I guess: I hoped she had. If her stupid husband can't find his way, why should that prevent her taking a ride now and then? (no answer needed, thanks ;-) I didn't ask that question, though. Though with most people it would be a given that her and Mr. Peck had done it, I know her to well to leap to any conclusions...
Last night, in the Okinawan restaurant, this subject also came up: One of my female co-workers, an interpreter who just got married at the beginning of the year, sort of glared at the only other male (besides me) in the department, and said 'Nani-san, have you ever cheated on your wife?"
Nani-san (not his real name, of course), totally non-plussed, sputtered and said 'why do you want to know'. Definitely not a definitive answer, and my boss said 'it is a binary question, yes or no,' which is true, but didn't give him much of an out to a question that he obviously couldn't answer honestly. He recovered pretty well, with 'I wish that such an opportunity had presented itself,' which, you will notice, still did not answer the question, though the implication is that the opportunity had not, and therefore he had not. It did get him off the hook, though, and I was reasonably certain that heads would then turn my way, and mentally prepared myself for the question: "No, absolutely never." Ms. S, who is leaving soon for England, and is, I believe, divorced, and who has, in past conversations, been quite interested in male opinions on fidelity, turned to look very closely at my eyes to see if I was lying. The mental preparation helped me hold her gaze.
My boss, then told a story about a certain Accenture partner she had seen in Roy's with a young woman, and who the next day told her some baloney story about the girl being an old classmate from college, while she was sure that there was more to it. I didn't remember that until I was sitting at a table in Roy's with Princess J, whom I am really good friends with, and with whom, no, I have never slept, and whimsically wondered whether my boss would show up. Luckily, my spate of ironic karma has ended.
Infidelity is a funny thing: Perhaps it is the sort of Roman Holiday described in the dictionary, not for those doing it, but for those who get to watch in a kind of fascinated pleasure at the squirming of others, doing their mating rituals in a public colloseum for all to observe with a touch of envy, irony, and disgust. Bon voyage!

Book Review: Tokyo

2005-08-18T19:44:00.000+09:00

I am a confirmed addict of popular fiction. I generally buy my paperbacks at one of the two twirling racks of books that the bookstore in the underground passageway of the Kamiyacho station has, which limits my purchases to around 30-40 titles.
This time, I had a similar selection at Munich airport's duty-free gift shop (you have to show your passport to buy a Mars bar!), where I purchased Tokyo, by Mo Hayder (which is also known under the U.S. title of The Devil of Nanking).
Let me first say that I am one of those nitpicky people who find a lot of western writing, especially mass fiction writing, about Tokyo to be rather foolish, and often getting the details wrong, or worse. A good example of the 'worse' category would be Clavell's Gaijin, which takes certain historical facts, like the existence of certain rules or laws, and jumps to the (wrong) conclusion that people were actually following them. Clavell also manage's to get some details simply wrong. (If you want to know which, write me when I am at home, where I have the book.) It seems like for a long time more authors got it wrong than right.
Hayder doesn't get it wrong. The place she describes really exists and it is really Tokyo. It is, to be sure, a subset of the varied and textured place that is Tokyo, but the subset is described accurately. She also doesn't get any details wrong, save one: She describes a desert as 'a mochi' when what she is really describing is a daifuku, which is made of mochi, but is not called a mochi. (This gives you some idea of how nitpicky I am.) This is a minor, and certainly in no ways fatal mistake. And it is materially unimportant to the story.
I am also an East Asian Studies Major, with a history focus, which actually increased my enjoyment of the story and of Hayder's narrative architecture: There are parallel first-person narratives by Grey, a young Englishwoman in modern Tokyo (1992), and Shi Chongming, a young lecturer in 1937 Nanking, China. Both characters also interact in modern Tokyo, but the stories are very internal in nature, and their interaction seems mostly designed to focus this internal narrative, and to move the story forward.
Hayder is a good story teller, but the main mystery of the story is somewhat anti-climatic, mostly because she leads us fairly early on to suspect the very worst, and it turns out that the worst was in the past, or at least mostly in the past. That doesn't make it less bad, but changes it's immediacy.
If you are not familiar with the Nanking massacre, also called the Nanking Rape, you will probably be shocked by some of Hayder's descriptions of that atrocity. Her descriptions are accurate, and Hayder really is able to very capably elicit the full horror of the thing through the narrative of Shi Chongming.
One thing that I found interesting is how Grey's fascination of the Nanking massacre, where somewhere between a couple hundred and 400,000 people died, depending on who is doing the reporting (the Japanese tend to be at the low end , and the Chinese on the high end), colours her view of modern Japan. I have been here for awhile, was familiar with this subject through my history studies, but never somehow connected modern Japan with those atrocities committed in the Emperor's name in the very recent past. I am apparently not alone in this lack of consideration, as most Japanese are less familiar with this incident than I am, and manage to seperate the past crimes of their fathers and grandfathers with the current reality.
The fact is though, that the Chinese rage and fury about this ability to do what people in all places and in all times have done, which is to consciously put the past out of their minds, and look forward, something that the Chinese themselves have done with cultural revolution, Tianamen Square, and any number of atrocities, is mis-placed. What they should be mad about is the way that their government has manipulated the very real grief, of the very grievously injured, damaged, survivors for political purposes. I won't condone the moron revisionists in Japan. Period.
I give this book four smileys out of five. It tells a compelling story, two compelling stories in fact, gets Tokyo right, get it's history right, and causes one to ask some interesting questions about how we relate to this country, this culture, and it's past. ☻☻☻☻☺

Tokyo Swaying

2005-08-16T22:53:00.000+09:00

The tremors that presage a major earthquake seem to follow a similar pattern: shake-shake-shake, and then a pause of around 5 seconds, followed by continous shakes of increasing intensity, until they reach full intensity.
I don't know in terms of magnitude on the Richter scale how strong the quake was felt in Tokyo, but on the Japanese scale, which measures one to seven, with seven being the strongest, it was a weak six (which was measured on the Richter scale at a 7.2) in Miyagi prefecture, about 300 kilometers northeast of Tokyo, and a solid four in Tokyo. Being on the fifth floor of our 42-storey building is either a blessing or a curse: My colleagues on the 39th floor were nauseous from the swaying of the building, which continued for five or ten minutes after the quake was finished, whereas I was only mildly nauseous, mostly owing to the non-prescription sleeping pill I resorted to last night when I sprang awake at 2:30, and wondering whether to start running for the stairs or risk being crushed under 37 stories of rubble.
The building did what it was supposed to, which is sway, releasing the energy in the process, but I do wonder what the limits of it's swaying are...and don't want to find out any time soon.
The shinkansen that I use, the Tohoku shinkansen, was stopped for most of the day, since it passes right through the epicenter. The information available in this day of supposedly high information penetration was laughable: None on JR East's website, and only extremely general, and as it turns out not particularly timely or accurate, information on Yahoo!'s portal. I went to Tokyo station anyway, just in case, and because it is on the way to Ueno, where the normal trains leave from. Lo and behold, they were just starting to run Shinkansen's between Tokyo and Nasu-Shiobara, or so the signboard said. I still had to wait about 45 minutes. I met an American guy from Utsunomiya, and we talked, but in the rush for seats, I got one and he didn't. I offered to give up my seat from Omiya onwards, but it took nearly 45 minutes to get there, and he gave up and got the normal train from Omiya. Ironic, because the train ran at normal speed after that.
I asked the HR department what policies, if any, they had in such a case, vis a vis paying for a hotel or alternate transport if I was not able to return home. They were wholly unhelpful. It is a good thing that things were not so bad, because otherwise I might have actually needed to deal with their idiocy. God forbid a real disaster happens...then again, their stupidity would be the least of one's worries in such a case.
And here we have the reason for the impermancy of buildings in Tokyo: The more solid they are built, the less flexible they are, which means that they would fall down after a few earthquakes of this size, and after one major one like that which hit Miyagi. Things are not always what they seem: The comforting solidness of Europe, while real, and wholly appropriate to the place and history of Europe, disguises a possible fragility in the face of earthquakes, while the flexible wood and steel buildings of Japan, while not as seemingly solid, possess the flexibility to survive in the place and history of Japan. For that I am grateful.

Work-Life Balance

2005-08-15T22:45:00.000+09:00

Watching the Sopranos season 5 finale last night, I thought about work-life balance. Sorry if you haven't seen it yet, but this is the one where Adriana, Christopher's fiancee and FBI snitch, gets whacked. I mentioned before about sociopathic bosses, and American's becoming a little too good at separating what they do at work from who they are, and I think the Sopranos take this to that extreme. It makes it funny, in a sense, but also really scary: How can one help but think that the whole family are sociopaths?
I got back to work today, and popped my head in to say good morning to my boss, and got the icey treatment. Apparently rest and good health have not brought me back into a state of grace. Screw it. At least she approved my expense report for the trip, turned in in record time, since until they pay me for my expenses I am broke.
Back to the work-life balance thing. It is interesting: In Japan, work or school probably tips the scales in nine times out of ten as to importance. It is obligation number one. That is quite understandable, but when you have paid holidays, and while the reality is that families do exist, it is not the end of the world if you want/need to take a holiday. And yet, it is treated like a weakness, and people fall all over themselves apologising for not being around when such and such an important something is taking place. While Americans and Europeans spend lots of time at work, it is treated to some extent like simply the way that money is earned. What is really important is family. Europeans definitely get to spend more time with theirs than Americans do, but Japanese men must be at the low end of time spent with family.
I got home 'early' tonight, at 8:30. I got to hug and kiss my son before he went to bed. I didn't do anything for the money I earned that makes me ashamed. Not exactly a perfect balance, but not a bad one either...

Solidly European?

2005-08-13T20:16:00.000+09:00

Two conversations yesterday stick in my mind (the definition of yesterday, in this case, is a bit fuzzy, since I am back in Japan and missed half a day). One with a colleague as we were stumbling home very full from a wonderful meal of duck and rice at the Red Lantern, very near the station. When he learned that I am originally from Oregon, he went into rhapsodies about what a cool place that is. Near the end of the rhapsody, he described Portland as the most European of cities he has been to in the U.S. I don't really know much about the whole U.S., but understood why he said it: The wide avenues with parks in the center in the area of the library and art museum; the downtown areas, with their brick buildings; the trams; the comfortable co-existence of the old and new. I hadn't really ever thought of that, but his view was interesting.
The other conversation was with the desk man at my hotel, The Burns Art, and we were talking about the Japanese population in Düsseldorf. He said that it was both Düsseldorf's centrality, and the tolerant attitude of the locals towards outsiders that had caused it. Many of the Japanese expats live in the older homes on the other side of the Rhine, many of which are 200 square metres with high ceilings, and very expensive, and this particular desk man, with an oddly strong British accent and proclivity for words like 'blast' and 'crikey' seemed somewhat envious. I told him that I had recently bought a house in Japan that was 130 square meteres, and considered large. We both generally agreed that North American homes were probably the largest, but he said "in Europe, houses are built to last hundreds of years, whereas in North America they are built of flimsy wooden frames."
I have heard this before, and I sort of wonder about it. I grew up, in rural Washington state, in a house that was more than 100 years old, and was built on the wood frame model. It was not without issues: The foundation had also been built out of wood, so that needed to be replaced. Painting needed to be done fairly regularly, and the interior wiring and ceiling material had been replaced. The Burns, for example is completely floored in marble, and is, of course, stone on the outside and brick underneath, as are most German buildings. It is definitely solid and doesn't require a large amount of maintenance. In a big earthquake, a lot of people would be crushed under the weight of these large, heavy building, but that is not much of a worry.
My great grandfather owned a brick factory near Forest Grove which produced the brick for those European-style buildings in Portland. He had come from Scotland as a young man, and I think it would be fair to say that he brought an old-world belief that buildings should be made of solid materials.
There is something very comforting in this solidity, and every time I go to Europe, whether to Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, or Sweden, I get this sense of solidity, a sense completely and utterly lacking in Japan, and not as common in the U.S.

Off(shore)

2005-08-11T15:18:00.000+09:00

Though I did absolutely nothing yesterday except sit in a vendor presentation, some impressions on the state of I.T. outsourcing did make themselves apparent. Not a long blog today, and I obviously can't talk about the specifics, but below are my impressions (by the way, if my typing is bad, I apologise: My power adapter on my notebook died, and so I am borrowing a local German notebook from the local office. All of the punctuation is on different keys, and the 'y' and 'z' are reversed.)
Anyway, my impressions:

Indians have an interesting colour sense. It is definitely different from a western European one.
Their slides were rather busy, rather like Japanese ones.
One had the strong feeling that the software development part of the equation would be pretty strong, but that the important front-end requirement definition, etc. might pose problems, in terms of actually being able to do any analysis that insures that our requirements are met.
There was a certain rigidity in thinking, that was interesting, having managed and worked with an Indian project manager and having observed similar thinking in him.
Things like corporate social responsibility and handicap access, in a western-style compliance sense, don't seem to mean a lot.
Their European handlers, whom we would presumably be dealing with, were quite poor, and it made me wonder at the arrogance of placing such idiots in charge of a group of Indians who were obviously so capable.

Perhaps the model makes sense for some, but in some ways it didn't work for me. I don't know whether the whole offshore thing is a bust, but in this case it was just off. Just my two rupee...

Agile?

2005-08-10T14:41:00.000+09:00

Sitting in a day-long vendor presentation yesterday doesn't give me much to blog about, but one interesting thing that the vendor did talk about was their use of the agile software development methodology. They did, in fact, dedicate considerable time to talking about it, and even distributed a book, Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide to give us a background for what they were talking about. I had read their presentation the previous evening, and found a somewhat earlier work by Alistair Cockburn in PDF format that gave me some idea.
The methodology seems to address some of the things that frustrated me in the last project I worked on, namely that we never saw actual working code, ever. We saw documents. Agile emphasises that owner and user interaction in the project is based on working code. That is hugely attractive. It also addresses the issue of matching requirements to out of the box functionality: Without user input, even a well-written requirement, taken completely literally and without the frame of reference of a certain package, will often result in a custom-built functionality. I saw this on my last project. A more consultative approach seems attractive. Having run the CR (change request) part of a project which basically failed on CRs, I am really in favor of anything that reduces complexity and the cost of change. Agile seems to help there. My colleagues were not so enthralled, however: Documentation is a big deal in a big development project, and agile calls for the minimum required documentation. Comments that they would in certain cases expect that customers would give up certain requirements, while dead honest and true (which I actually appreciated), did not go over well with some people.
I plan on reading the book, and finding out more. If this vendor gets the contract, there is a chance that I would need to be involved, since the methodology requires full-time, dedicated resources from the customer to work closely with the vendor. The book, in any case, should give me an idea of a different way of doing things, which, after the last project, can only be a good thing.

iPod Wi-Fi?

2005-08-09T02:05:00.000+09:00

One interesting thing that happens every time I have been in Dusseldorf are the conversations that I have with colleagues. Last time and this, those conversations have veered towards the side-businesses these colleagues were involved in. It is interesting: The same conversations simply are not had in Japan. One reason is that Japan is simply not a very entrepreneurial country, and company employees the least entrepreuneurial element in society. Even if someone is involved in something like that, it is considered both disloyal and immoral to use any of your precious energy for your own benefit and not the company's. (hey, this sounds a lot like the attitude my boss has displayed in the last week or so--maybe she is really turning Japanese!)
The conversation this time involved some development that one colleague is doing to integrate Wi-Fi with an iPod, or iPod-like device. Our conversation was an interesting one, where I actually ended up suggesting this very thing, which prompted him to admit that he was actually developing the very thing I mentioned. The crux of the conversation was that mobile carriers are not doing enough to provide what customers want, especially with regard to music. This colleague's view was that mobile carriers just don't get it. He is a little over-the-top about adding instant messaging and IP telephony to this Wi-Fi iPod, whereas I think that his basic idea is spot-on.
One Japanese mobile carrier had MP3-enabled mobile phones more than 3 years ago. But they used a very annoying variant of MP3 called secure MP3, which made it impossible to upload music unless one used the one package, SD Jukebox, that supported the format. It was a terrible piece of software, and cost about 5,000 yen. So, to actually use the functionality of the phone, one had to spend more money, and use crappy software. The situation hasn't improved that much, except that it is now possible to download music rather upload it from a PC.
A Wi-Fi-enabled iPod would do a total end-run around the BS of mobile carriers and their focus on making nice with record labels rather than meeting the desire of their customers. (As an example, this same mobile carrier's mobile content managers call themselves 'eigyo', meaning sales. What are they selling? They are selling the idea to record labels and game producers that mobile content is a good thing, and having their content on the branded portal is a great thing. Why, you may ask, would they need to sell that idea? Good question. The answer is that they don't. But there is a particularly Japanese proclivity to protect the relationships with those that they know at the expense of new relationships that might benefit them. People everywhere do that, but where Americans or Europeans, if you pointed it out, would mostly agree that it was not a good approach, many Japanese will simply shrug and say "that is the way that we do business." There is something admirable in this kind of loyalty. There is also something insidious and antithetical to being able effectively meet the needs of customers in a timely way.)
It is a very small world: This same colleague knows Jan-Michael Hess, who I met when he was in Tokyo for the Mobile Intelligence Tour, and Daniel Scuka who founded Wireless Watch Japan.

Prescient?

2005-08-05T00:06:00.000+09:00

I haven't blogged in awhile. I would like to put it down to being so damned busy that I couldn't, which is semi-true, but I think that a certain summer malaise is closer to the truth.
I have mentioned Nooper before: They send out little mobile e-mails with information of various kinds that you subscribe to. I subscribe to Wai-wai, the Daily Mainichi's column, and to horoscopes. The horoscopes have been oddly prescient recently, and I would like to share:
Last Thursday, the Noopie horoscope (I am a Sagitarius, by the way) said:
You'll be eager to learn something exciting and adventuresome today. Take the chance to travel. A unique part of the city that offers authentic traditions from different cultural backgrounds will give you new ideas.
Guess what happened? Ok, I can see you already giving up! Yes! I fell asleep on the shinkansen on the way home, and got to see a quite different part of my prefecture (somewhat larger than the 'city' referred to in the horoscope): Nasu-Shiobara. Unfortunately it was midnight, and there were no trains left going back where I needed to be, so I also got to have the adventure of sleeping in the Nasu Station Hotel for the very reasonable fee of 7,700 yen, since my wife did not want to pick me up.
And then this morning, while waiting for the shinkansen, which was delayed by an hour, I found the following horoscope on my phone:
Hard work will pay off. Don't be too concerned about what others are doing--focus on your own criteria. The more self-sufficient you are, the further ahead you will get.
And what do you know? I get to work, and my boss is pissed off because I missed a 9:30 appointment that we had to discuss something else that she was already pissed off with me about. She didn't understand what the note was that I flashed her from JR explaining that my train was late, and wasn't in any mood to listen.
I had tried to call her P.A., who had hung up, and since I don't have my boss' mobile phone number, had not been able to get in touch to tell her that the trains had stopped and I would be late. I postponed the meeting until 3, by which time I had prepared a Powerpoint explaining the case of one of the other things that I had somehow managed to rub her the wrong way about, another presentation of the report that we had agreed before she left for her homeleave that I didn't need to work on, but which, upon her return yesterday, she couldn't understand why I hadn't prepared.
In additon to the lack of any attaboys for a very good job I did on another project I finished while she was gone, she went on to suggest that I was somehow defrauding the company by leaving over the weekend for my business trip, even though I fully intend not to claim per-diem or hotel expenses for those extra two days, and will be able to fit in an extra day, Monday, that I would have otherwise been travelling on. Later in the day she explained that she was less worried about me defrauding the company than she was about me talking to anyone during that extra day. Oh, what a relief! She doesn't think I am without moral, just incompetent.
Ah, but you see, this is where the the key word in the horscope really has lots of meaning: "will". Future tense. By tomorrow she will be over her cold and lack of sleep brought on by jet lag, and appreciate all of my hard work, which I did until 9 pm today, by the way. Hard work, in fact, which I have done for about two hours every night for the last five or six, at home.
Bakayaro!

Love and care...

2005-07-18T23:14:00.000+09:00

I may have mentioned it a time or two, but though I spend a large part of my life in Tokyo, I don't live there (the use of there meant to suggest, rightfully, that I am not in Tokyo at the moment). I live in a little hamlet of around 350,000 souls called Utsunomiya.
I had a house built here for I and my family last year. One of the things that happened was that we ran out of money, or rather decided to spend less on the landscaping and more on the furniture. I have spent lots of time since on the landscaping. I built a deck, a marble(ish) patio, and a further patio out of paving stones, as well as a long flower bed. In the process, I have gained valuable cement-mixing skills as well as less-welcome back pains.
Yesterday, my wife and I, with our son and nephew in tow, went to the house of one of her friends. This friend and her husband are splitting, divorcing, and will move out of their house fairly soon, it being too big for their new single lives. He says he wants to move into a 'mansion', which means a condo in Japan, and she will move in to her parents house. He also plans to give up his Mitsubishi Delica van in favor of a Nissan Fairlady Z sports car. Single indeed.
I have known my wife's friend since the day I met my wife, and known of her unhappiness with her marriage for nearly as long. It took them 12 years from when I met her on August 13, 1993, until now, to throw in the towel.
They had spent a fair amount of time on their yard, and it was really nice. Lots of plants, trees, and shrubs that I don't know the names of. And, to make a long story short, many are now translplanted to my own back yard.
They join some other shrubs that came from a female friend of mine who lived near where we used to live before moving to Utsunomiya, a much smaller village of around 30,000 people just north of Utsunomiya. Actually, to say that she or I lived there is somewhat inaccurate: Both of us had family there (her husband, and my wife and son), but lived in Tokyo during the week. We had, in fact, been room-mates for about a year. I moved back here last year, since from Utsunomiya it is now possible to commute, whereas before the lack of local trains made it difficult.
My friend and her husband were at a crossroads: She had enough independence and money, as well as enough dissatisfaction with certain parts of their married life, to be seriously considering the pros and cons of being together. He is basically inscrutable, but whatever: She is my friend, so I am going to take her side in any case. But it looks as though they may have patched it up: He got a transfer to Tokyo, and they are once again living together, and I hope that they are happy.
So, I now have a yard filled with plants that came to me as the result of friends' marital difficulties. The irony is that, in both cases, the plants were given more care than the marriages, so they are in good shape, while the lives of those who raised them are less fulfilled...

Once we are born, only one thing is certain...

2005-07-16T23:03:00.000+09:00

I mentioned before that I had gone to the hospital, and would need to go back on Friday, yesterday. I ducked out of work and went there by my appointment time (I was previously mistaken: They do have appointements!) only to...wait! I am not sure what the point of having an appointment is, but well...
In the waiting area in front of the urology department, I noticed a couple of gaijin, which I thought was unusual. One guy, who looked maybe in his 60's, sat at the back with a young caucasian woman. I recognised the guy, but couldn't place the face. The PA announcement asking him to go into the examination room was so garbled I couldn't hear the name, and in any case I had brought my PMP study book and was engrossed in the study of scheduling. He had been in the examination room for perhaps 5 minutes, when he came out and gestured for his daughter (that is my assumption, and I could certainly be wrong) to come join him. I didn't think much of it, but was quite sure that I had seen his face before.
Not long before I was called in, he came out with an older Japanese woman, which I guessed he must have gone in with. The daughter hadn't come out yet. I wasn't actually called into the examination room, but to a bench in front of the examination room where I had some more waiting to do. The woman who I had assumed was his daughter was sitting on the adjacent bench, her face somewhat red, as if she had been crying. She was speaking with an older Japanese woman.
"He is planning to start his book, you know. I don't know if that is the right thing right now...I have always been the one to push him, but..." the older woman said.
"I don't know either...I want to hear the prognosis first. I guess I am worried that his last bit of time is not spent in hospitals...there is a time when we probably just need to say that the quality of remaining time is more important than fighting it," said the younger woman.
"Well, yes, but let's wait to hear the prognosis," the older woman said.
"Yes. I know the doctors are good, and they want the best, but I also know that part of this culture is to fight until the end. I don't want that for him."

Some other things were said. I was not trying to eavesdrop, but was perhaps two feet from them, and so it was not possible not to hear what was said.
It turns out that I don't have liver cancer, or kidney cancer, or whatever it was that they were concerned about.
On the way back from lunch, I remembered where I had seen the man, which was not as I had first thought, at an ACCJ even or something, but on television, on a program called The Broadcaster, where he was a regular. He was a perfectly bilingual guy, with a very thoughtful and softspoken manner that I had always liked from what I saw on televsion. His name is George Fields, I learned once I had this hint, and looked it up on the internet.
I guess I tell this story because of the impression it left on me, which was of the oneness of humans, whether they have done great things, as I believe that this man had, in facing the hard things in life. And a real impression that he was doing so with a kind of grace, in the way that he treated his daughter's feelings and just in the way that he was with her, that I hope to be able to show in the face of death. And the oneness of those of us facing the prospect of losing a parent.
I hope that I have people around me who show as much respect and care as those around Mr. Fields seemed to, as well. He may be a big shot TV personality, but in the end, the thing that will matter to him is what he has shared with the people he loves. I think in his case, just looking at the brief encounter, that he will die a happy man, and that those that loved him will celebrate his life, while at the same time grieving.

Love thy customer

2005-07-15T22:26:00.000+09:00

I was in a meeting today (normally that wouldn't qualify as it's own sentence, but recently I have been extremely geeky [read: depressed] and haven't been much on the old 'let's sit down and shoot the shit' game). Anyway, we were talking about one of the features of a certain Intranet service that I am in charge of, and one of them was called 'Portal out of the box' or PoB for short. Basically, this gives any department or global entity the ability to create their own portal site, using standard modules and interfaces.
The comment of the woman in charge of internal communications was 'we have chosen not to use that here, because we worry about the consistency of the user experience.' What was really at work is that it allows departments to communicate without that communication being mediated by the internal comms folks, which is a threat to their control. It is probably a safe bet that my future as a corporate blogger is limited here...
Fast forward to a posting that I saw concerning Dell computer's customer service. I think that this guy made some very good points. This guy seems to be pretty influential, and within a week of his post, Dell announced that they were shutting down their cutomer care messag boards.
I don't know the story, but he communicated directly with a senior director, and mentioned aspects of legal liability that obviously got someone to over-react. It was mostly about the at-home service guarantee, which, if you looked at the boards, looks like is worthless, because the technicians don't bring parts. This blogger correctly pointed out that saying you would do one thing, and then not doing it (at-home computer repeairs) is fraudulent, but rather than really looking at why a customer was accusing them of fraud, they immediatly looked for ways to elimenate any exposure they might have, which apparently included elimenating the customer care mesaging boards.
I had an all-around disappointing customer-service experience with amazon.com. First of all, I ordered the MCSE test preparation set through the U.S. site, becasue the Japan site doesn't sell it. Ok, whatever. So, three days ago, I got one of those notices that the post office leaves when you aren't at home (what do we call them in English? I know the Japanese word, but not the English..) So, I asked them to bring it at a time when my wife would be home. I got home that night, and ripped open the package only to find a boxed set of the Little House on the Prairie books. I was understandably confused, so I looked at the address label, and it was addressed to someone in Fukui prefecture. How, I wondered, did this package end up at my house? It turns out that it came in a white bag, which had it's own label. Somehow there was a mixup.
So I went to the amazon.com website to find their customer service number. Hah! I may have spent thousands (easily: I would reckon probably in the neighbourhood of $10,000 during the last 9 years that I have been shopping there) of dollars at their store, but they have decided to force me to use a cluggy e-mail tool that slotted problems into types that were not describing my issue, which was that I wanted to make sure that the lady in Fukui got her book, and that I got mine.
The nice thing about google is that if something exists, you can probably find it: (800) 201-7575. The disappointing thing wasn't that the woman was rude, only that she didn't seem to have a clue. I wanted to do the right thing, and she just didn't seem to get it: I wanted to tell her the name of the person who did *not* have her boxed set of Laura Ingalls Wilder because of the screwup, so that amazon could re-send it, since she told me that I had to send the box back to amazon.com, fronting the international postage until they gave it back to me in a credit. She didn't want to know the person's name.
"Well, what about her book? She is going to get it much later than she should. Don't you think that if you know she isn't going to get it, because you are telling me to send it back to you, that you should re-send hers?"
"Don't worry, your MCSE set should be arriving in a few days."
I ended up telling her to escalate the matter, and then she comes back and says "if you are willing to send it to this other person, we would be very grateful." Being grateful to me, rather than simply clueless, seemed an improvement. The basic issue, though, is that she never seemed to think about "what will make this customer and the other customer, who hasn't raised a trouble ticket yet, but certainly will since her books definitely won't make it to her, the most happy?" She seemed mostly concerned with closing the trouble ticket, not doing what is best for the customer. That is not the same as the old amazon.com, whose customer service was amazing and unique: I got a copy of The Ruling Class DVD included in one order just because someone there thought I might like it (I did). In Japan, they used to put paper book covers on each book they shipped. You really got the feeling that they cared about customer service. I did not get the warm fuzzies in my most recent delaings, and I still do not have the MCSE test set...I have actually run help desks, so I understand the importance of measuring performance with hard numbers, measuring what you are doing, and using quality control to make sure the answers to standard questions get answered the same. But that is no substitute for a human who cares about me. In this age of outsourcing call center work, I really wonder how often the question gets asked of call center staff: Do these people love our customers? And will that love make itself known? amazon.com used to be able to say that.
In my very brief sojourn to another part of our company, I was in charge of a web site for partners. One of the things I was working on was getting forums up and running. The hostility to the idea from nearly everyone save me and my (not official, but nonetheless) boss was interesting. I felt that considering the small number of people we had dedicated to supporting partners, it made sense to do something that allowed partners to participate in a community, and help one another by answering questions for one another. The objections basically boiled down to "nobody will use them," "that won't work in Japan," "this poses big legal risks," "who will make sure nothing untoward is said?" and so on. There are always five reasons not to do something, but I will almost always take doing over not doing. The thing I dislike most about lots of people in my company, and, really, in this country, is that they are so averse to any kind of risk, that the risk of doing anything ends up greater than the risk of doing nothing almost every time, and they take the less risky course of action.
Letting go of the power you have over your users or customers is the hardest thing in the world, but the old adage, 'if you love someone, set them free,' is true here: The love will be returned. Both Dell and amazon.com used to get this.
Interestingly, there is also wiki application that global has implemented. I can imagine the local howls at any of our people actually using it...all the more reason to do it!

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

2005-07-13T02:44:00.000+09:00

A facinating story in this month's Fast Company magazine, entitled Is Your Boss a Psychopath? The story hits a lot of interesting points, but near the bottom is a phrase that, in reading the story, had already occurred to me:

"She points out that psychopathy has a dramatically lower incidence in certain Asian cultures, where the heritage has emphasized community bonds rather than glorified self-interest."

My last boss here in Japan, an Australian, was in fact a psychopath. No doubt. I have met a couple of others here in Japan, where, because their behaviour is so antithetical to the cultural norms, it is fairly easy to identify them, whereas I am afraid that in the U.S. they are seen as perhaps a little on the extreme end of of things, but their qualities are often identified as good ones. In Japan, individualism in general is frowned upon, and the ruthless disregard that sociopaths/psychopaths have for the pain that their actions might cause society or others is much less acceptable. I would, incidentally, score my last boss as a 16 on the quiz they give in the magazine, which means 'be very afraid,' which I was.
A couple of years ago, when I was between jobs, my housemate and I were brainstrorming ways to make money. Our dot.com had just gone bust (the result, I should add, of our CEO's psychopathy being discovered, rather late, by a company which was just about ready to acquire us) and we were broke. There was, however, a big shitload of Hermann Miller office furniture still sitting in our former company's office, that was going to get tossed out. So, I put two and two together and suggested that we call the company that another of our hosemates had just quit, because they were planning to move offices, and might need office furniture. I won't take all the credit, but I thought that I deserved some. I had to, however, make a quick trip to San Francisco to take the oral exam for the Foreign Service, and couldn't take part in the hauling of furniture. I got back and found that my housemate had made around 500,000 yen on the deal. I was waiting for my cut, which should by rights have been half minus the costs of labor and the rent a truck. He handed me 10,000 yen.
I had thought that we were friends, and I guess that we really were. But his ability to completely screw me on the deal, and to separate that and say 'it's only business, mate,' which he did in fact say, shocked me. 'It's only business,' is a distinctly western concept, and not one that I like. It is akin to saying "in this realm of unbridled competition, any behaviour is acceptable, and you are a wanker for getting upset. Don't take anything that happens in this realm personally." At least in one area, I really like the value that Japanese put on personal behaviour, and the real lack of tolerance for this type of behaviour. To some extent, it means that Japanese are better at concealing it, but the real stigma attached to it, and the professional and financial disincentives, mean that there is less of it here.
Yeah, I found something I like about Japan.

Well...

2005-07-09T00:55:00.000+09:00

I spent most of this afternoon in the Jikei University Hospital. My test for gout last week didn't turn up any telltale signs of uric acid, though my big toe still hurts, but did turn up something else, which the Roppongi Hills Clinic didn't have the facilities to test further for, and which I don't want to talk about in a specific way, this not being an octogenarians log of ailments but a hip, trendy, always fresh look at Tokyo (yeah, well...).
I hate hospitals, and I hate them in Japan even more. When I was a kid I had this moribd fear of needles. It took John, the 300 pound janitor (I am dead serious, and he is probably just dead at this point), to subdue me when it was flu shot time. I also hated the dentist, who got so fed up with me, that he threatened to drill a hole in my tongue if I didn't stop screaming (he either forgot the novocaine, or I was sufficiently scared of the shot that I wouldn't let him give it to me--I have chosen to forget which). Everyone hates dentists, though, so that is not so strange.
I got over my fear of needles: A very large number of rabies shots in the stomach were required after I got bit by a rabid dog when I was in Thailand, and though I was not exactly thrilled, compared to the other choice, which was that I would start foaming at the mouth in a few weeks, and my brain would waste away and I would die a horrible death, I was willing to put aside one fear in the service of a much bigger fear. Once I had put it aside, I was able to do it again, and once I stopped fearing needles...no, I didn't become a junkie, but I did sell my plasma right after I graduated from college, which involved needles twice a week for several months. Now I can look disspasionately at the needle going in, and generally calmly suggest the best place (they probably think the scar on my right arm is a junkie's mark, instead of just the mark of a poor white boy who sold bodily fluids to make his rent...).
Anyway, what I don't like about Japanese hospitals: (yes, list time: Letterman does it, and so do tons of other blogs, so why shouldn't I (which makes me think that a top-ten list would be even better))
10. Too many kanji for body parts that I don't know and don't want to know
9. Too damned many sick people
8. Doctors tell you the German or Latin name of an illness and take it for granted that as a gaijin you will understand. News flash: White skin gives one no advantage in foreign medical gobbleydegook.
7. They make you write all of your personal information each time you go in. Apparently computers are not reliable enough.
6. You can't get an appointment: They don't believe in them, apparently. So you just have to go in and wait.
5. Whilst waiting, they never seem to have comfortable chairs in their waiting areas.
4. Stupid questionnaires that ask questions you would expect the doctor to ask, maybe, if you had a very different problem.
3. Too many tests: This is apparently a big profit center, but it seems like not so much would have changed since last week, of which test results I handed them.
2. Waiting: Waiting at reception, waiting at the departmental reception, waiting for the test, waiting for the test results, waiting for the doctor, waiting for the CT test, and finally waiting a very long time to pay my bill.
1. Japanese doctors: They must, as a group, be the biggest bunch of idiots in Japan. I have had so few good experiences with them, that I can only assume that their education or selection is so poor that it is not their fault. I don't really care though: Vigilance is absolutely essential, because you never know what sort of lunacy will make it's way into a prognosis or lack of one.

I will be going back next Friday. Oh, what a stroke of luck! Well...

Solutions or bigger headaches?

2005-07-07T23:24:00.000+09:00

I have spent the last two days being really geeky: Installing open source solutions on a Linux server. One solution, or rather application, is a project management application for groups called dotProject. It is pretty good for free, and looks to be able to integrate with our environment, since it supports LDAP. I am getting one of the translators which work in our department to do localisation work, so it should be comprehensible to my co-workers. It has a pretty good translation interface, so it is easy to do. The other application I found is called Dokeos, and is a SCORM-compliant eLearning application. That means that compliant content should work on it, and content created on it should work on other platforms.
Installation is definitely the bane of open source: Because packages tend to be deployed on a wide variety of OSs, and there are a fair number of different environments even in Linux, there tends to be a lot of tweeking of installation, web server settings, database server settings, and so on. It took me far too much time trying to figure out why a perfectly legitimate password didn't work, and why I couldn't get into the system. There are still a couple of bugs that I need to solve.
I put my son to bed this evening, and was sort of idly thinking that I would really like to form a new web solutions group in our company that provided robust solutions quickly to our business users at a very inexpensive cost. The trick would be having integrated building blocks of solutions, and sharing certain resources like database servers, LDAP servers (better yet, use the LDAP functionality of Active Directory), so that all of the basic pieces were in place, and it was just a matter of plopping a new instance of the application down. Even with lots of customisation, applications could be quickly rolled out to customers. If you had your mail server, database server, LDAP server, and others ready, it would be a relatively simple thing to put up an application that you had already configured to use those servers.
I want to create. Even though putting applications up is not necessarily creative, it is providing a solution to certain requirements. I miss that kind of thinking. I want to create a can-do group of people who say 'what is your requirement', and then gets the requirement done quickly and with good quality, for a reasonable cost. Then, the kicker, we provide a high level of support, with SLAs. This would be a helluva lot of fun. Think I will propose it next week when my boss gets back from the U.S.
I got a response from the Netherlands HR person: You are too senior for this role. I wrote back, basically saying 'screw seniority, I am not that concerned. What could be a more important factor is salary, but let's talk about it.' I haven't heard back from her yet.

Are you hungry?

2005-07-05T22:53:00.000+09:00

An interesting story today in eWeek that somewhat suspectly tied overthrow of African dictators to high mobile phone penetration. With over 20% penetration, the columnist posited, dictators began to fall. He does not quote a source for the statistic, and used it to rather annoyingly make a connection that didn't actually exist, and which he didn't actually admit until the last sentence, but it definitely makes one think (Rodin's Thinker pose) about the changes that modern communications are wreaking on the world.
In India, China, slowly in Africa, much more quickly in South America, distance and lack of communication are no longer synonymous. Americans and Europeans take it for granted that telecommunication is reliable, widely available, and reasonably priced. Until very recently, however, that was more often than not untrue in most of the rest of the world. As an exchange student in Thailand, once in the 80's, and again in the early 90's, nothing could have been further from the truth. In a country of over 50 million, there were less than 1 million phone lines. An application for a fixed line phone either required 5 years to process or a bribe. The cost of a 3-minute phone call to the U.S. was about $10, and required going to a post office, during business hours, to make.
A decade and a half later, mobile phone lines outstrip landlines, and one in three Thais owns one or the other, meaning almost every household has acceess to telecommunications of some sort. I don't know if, in the case of the rural society that I lived in, that is a good thing or bad: I remember sending a letter to a remote temple asking if I could ordain as a monk there. I didn't receive an answer, which made me nervous, as I had to plan, or so I believed as a westerner. My host mum told me to chill, and just go. The abbot of the temple, when I arrived, said something like "oh, yeah, I got your letter. I didn't write back because we never turn anyone away who wants to ordain, and it would have meant walking 5 kilometres to the nearest post box." I shudder to think that the same monk might today be gabbing away (one of the Buddhist sins: Un-thoughtful speech) on a mobile. I doubt he is, but what about the young guys?
But as to the political dimensions: Making laws, as most dictators, and even some so-called democracies do, which limit the right of it's citizens to gather in large groups becomes meaningless when virtual gatherings, using SMS, e-mail, audio telephony, instant messaging, chat, or whatever, become widely available. A reasonably good example of this was in the Phillipine 'people power' revolution a few years ago, which toppled Joseph Estrada. It was largely driven by SMS. More recently, large-scale protests in China against inaccurate depictions in Japanese textbooks of Japanese atrocities in WWII were largely organised online, in chat rooms, and by text message. Certainly, in both cases, mass gatherings happened, but there was little, short of turning off all communications methods, that authorities could do to stop them: They couldn't break up organising meetings, because there were none. Arresting organisers might have been possible, but both were more viral in nature, and though there were definitely organisers, they were able to effectively conceal their identities. So, sudden gatherings, which sometimes turn into violent protests, and which are difficult to stop, are probably the rule going forward, at least in repressive countries where citizens have access to communication technology. I would still like to see the statistical data to prove it though...
But what about so-called developed countries? Are our governments and institutions so perfect that a little people power is unnecessary? Probably not. But, generally, there is also nothing stopping us from protesting. The convenience of organising protests, for the most part, hasn't meant more of them. One notable exception is the protests against G8 and the WTO, both of which benefited from communications technology. The real irony is that freer world trade is actually narrowing the gap between the 'have' countries, and the 'have nots.' There was a good column in yesterday's International Herald Tribune about the trend in western countries to work longer hours. It suggests that one of the reasons is that western workers are competing more directly with workers in India, China, Indonesia, or Brazil. Though there will probably never be absolute equality, a much more equitable future is now possible because of freer world trade and, ironically, great improvements in communication infrastructure throughout the world. What is gained is less poverty and greater economic and political empowerment. But something is lost, too.
I remember making a trip from Japan to Chiang Mai about 13 years ago. It was a fairly sudden 'visa trip': Leave the country for a few days prior to the expiration of your 90-day tourist visa and come back on another. I didn't have time to write a letter, pretty much the only way to communicate with my former host family. After a grueling train trip from Bangkok, which included a head-on collision and derailing, a bone-jarring ride in the back of a log-poacher's pickup truck, under a canopy to protect us from the dust thrown up, and then a fairly uneventful bus ride into Chiang Mai, I got off the bus in front of the Wararot market. My host family had a stall there, selling sweets. I hadn't seen them for about four months, but when I went up to my host sister and said 'hi', she said 'oh, it's you. Are you hungry?' People talk about the immediacy of mobile communications, but what can compare to the immediacy of an outheld hand offering a sticky rice and mango desert?

Time to buck up, sonny!

2005-07-04T18:54:00.000+09:00

I realised today that I probably am sounding a little whiney. I hate whiney people, and really don't want to sound like one.

So, I decided that I need to be making forward progress, which could mean a lot of different things, but right now means that I want to be adding to my qualifications. I got turned down for our company's project management course, which is a bit of a joke, since I have been doing project managment for about three years now. Actually, the reason I want to take the course is to get the formal classroom training that I need to get the Project Managment Professional (PMP) certication from the Project Management Institute. I have met the experience requirement for the PMP, and if I work at it, should be able to get the certificate by the end of the year.

I also want to get my MCSE qualification. Don't ask me why, except that I am a geek, and as far as I know, no one else here has it. It is useful knowledge, and for a manager having a technical qualification, the more difficult to get the better, is useful for demanding respect from the troops (of which I am currently without, for reasons mostly having to do with the events I described in my last post). It is not an easy qualification, actually, and requires taking six different fairly difficult exams.

After I am done with that, I will look at getting the CCNA, or the Cisco Certified Network Architect, mostly because it is useful in the industry that I work in, and would be useful knowledge. When I am done conquering the world, I will be ready to sit down at get the first level on the Japanese language proficiency test, which is the test used for college admittance of foreign students. In fact, it is fortuitous that I should look at their web site today, since today is the first day that applications are being accepted.

Time to go home.

Back at the start, again...

2005-07-04T11:47:00.000+09:00

From my desk at work, I wish you a happy fourth of July. For some odd reason, this holiday is not recognized by all the world, and I have, <gasp!> WORK today.

I did not, as per previous posts end up at the embassy: Couldn't be bothered. There was another celebration at T.Y. Harbor Brewery that was apparently good as well, but making the trip into Tokyo with my son in tow is not my idea of a restful holiday. Actually, neither is varnishing my deck, which is what I did end up doing.

My excuses for not posting are mounting, and none are particularly great, except perhaps a general malaise that is infecting most of what I am supposed to be doing. Call it the rainy season blues.

On Friday, the president of the company gave a speech on the new strategic direction of the company. When I came here two years ago, there was a one-day orientation. In that orientation, someone from HR told us all with a straight face that we were going to double our customer base in three years time. I thought it was a joke, as would anyone who actually knows this market. But there was such a serious, positive attitude that of course we would make it, that I put aside my initial doubts that perhaps a couple of executives were on crack. I shouldn't have. Two years later, we are barely where we were when the goal was made. At the time, I did question the goal, asking 'what is the strategy to actually double our customer base?' There was none. Or, rather, there was this strategy called 'aim to gain' which was so high-level as to be useless, and cannot really be called a strategy as much as a motto.

Friday's speech gave some hope: The goal, while nowhere close to doubling our market share, is nearly as challenging as the previous one, owing to a slowdown in new subscribers as the market has become saturated. The difference is that there is an actual strategy to achieve the target. I actually had lunch with the president last Monday, in a session called 'speak your mind', which included seven other employees from various parts of the company. I was really impressed with his ability to listen. He didn't try to dominate or change our minds, he just listened, asked questions to clarify points he didn't understand, and took lots of notes. My question was one that I considered to be important, but the look on his face suggested it wasn't one that he was happy about. It turned out that was because he actually considered that one of the major problems facing our company, and he referred to my question in his speech.

I am feeling somewhat better about the direction things are going. I think that if our current president can stick around for a couple of years, and if global doesn't muck around with us, that we have a brighter tomorrow than today. That is a good feeling, and I hope that it is justified. Then again, I have this sinking feeling that there are too many really lame people, and worry that no matter what the best intentions of top management, they will still be lame. And I worry that my lack of motivation will make me one of those lame people.

My boss sent me a job notice from the group company in the Netherlands. Generally, this is not a good sign: Is she trying to get rid of me?

Actually, I think that it is not the case that she is sick of me and wants to see me gone. I was asked to join another part of the company several months ago, a part of the company much more in keeping with what I had done previous to working here. There were several changes, though (both of the guys that interviewed me, my new general manager, as well as his boss, the division head, were asked to leave), and the paperwork was typically late, so that it got stopped after the changes were effected. There was, additionally, a very strong element of racism in both of the people who took over from the former managers. They were very nice about it, but explained that people in their division were sick of foreigners, and that they didn't see how they would be appointing one a manager. I had actually taken over the group, and were managing them, since they were without a manager, and both my division head, and the other guy (who was replaced) had agreed on the transfer. Things were going fairly well, considering that it was a completely new job, and there was a pretty heavy learning curve. And then the lack of progress regarding the transfer paperwork just pissed off my (official) boss and my division manager, and they told me to get back.

I invested a lot in doing the other job: My hopes, my position within my division, my energy. I am lucky to be back with no real reprecussions (the division head, who is a very traditional Japanese guy, told me that if he thought I had gone around him to get a transfer, he would have fired me: In this company, your loyalty is to your group, rather than to the company as a whole.).

When I returned, my boss and I spoke really frankly, and she told me that she thought that I should look abroad if I wanted a career in the company. This was not long after the evaluation 'levelling' took place, and I am reasonably certain that I took a hit there (again). It is ironic: I have achieved all of the projects that I have been assigned, on time and under-budget. Until recently I was in charge of activities which were vitally important to the way that a half-billion dollar decision was made, and which were not being done before I saw the need and took it on. The fact that the decision went in such a way as to elimenate my job was fine with me. I am not saying that there were no problems, no failings, and nothing I could have done better. I think that my boss is right, though: This is a company that I probably cannot succeed in progressing in. No matter how much I respect the president and trust his ability to bring us up again, I don't fit in. I am a foreigner, which is one problem, but the other is that I don't feel a need to make things more complex than they need to be. In I.T., where I am now working, they make simple things incredibly complex. Most people don't do development, deployment, or other value-added work, so what do they add? Complexity. We are in the complexity business, and by selling complexity we maintain our positions, our budgets, and our stranglehold on how others in the company can work. I would rather be in the solutions business.

Call it the Monday blues: It is raining outside, and I can barely see to Tokyo bay from my position at the top of the highest building in the neighbourhood. One of my colleagues did pass the leadership program test, and I am happy for him, but a little blue for myself. Tomorrow we move our desks, back to where I used to sit when I started in the company more than two years ago. I guess I feel like that mystical doubling of customers: I have had my ups and downs over the last 2+ years, but end up right back where I started.

Loser!

2005-06-29T17:41:00.000+09:00

Yes, this time it is the singular of the word: I did indeed do poorly on the numeric logic portion of our leadership program's test: I was in the 25th percentile, probably the lowest I have ever scored on a test. Paltry. Laughable...ok, before I make myself feel too bad, on the verbal logic portion I was in the 75th percentile, which is probably the second-lowest I have scored on a standardised test. I think a lot of fairly capable people must have taken the test, thereby skewing the scores somewhat. Anyway, I failed. Bummer, and I am running out of languages to say it doesn't matter to me in...mai pen rai (Thai).

Horsing around

2005-06-29T00:49:00.000+09:00

In the busy life of a Tokyo socialite such as myself, not a night goes by when I am not out and about in the capital of wa (at least for the last two). Tonight it was for that most refined of Japanese past-time: Horseracing. I was invited by John Garret, who works for Asia Netcom, which used to be known as Asia Global Crossing, and which employed Darryl Green, subject of a previous post. His ex-wife, named Saito or Sato (maiden name? Remarried?), and who works for Goldman Sachs was also there.
It was held at the Tokyo City Keiba-jo, also sometimes called the Oi Keiba-jo ( keiba-jo means racetrack), and is called ゛Twinkle Races゛.
I did not win. It is a very good thing that my bonus is due in two days. Nuff said.
I was probably a little drunk and a little unhappy about losing, but should probablyl watch myself anyway: I created a bit of a scene because the waitress came and took our last drink order about 15 minutes before the last race started. John asked twice where it was and they made some excuses. The race came and went, and still no drinks. I first asked her again to bring the drinks and was probably slightly unpleasant, because, frankly, they screwed up. So, rathe than bringing the frigging drinks, the woman goes to a Japanese woman who works for ANC and had the nerve to say that she had brought them. I told her not to lie, and to bring our drinks immediately. So, she brings one beer, when none of the three people who I was sitting with had gotten their drinks. It went on a bit more after that, but did not end happily...Sort of an unpleasant end to an overall enjoyable evening, and I feel bad that I played a big part in creating ill feelings. I hate bad service, and probably hate bad service in Japan more than I should. It is quite easy to feel like you get bad service because you are a gaijin, and in my case that has manifest itself in a tecchy attitude. Probably need to tone it down about eight notches.
This busy socialite has managed twice, in five days, to draw unwanted attention to himself. I would say 'make an ass of himself', but that would suggest that I actually felt the usual sort of remorse, which I unfortunately don't. The first case, which I didn't mention previously, was on Friday of last week, when I attended yet another sobetsu-kai at a quite senior person's house. I was asked to provide some entertainment, so I volunteered to juggle. Drinking before juggling turns out to be a no-no. Even so, the act went alright until the point when I purposely threw one of my juggling bags at what I thought was a wall. It wasn't, it was a shoji screen, through which the juggling bag went. The big shot got pissed off that I had destroyed his screen, though his wife was quite gracious.
Ah, c'est la vie.

Mobile Monday

2005-06-28T13:53:00.000+09:00

I attended the Mobile Monday event last night at the oh-so-trendy KDDI design studio in Harajuku. I was late, because of the aforementioned visit to the doctor, and got there for the second presentation, by the general manager for new media at Warner Music Japan, Andrew Dunbar, talking about chaku-uta full service that they were participating in with KDDI. It was good, though there were too many people, which meant it was standing-room only. It was also a Powerpoint, of which I see way too many every day, so I guess that aspect of it I was totally happy with. One of the interesting things he said was basically something like 'we really like this model better than i-tunes because Japanese consumers are willing to pay 250 yen per song, plus download cost to have a song on their phone that they can't play on any other device.' What's not to like about consumers behaving in a way seemingly so at odds with their own best interest, and so in-keeping with that of the record labels? He also alluded to music videos from Warner being available at some point soon on au, even though they have an exclusive deal with Vodafone right now, on the Vodafone BB service, which allows users to download videos from their PC, and then pay for them and play them on their mobile handsets.

The five-story studio has a performance and display space on the first floor, and then mobile phone displays on the second and third floors, a kind of art gallery on the fourth floor, and a cafe on the fifth floor. I went up to the second floor and tried out some of the handset that they had there. I wasn't that impressed, but was slightly surprised to find that one of their new Toshiba handsets has Bluetooth, which is unusual in Japan. On the third floor, I tried out a clunky brick of a phone made by Fujitsu and running some Microsoft variant. It was, the very nice and cute girl manning the display assured me, a new concept in mobile device, and currently being used at the Aichi World Expo. Not! It didn't even have a screen much bigger than one that I have on eithe of my phones.

On the way up to the fourth floor I met Sho Izaki, a vice president for biz dev with gracenote. When I first heard him say the name of his company, I heard "grey snot", owing much more to my poor hearing than his pronunciation. I thought it was a bit of an odd name, but hey! we were at the trendy place, avant garde, and grey snot was not totally out of the question...We talked a little bit about his business, and mine, drank a little wine. I met an engineer from Sony-Ericsson, and mentioned that my V802SE has been recalled today. I was, by the way, at this point in the cafe on the 5th floor. This was quite the trendy cafe, complete with funky interior, floor of weathered two by eights, tatooed bartender with an attitude, who looked at me like I was crazy to ask for mineral water, and sort of snottily pointed at the tap when I asked for water-like beverages, and too damn many people! Your usual party in Tokyo, in other words.

I bumped into Gerhard Fasol, a regular contributor, ahem, poster, to keitai-l. He was considerably less obnoxious than the last time I met him in person, at which time he was extremely dismissive and arrogant. He still can't work out how Vodafone could possibly have profits, and trying to explain it would not, I felt, be worth the efforts. He is convinced that it is becuase of deferred tax credits or other such gimmicks. It is not use explaining that getting new customers actually costs money, because of additional required capacity, subsidies on handsets, etc. Since Vodafone K.K. are not gaining customers, those costs are reduced. Actually, I should send him the tool that we used in the simulation game, he might like that!

I also saw Steve Meyers, president of Theta Music. I don't know the whole story, and if they have totally separated from Linc Media, but it loks like they are in the same offices as the last time I spoke with Steve, some time in 2002. He looked older and tireder, but don't we all? Apparently the main thing they are focusing on is selling or porting Japanese content overseas. Terry Lloyd, the founder of a bunch of companies, including Linc Media, J@pan Inc., and others, had thought of that a few years ago, but it didn't really take off at the time.

Tracey Northcott, of Enfour was also there with her brother Richard, also of Enfour. They are working on some cool apps for series 60 handsets, of which the Nokia V702NM is the only one currently being sold in Japan. I hope that they have good luck in selling those apps. Right now, Vodafone is only selling two native Symbian apps, one the Access Netfront browser, and the other some custom 'skins.' She introduced me to Lisa Gotlieb of Walt Disney Internet Group.

By this time, my big toe was hurting again, and I needed to leave. To tell the truth, these kinds of networking events I find slightly uncomfortable and exhausting: Too many people, too many people that I don't know (that is the point, I guess!), and too many things to remember not to do. (slobber, topple my wine down someone's shirt, spill the beans on any of our corporate secrets, etc.)

Sick?

2005-06-27T14:25:00.000+09:00

I played volleyball in a neighbourhood association tournament two weeks ago, and during the lead up to that and aftewards, both of my big toes were aching. I thought "this is an odd thing to have happen, perhaps it is because I am using different muscles in my feet than I usually do."
It turns out that I probably have gout. There aren't too many other reasonable explanations for pain in big toes except for that. I will go see the doctor in a few more hours. I have also been really easily fatigued recently, and I don't know if that is related or not.　I will use that as the excuse, anyway, of why I haven't posted for the last two days. The reality is slightly more shameful for a so-called IT professional, which is that both of my desktop machines at home were out of commission this weekend, owing to some necessary repairs and data transfer. So much for three nines!
I will be attending the Mobile Monday soiree tonight, so hopefully I should get a post or two out of that!

Land of Liberty?

2005-06-24T13:41:00.000+09:00

As an expat, in your first few years it is easy to miss home, and you tend to go through periods of alternately loving and hating your new home. After a few years, though, the frequency and the extreme nature of these periods levels out, and you begin to be pretty realistic about your new home, seeing both good and bad, and generally accepting both, rather than railing against it has you tend to in the first period. The other things that happens is that you begin to view your own country from the outside, unfettered by the emotional attachment that you naturally have for the place where you were born.
I love America. There are so many things to like. But looking at the direction it has gone politically since September 11th, and really since Dubya took over, fills me with a dread. The latest outrage is a Supreme Court decision which allows municipalities to use the law of imminent domain to seize property not for the purpose of building a new school, a road, a sewer treatment plant, or other public works, but to sell to developers, who can then re-develop an area and profit from their work.
George Will, had a good opinion piece on this today, and I would mostly only add a question to his piece: Do the members of the court remember that little thing called the bill of rights? It specifically says that seizures must be for public use. Does building new condos constitute public use? Considering the state of the housing market in the U.S., it is a question whether anyone will even be living in them.
If you combine this with the Patriot Act, the government's (mis)interpretation of the Geneva conventions, it's flagrant disregard for global norms in too many areas to list, it is hard not wonder if America is not slipping, one step at a time, softly, softly, in to totalitarianism. One constitutional right at a time, the liberties that we claim to be fighting for in Afghanistan and Iraq are being taken from Americans. The big uproar about Amnesty International calling Guantanamo a 'gulag' misses the point: Just because today there are nowhere near the same number of prisoners at Guantanamo as were in the Soviet gulags, does not mean that if the legal ambiguities and abuses are not addressed that such will never be the case. So, too, just because the ruling was about one Conneticut town clearly doesn't mean the expansion of government's right to seize property arbitrarily has not been vastly expanded. One wonders where this long slippery slope is leading, and I fear that it is not to a nice place.

Sony needs to grow up!

2005-06-24T13:00:00.000+09:00

Two days ago, at the Takanawa Prince Hotel, Sony held it's general shareholders meeting, where they elected a new head, Howard Stringer. The hotel's large conference hall is often used by large corporations for big meetings, as it seats around 2,000. My own company had a large employee meeting there shortly after I joined two years ago. At that time the meeting was all about the new possibilities that we were facing, and how we were going to vanquish our rivals. The Sony meeting probably has a similar feel to it. The problems that they face in reaching their goals are also similar to the ones that we have faced, and not yet really resolved:

The tendency of folks to build silos, or so-called 'vertical business' within the company, yet not integrated with the company. You may have all kinds of good things to say about the Playstation 2, but it is a perfect example of being a product of this sort of organisation: What kind of memory did the original Playstation 2 use? Of course, as the inventor of Memory Sticks, you would assume that would be the removable memory format used, but NO! It used a proprietary memory. You would assume that as one of the largest ISPs in Japan, with So-Net, that Playstation 2 would have had some kind of tie-up and real push to online gaming. But NO! Online gaming has largely been dominated by X-Box. Having mobile versions of Playstation games pre-loaded onto Sony Ericsson mobile phones would seem to be a no-brainer, but that hasn't happened either. Ken Kutaragi, head of Sony Computer Entertainment, has been known to comment that the company couldn't get rid of him if it wanted, since such a large portion of profits come from the Playstation, which he helped to develop. He is known as a maverick, and has run SCE as a kind of fiefdom.
Because of the above-mentioned silo mentality, Sony has a ton of different businesses that it should or shouldn't be in, but that are adept at protecting themselves from the vagaries of an overall strategy. A great example is Sony Chemicals. This company is in two businesses: one is the production of various kinds of media, like video tape, DVDs, etc., as well as batteries; the other produces specialty products used in electronics production. Despite there being a market for these products, and that Sony may depend on some of the products that are produced by Sony Chemical, how does this business fit into a focus on entertainment? Answer: It doesn't. The margins at the business are also not what I would call stellar, and considering the research and capital-intensive nature of the business, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to hold on to it, except perhaps for strategic reasons
What is the strategy? Sony have been asking themselves for the last decade what kind of company they want to be when they grow up. Well, they have been grown up for a while, so it is time to decide. Do they want to be a G.E. type of company, with lots of different business, and focused on operational and financial efficiency in each one, something that Samsung has done extremely well in the last few years; or do they want to be a new kind of company, focused purely on entertainment, with a value proposition that says 'if you buy Sony hardware or software, they will all work together always.' Get over your Gen X angst and make up your mind!

When I was a kid, we had a Trinitron T.V. It was beautiful! It worked perfectly, was designed well, and had the first truly square screen I had seen. It was worth paying a premium to have one. Sony has never had this kind of reputation in Japan. But most of their ideas come out of Japan. The trouble they have had in realsing the synergies of their businesses is, I would venture, typical in a country that is only 140 years removed from feudalism. Somehow bringing the company towards enlightenment will be, I think, Sir Stringer's biggest challenge.

Losers!

2005-06-24T10:02:00.000+09:00

Yes, the big L for us! We didn't make the cut in our business simulation to go on to the next stage: Only the top four teams go on, and we were sixth. Seems like I am having to say sho-ga-nai alot lately. We did manage to get the top score from Japan, which apparently could give us an audience with the president of the company, but we will never know about that fabled trip to the UK. :-(

Fill in your fate...

2005-06-23T21:25:00.000+09:00

I sat for a multiple choice test today that acts as the first cut for admission to my company's leadership program. In the modern world, what word goes with roadside? Yes! You guessed it! BOMB! I guess I am not cut out to be a future leader in my company, since I couldn't even finish the numeric analysis part of the test. I aced the other part, the verbal part. A bit like the PSAT in that way: I got 730 on English, and only 550 on math. Generally this is not a good thing, to have the two separated by so much, but in the case of the PSAT, in order to come up with National Merit Scholars, they double the English and add the math (or at least they did in 1985, when I took the test).
This test was a kind of deja vu, in terms of filling in small dots with a number 2 pencil, and doing well on the verbal and poorly on the math, but I doubt that the feeling of 'been there, done that,' will extend to the result. I could rail against standardised tests as a means of determining a person's future, but that would be stupid: I have almost always been the beneficiary of them in the past, getting lots of scholarhip money out of my National Merit Scholarship, which allowed a poor boy like me to attend Carleton College, and before that an all expenses paid trip to come to Japan as a high school sophomore, which has changed my life.
After this test was done, which is the only one that the global program uses to determine eligibility, they gave us a personality test. Considering my poor score on the first test, I can only hope that my shining personality saves me overall. I somehow doubt it. Esepcially because that part of the test is being looked at by the Japanese side. It doesn't help that I am COMPLEX. c'est la vie. Sho-ga-nai in Japanese. I was told by one really senior guy yesterday that if I wanted to work for global, I needed to become really familiar with a specific part of the business, like customer service or something. He actually promised to send me if I had the proper skills by next year when he will need to make some choices. So, enough of fun and games, and time to get to work!

Vocabulary

2005-06-23T07:23:00.000+09:00

I was reading Indonesian, Singaporean, and Indian blogs last night, and I realised that those of us who write in English, but may speak another lanugage at work or school all day, whether native or not, tend to mix in non-English words. I actually like this, because it give you the flavor of a place. The problem is in comprehension by people who don't understand that additional vocabulary. So, I have started a vocabulary list of words that I might use, or have already used. Perhaps this will be educational (plastic smile) for everyone! Anyway, here goes (in no particular order--if it ever gets big enough, I will worry about it then):

gaijin 外人（がいじん）--A non-Japanese, a foreigner, often a non-Asian foreigner, ME!
shinkansen 新幹線（しんかんせん）--Bullet train, literally 'new trunk line'. There are several lines, the most highly used being the Tokkaido Shinkansen, which runs from Tokyo to Hakata in Kyushu(changing to the Sanyo Shinkansen after Shin-Osaka station). There is also a recently completed Kyushu Shinkansen, that will eventually link to Hakata. I ride the Tohoku (northeast) Shinkansen, which runs to Morioka or Hachinohe, with branch lines that piggy back on the main line and then go to Yamagata or Akita. There is also the Niigata line and the Nagano line.
sobetsu kai 送別会（そうべつかい）--Farewell party, also sometimes called by resident gaijin a sayonara party.
keitai or keitai denwa 携帯（電話）（けいたい（でんわ））--Mobile (phone), cell phone, handy phone.
sho-ga-nai (しょうがない)--It can't be helped, c'est la vie. Common slang for shikata-ga-nai (仕方がない).
keibajo 競馬場 (けいばじょう)--Racetrack, horse racing track. Scene of scene over failure to deliver last order.
shoji 障子（しょうじ）--A sliding screen with rice paper panels. Not to be confused for juggling bag target.
bakayaro ばかやろ！--The thing someone fed up to the gills says. Literally means 'damned fool', or something like that. Also the name of a series of movies which consisted of small sketches of people being pushed beyond the edge to the point where the explode and make this exclamation.
eigyo 営業（えいぎょう）--Sales. An interesting Japanese-English combination word is 'eigyo man', meaning salesman.
mochi もち--Often called a 'rice cake', it is nothing like the sort of rice cake that you find in health food stores that is puffed rice in a round shape. It is a cake (meaning a flat shape, rather than a sweet confection) of mochigome, or glutinous rice, pounded into a rubbery state, traditionally with a massive wooden hammer in a massive stone gizmo (a pestal-like thingummy). It is eaten especially at New Year, and is baked, boiled with a chicken soup, and probably other ways.
daifuku 大福（だいふく）--A confection by wrapping a thin layer of mochi (see above) around red bean paste (anko). There are also strawberry daifuku, which add a fresh strawberry. Daifuku literally means 'big happiness', and are the same characters used at Chinese New Year in China for celebratory gifts and on moon pies. (I don't know if there is a relationship or not.)
o-bon お盆（おぼん）--A festival held generally in August, though the timing depends on the place. It is also sometimes called the lantern festival, which is because candles are placed on little boats, and floated down the rivers. This aspect of the festival probably came later, from Buddhism, and is very similar to the Thai loi kratong festival. It is probably a much more ancient harvest festival that pre-dates Buddhism. One aspect of the festival is welcoming back the dead for a certain period, and then sending them back on their way, which is where the lanterns are used.
bon odori 盆踊り（ぼんおどり）--The dances which are danced at the o-bon festival (see above).
salaryman サラリーマン--A salaried male worker. Often a lifetime employee of a company.
kokutetsu 国鉄（こくてつ）--Japan National Railway, or JNR. This was the name of the company prior to being privatised, when it changed it's name to simply 'JR'. Kokutetu literally means 'national rail,' and technically doesn't exist anymore, since it has been privatised, but many people continue to refer to JR in this way.
maké inu 負け犬（まけいぬ）--Literally a 'loser dog', meaning someone who is beaten and weak.
iikagen ni mesamenasai いい加減に目覚めなさい（いいかげんにめざめなさい）--Literally 'open your eyes to bullshit', though bullshit is just one translation, and the word doesn't make use of any scatology. The character of Maya Akutsu in JoOh no Kyoshitsu says this to students to challenge them.
naki mushi 泣き虫--Literally 'cry bug', but is used also exactly the same as 'crybaby' in English.

I will try to add to this list, and refer to it when I use these words in future. If there is something that I mention that you want me to list, leave a comment. If you want a really comprehensive English<-->Japanese online dictionary, the one used by most translators in my company is ALC's.

A late night...

2005-06-22T12:55:00.000+09:00

One of the features of working as I do as a project manager, and further as a project manager on projects that employ a lot of gaijin, is that I attend a lot of 'so betsu kai' or farewell parties. In fact, I would venture to say that in the last three months, during which the project I have been working on has been winding down, that farewell parties have probably been my major source of social activity.
Last night's bash was for a guy that I really like and respect, and I am sorry to see him go. It was held at Kushi Tokkyu, near Kamiya-cho station. As a manager I had to fork out 6,000 yen for the privelege, which I didn't have and had to borrow until pay day (Friday) from another colleague that used to work for me. I have recently started Atkins, and there was plenty in the meat department there, but I needed to avoid beer. Technically, Atkins, in the first two weeks, doesn't allow alcohol, and after that only in moderation. However, I had done my homework, and found that Japanese 'shochu', a kind of rice spirits similar to vodka or gin, has zero carbohydrates. Zero means that if you have one glass or ten it is the same. So, I had ten.
We progressed to the Town Cryer II, where we had 'one for the road.' Unlike a bout of successive 'one for the roads' that I had with an Irish friend of mine two weeks ago at Mad Mulligans, after which our bar tab totalled something like $200, this being a Monday, I really did only have one. The last shinkansen train leaves Tokyo at 10:44, and I made it with plenty of time to spare, unlike two weeks before, when I had missed it, and instead stumbled over to Legends in Roppongi to watch Japan play Bahrain, before conking out at the McDonalds while waiting for the first train home.

...and an early morning

2005-06-22T12:52:00.000+09:00

I am participating in a business simulation activity in my company, and it involves a bi-weekly teleconference. Because the guy coordinating the teleconference and one of the teams are in Australia, they seem to think that make it acceptable to hold teleconferences at 8 a.m. In some countries this is a normal working time, but Japan tends towards later starting times and much later finishing times. So, I arrived home at nearly midnight, drunk, woke up at 5:30 (still a little drunk), and caught a 6:30 shinkansen to be at work by eight.

We won! Today's teleconference was the last one prior to the championship round, which consists of the top four teams in the world. The game has 64 teams divided up into 16 'worlds' of four teams each. We pulled out all the stops and won our world. I have heard that we have a decent chance to make it into the top four. Yeah! It was almost worth coming it at eight. There is a further rumour that if we win the whole contest we will be flown to the U.K. to give a presentation to the group CEO. That would be cool!

I will take all of the credit for our win. The way it worked is that we were given an Excel-based 'tool' and had to make some decisions concerning our business, and then enter them in the tool. We did well the first year, but got our butts kicked the second year. Looking at how our competitior did this, it became obvious that we needed to do some things differently. In our industry, the common wisdom that the more customers you have, the better. The other common wisdom is that you can't raise prices. I took a look at that and decided to let the numbers speak for themselves. It turns out that certain segments are worth much more than other segments. So, I increased the prices for the less desirable segments to the point that they were once again desirable for us to serve. While pricing is hugely important to certain segments, to others it is less so, and we were able to generate substantial customer satisfaction while at the same time charging more. We also decided that we would continue to focus more on the segments that were less sensitive to pricing. We focused a lot of attention on imrpoving all areas *except* pricing, to minimize a customers overall dissatisfaction.

It was a good strategy, but the team of Australians that we vanquished were left whining. It is a good thing that I didn't have any time the night before to record 'We are the Champions' on to my mobile to play when the results were announced. There would have definitely been an explosion. Actually one of my own team-mates is disgusted and didn't show up to the teleconference...I warned everyone that this was a strategy to win the game, not to be confused with running a real company looking five years ahead. I said that if we wanted to win, this was the only way I could see, but that it wouldn't be something we would be able to be particularly proud of. It was three to one to go the direction we did.

When I mentioned that the Australians were pissed off to another colleague, he said 'it's only a game! What's their problem." I know exactly what their problem is, which is that they wanted to win. I don't consider myself particularly cut-throat, but when it comes to games or competitions I am fiercly competitive, in my fairly mild-mannered way. If it is clear what needs to be done to win, I will do it. Why the Aussies didn't, I don't know, since with their bigger market share they could have beat us at our own game. This is the advantage of being a geek who has no concept of finance, marketing, or sales: I and my other geeky team mates (the one guy that got pissed off with our strategy is in marketing, I think) only looked at how to win. Because this is a learning exercise, perhaps we should not have approached it this way, but as soon as they talked about winners and losers, there was no changing our approach. The problem is in the criteria: Our strategy and results ended up being very similar to our own company's, and the criteria are the same ones that the group uses to evaluate each country's business. It is clear that shareholders are looking at some other factors, though, and that this is not a formulae for long-term success, nor for overall market success, but for short-term financial success. That was particularly educational. If we make it into the final four, and then win and need to make a presentation to the CEO, we have decided to use our presentation as an appeal to him to change those criteria.

Actually, that may have been one of the reasons that our chief executive quit last year: The short-term financial focus of global is not in keeping with longer-term viability in the Japanese market. Having said that, both are absolutely necessary. Actually, our Australian competitors did a better overall job at balancing the two. Unfortunately, the criteria are not balanced, and rewards pricks like me who only care about short-term profitability (or who play the game based on short-term profitability, which is actually the case).

Yes, it may hurt the mother less, but...

2005-06-21T18:39:00.000+09:00

What about the poor child?
I will vary my fare slightly because I got a rather interesting Noopie on my mobile phone from Wai Wai about pregnant mothers who diet to the extent that their children are born underweight. The mothers had good things to say about giving birth to preemies, though the health of their child was damaged for life. They had fewer contractions, and childbirth went more smoothly. Weigh that against vastly increased risk of high blood pressure and heart disease. Hmm...
It is not quite as simple as that though: When my wife was pregnant, the prenatal classes kept hammering away at pregnant mothers minding their weight. I thought it was BS at the time, and told my wife so, but she said 'no, the doctors say that pregnant women really need to diet to make sure they don't gain too much weight during pregnancy.' Who was I, a mere husband with more commmon sense than her moron doctor, to argue with such airtight logic?
Yesterday, my wife met with the mother of one of my son's classmates. The purpose of the lunch meeting was to establish the ground rules for any relationship her family and mine may want to have. Basically, she was checking my wife out to make sure that her son didn't make friends with a kid whose mother she didn't like. In this case, actually, I spoke with the father, another one of a very small handful of Americans living in my city, and suggested a barbecue at my house. The mother was very disturbed by this, and wanted to define the scope of the relationship prior to any messy entanglements. GAWD!
Her son, it turns out, does not play with other children except at school, and in structured after-school activities, for which she purposely goes out of the school area to avoid meeting other mothers from her son's class.
The cause of this was because of some unpleasantness she apparently had with a mother when her (much older) daughter was elementary school age. Whatever...I understand her discomfort with her kids playing with kids whose parents you don't like--what parent hasn't had the experience? But what do I tell my son? Don't play with that kid because I don't like his parents? GET OVER IT! Chill! They aren't getting married, only playing together for gods sake!

Smart move by a giant

2005-06-21T10:56:00.000+09:00

An interesting story in the Nikkei points to a strategy on NTT DoCoMo's part that has huge implications for number two and three operators au and Vodafone: They are apparently considering opening their networks, outside of the major metropolitan areas, to newcomers. In my post of last week I cast aspersions on Softbank's ability to roll out their network nationwide by next year. With this development, the main stumbling block is removed. Softbank will still need to work on customer service, big time, if they are to win many customers, but the ability to compete on price, partially as the result of a reduced need for network development, could well lead to a price war.

This is an incredibly astute strategy on the part of DoCoMo to pursue a divide and conquer strategy: By enabling the early entry of Softbank and eAccess, prior to mobile number portability being introduced, they create a market situation of five smaller rivals rather than three. This will allow them to paint the value proposition as 'there are the rest, and then there is DoCoMo.' This will play well to Japanese consumers, who tend to go with the strongest brands in a croweded market. The behavious is something like, 'when in doubt, choose the leader.' The introduction of the two or three new entrants could create that doubt. Further, this strategy allows them to focus on the customer segments that are not particularly price sensitive, including the business segment.

Though it is a small story, and doesn't mean the sky is falling, to those in the mobile telecoms sector, this changes everything.

Shared Incompetence

2005-06-20T19:54:00.000+09:00

Three stories in U.K. Sunday papers this weekend highlight the worst qualities of non-Japan-based journalists' ability to report on Japan: In his story in the Sunday Times, city-page editor Paul Durman doesn't seem to wander very far from the Foreign Correspondent's Club, but seemed to have trouble with his reading: He talks about 'Big Camera' and their displays of mobile phones, when what he actually means is 'Bic Camera', which is right across the street from the Foreign Correspondent's Club. A Business Telegraph story contains the same mistake, which makes one wonder if Mr. Durman is moonlighting, or perhaps he and the Telegraph reporter wrote their stories together?
A story in This is London (Financial Mail on Sunday) makes no such blatantly inaccurate mistakes, but contains several errors of fact:

The operation, which accounts for a fifth of Vodafone's profits, has been hit by a fumbled transition from 2G voice-only phones to 3G high-speed internet technology.

2G phones, from any carrier in Japan, have not been voice-only for around 5 years. The only recent example of a voice only phone is Tu-ka's Tu-ka S simple phone for old folks and kids, which was actually a big hit. His other inaccuracy is below:

Unlike 3G services from rivals like Vodafone, i-mode allows secure transactions for services such as buying train and plane tickets, share dealing and paying for goods and services.

If he had bothered to find out about this, he would realise that this payment functionality is not really related to i-mode, that it is hard-wired into the actual phone, whereas i-mode is an online service. Vodafone and au will also be releasing so-called 'wallet' handsets within this year.
Hey, guys, are reporters not supposed to ask questions? Verify facts? Dig a little deeper than simply stepping across the street to an electronics store whose name you can't even spell properly?

It just goes to show you...

2005-06-20T18:32:00.000+09:00

Coming on the heels of my last post, a story in todays Financial Times (FT) talks about a new law covering corporations that has foreign investors up in arms. Basically, the law would make the current of situation of foreign-owned financial firms in Japan unclear. In the world of finance, as heavily influenced as it is by government regulation, such a lack of clarity, and the risks that it poses should this lack of clarity lead to any inadvertent violations of rules or regulations, makes this a real risk for foreign banks, securities brokerages, and their ilk.
One of the interesting parts of this is that they totally missed it, so that their protests came rather late. The ACCJ also missed it. In my dealings with them, this doesn't surprise me very much: The competence of many of those in the organisation is, in my rather biased opinion, suspect. Whether this fiasco pushes any of it's corporate members to withdraw is a question, but they can't be too happy about it.
I think the bigger question, though, is what the hell the Ministry of Justice bureaucrats are thinking. In the current investment climate, Japan is a gamble at best. So is China, but that gamble has paid very hefty dividends, while the gamble on Japan may help a company maintain position, but has not paid out a lot of direct dividends. So, which country would you invest in?
This comes on the heels of a new privacy protection law which, while it has an admirable aim--to limit the access of companies to individual's private details unless they are specifically authorised to do so--it incurs large costs, legal headaches, and unfair singling out of certain companies by the media and bureaucrats.
The answer to what the geniuses at the MoF were thinking is that they weren't: Unlike China or most other Asian countries, foreign investment has traditionally played a fairly minor role in Japan, and there is very little sense that creating an unfriendly environment is something they need to worry about. They forget that foreign investment into Nissan helped save a company that no Japanese company wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole. They forget that Shinsei Bank, which was formed by Ripplewood Holdings, a foreign investor, is the best-performing Japanese bank. They remember that Lehman Brothers helped to finance Livedoor's hostile takeover attempt of NBS. And now they are extracting their pound of flesh. In their capricousness, and their hidden agendas, one must wonder what distinguishes them from the communist party functionaires in Beijing. The answer would be that if both sets of bureaucrats were on stock options, the Chinese would be smiling, and the Japanese would not...;-)

Japan in crisis?

2005-06-17T22:24:00.000+09:00

A friend of mine, and a guy to whose company my company does business with, stopped by my desk the other day, and we were talking, actually he was waiting for someone more important than me to get off the phone so that he could talk to him (it was, after all, the middle of the day, and he has a job to do, which involves selling stuff to us). We talked about Darylls move to Tata (see my last post), and moved on to other topics, the main one being Japan being passed by in another three or four years, if they don't pull their thumb out. To put this in context, we were talking about China and India, and the incredible growth both of those places are experiencing, and the incredible malaise in Japan.
A friend of his manages a large company that does chip fabrication. They take orders and build chips. Basically he said that the quality of the engineers, and some of the amazing stuff these guys are coming up with are literally two generations ahead of anything currently being produced. Nano-memory chips was one thing he mentioned. The number of engineering graduates in China is something like twenty times that of Japan or the U.S.
My feeling is that in developing countries students are hungry. There is a clear path to success, and the price of failure is poverty, a kind of poverty that those of who grew up in the U.S. have not known since the 30's. Those who have the talent and hunger to get ahead, can. India has something like twenty technical universities of a quality similar to M.I.T., at least in the students it graduates. Japan has a huge amount of saved capital, and has used that capital to build some very competitive export companies, but those company's build a good portion of their products in China, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Brazil, and other places where the labour is cheaper, higher skilled, and where the local bureaucracy doesn't kill initiative, which is definitely something that does happen here. So, when Japan hollows out, and their best companies find more to like outside than inside Japan, what is going to happen?
I had a talk with a Japanese network engineer who I am aquainted with today. He manages a piece of network that I need for some projects I am doing. The network is based on a technology called an Internet VPN, which basically uses the Internet for a private connection. The advantage is that the Internet is substantially cheaper than a leased line. The disadvantage is that it is less reliable. When I say less reliable, I am speaking in terms of being able to guarantee the speed of a connection. Actually, the Internet is *very* reliable in terms of availability: 100% as a whole, since the whole Internet has not failed, to my knowledge, since probably the early 70's.
I actually have a point here, which I need to get to soon, I understand: We have a reasonable connection, but we have an issue called latency, which means the time it physically takes for data to reach it's destination. It is a reality, and one that we have to live with. My network engineer colleague, though, sees it as completely unacceptable, and would rather not even have the network if it had any chance of imperfection. He is a perfectionist. And I realised: All of these anal people who want things perfect, they are all perfectionists! And there are lots of them in Japan. Tons. For certain things this is probably a good trait, but in the fast-moving business I am in, it is death. There will never be perfection, so the trick is to figure out what level of imperfection is acceptable, and work at achieving that level.
The real irony is that I am a recovered perfectionist, and know the deeply unhappy and depressed road perfectionism leads to, for the simple reason that there is no sane world where perfection is achievable. I'm not sure why it has taken me 12 years to identify this in Japan. Not everyone is a perfectionist by any means, but organisational and social beliefs tend to suggest that they should be: Witness all of the whinging on 2 channel; witness the utter shock and outrage that a jumbo jet blew two tires. No one was killed in the plane accident, not even really hurt, a couple of cases of whiplash. Many of the things that are talked about on 2 channel are just gripes about poor service, about China and Korea's unfairly targetting Japan, as well as a whole slew of mostly complaints, and posts by disgruntled workers, customers, and others. This, it should be pointed out, the most influential and popular web site in Japan.
It is ironic: Japan became successful specifically because of their attention to detail, and their perfectionism. Now, in a more complex world, where there are exponentially more things that can go wrong, these traits, or at least the practises used to support these traits, are crippling Japanese companies and their employee's ability to act, to innovate, and to move ahead.
Take this as an example: You hire someone to do some work for you. They do a complex piece of work that takes 6 months, including internal testing. When they hand over the work to you, you say 'we would like you to run the test cases for us: We just want to make sure they are accurate." "Alright," says the vendor, "just tell me which ones you would like to run." "All 1900 of them," you answer. "But that would take another 4 months!" said the vendor. "That's right, and we don't intend to pay you until we are done," say you.
This is a real example, actually. Think of the additional cost because of your perfectionism. And think of the additional work, schedule impact, and the rest. It is this kind of stuff that makes my aquaintance so down on Japan. Crazy...

Leaving on a jet plane

2005-06-17T10:09:00.000+09:00

Daryll Green, former Vodafone K.K. CEO left Tuesday for India with his family to head up Tata Teleservices. Green quit last June after having endured several months of his COO, David Jones, acting more and more like a chief executive, and effectively wresting, with the help of the Vodafone group, operational control from Green. It coincided with a voluntary retirement program that was over-subscribed, and which saw an 18% reduction in regular employees. Jones, who was fairly unceremoniously kicked out as of April 1st by new VFKK chairman Shiro Tsuda, and whose job was elimenated, had managed to have himself as the sole approver for almost all decisions at the company, and many decisions had ground to a halt.
Back to Green. There had been rumours, some going as high as the Nikkei, that he would become head of Softbank's mobile venture. Considering that Green hadn't been working for the last year, at least not that anyone saw, it is hard to believe he didn't have any irons in the fire during that whole period, just playing poker at the American Club. According to several vendors who have had dealings with Softbank, however, they are scumbags, at times refusing to pay vendors, lying about the number of software licenses they are using, and basically not behaving in a particularly ethical way. Their announcement that they wanted to start some time in 2006 should be treated with some caution: Though it would be easy enough for them to have something up and running in Tokyo or another couple of urban centres, an analysis suggests that it would not be possible for them to roll out a national network prior to mid-late 2007.
Tata definitely seems like the better choice for Daryll, and with a lot more possibilities. Though no one else has mentioned it, they also have a great stakeholder in Avaya, giving them access to a network equipment vendor and their expertise, especially in VoIP.
Sayonara, Mr. Green, and good luck!

Fourth of July in Tokyo

2005-06-16T00:14:00.000+09:00

I live out in the sticks, and there are probably only a total of 50 or fewer American's in these parts. Before I started working in Tokyo, one of the highlights of my social season was the annual 4th of July party at the American Embassy housing compound. The first time I went was at the invitation of one of my uncle's former colleagues when he was working for the state of Oregon. This colleague was an embassy staffer, and got me tickets, and I thought 'wow, I am special, I get to go to this exclusive party with embassy people and the like, and meet Walter Mondale (then the U.S. ambassador to Japan) and shoot the shit about his speech at my graduation.
Now I know better: You can get tickets at the American Chamber of Commerce of Japan (ACCJ) for 1,000 yen. No biggie. Eleven years ago, the expat community seemed like this glittering community of people who had it made. Now I work with a fair number of them, and it doesn't seem quite as cool:

No job security: A lot of the expats at my company won't have a job to go back to, and are here on short-term contracts. (this contrasts with my own cush situation, where I would basically have to committ a felony for my company to fire me).
No respect: Most of the employees (Japanese) don't respect the expats, saying stuff like 'they don't know shit about the Japanese market, so why in God's name has HQ sent them to Japan to run things?' Good question, uncomfortable answer: HQ doesn't understand Japan, either, and sends people with equal levels of ignorance (or other Asians: there is a Dutch-Chinese guy, a German-Korean guy, an American-Japanese (who needs an interpreter), a Lebanese-Swede, and some other interesting contributors to our melting pot.
Because of the two above facts, backlash is a fact of life: We just got a new president, an expat, ironically, who has recently been regularly saying that expats can't do the job, that we need to have Japanese in the important roles, and so on. I happen to be white, but am not an expat. Unfortunately for me, the backlash against the expats sometimes spills over to people like me who are local hires, speak the language, and have long and extensive knowledge of the Japanese market. c'est la vie.

Alright, there is definitely an element of jealousy: My boss, and expat, has a huge house in Denenchofu, one of the more exclusive neighbourhoods in Tokyo, paid for by the company, in addition to a car, and much nicer phones and computers than most others. In her case, I don't grudge her these things at all, as she has worked for the company for a long time, and probably deserves what she has. But there are quite a few young Dutch guys that have a certain bluntness bordering on rudeness (the polar opposite, in other words, of a Japanese conception of good manners), along with a certain assumption that they know what they are doing (they generally do, and it wouldn't hurt my Japanese colleagues to listen occasionally...), but with lots of youth. To see these guys in luxury apartments in the best areas of Tokyo might gall some...

Fame and fortune...

2005-06-15T23:44:00.000+09:00

...or just getting fired from your job? I saw Jessica Cutler's very brief blog, and read a really long Washington Post story about her meteoric rise and fall. Hey, the girl that couldn't keep a job found a way to make it pay! (beats turning tricks, which seemed to be the other thing she might have ended up doing, and saves on subjecting her petit 5'1" figure to the rigours of anal sex for money).
So, what the hell? My co-workers, colleagues, and hordes of others post on 2 channel, Japan's whinge HQ, so why shouldn't I have my blog?
(BTW, I have nowhere near Jessica's sex life to spice my blog up with (nor her looks), so I guess it will have to have other entertainment value...probably not a bad thing...)