• forget to turn it off on the train, in class, in a movie, during dinner, while swimming, or in any situation in which others would become very very irritated with me ;
• use it while I ride my bike ;
• write emails while walking at 2% speed on the sidewalk, at the station, or in a crowded hallway ;
• call you from a busy intersection or while at a rock 'n roll show, and pretend it's possible to have a normal phone conversation ;
• enable the feature that uses Mickey Mouse's voice to tell me that "Wow! An e-mail !" has arrived ;
• interrupt a normal, face-to-face conversation in order to write or check an email (that one's a special promise to Bo) ;
• make calls just because I can.
  

All of the above are ways that a person changes when (s)he's plugged into this network, and I promise to do my best to not become one of these people. Following this path will ensure that the thing is never on, and there you have it - exactly the way I thought it would all turn out.

If you need to contact me, just leave a message on my home phone.

Word/Phrase of the day : (Phrase) - "Moshi-moshi...unnhh...unnhh uh? Ah so desu-ka? ...unnhh...unnhh hai. Wakari mashita." - "Hello? *indecipherable nonsensical gutteral sounds* Is that so? *more nonsense* Got it...I understand." - This is pretty much every keitai conversation I've ever heard, and I don't think the person on the other end is making much more sense. I feel that P.T. Barnum was born a bit too early - this trend's a goldmine.

A few months ago I was in a one-on-one class with an engineer from a well-known multinational manufacturing company. The topic that day was 'vacations', and everything was going as planned - common English phrases having to do with taking time off from work, planning vacations, talking about your trip, etc. The last discussion question in the text book was a two-parter : "How many vacation days per year are you allowed by your company?" and "How many did you take last year?". The student, let's call her Ms. Yamamoto, handled the first part easily, but when it came time to talk about how many vacation days she actually took last year, she started crying. After a lot of sniffling, tissue-offering and silence, I learned that Ms. Yamamoto has taken exactly 0 (zero) vacation days in the last three years. I'd cry too.

I have a friend, let's call him Hitoshi, who works for another large company, and Hitoshi is suddenly making about $400 per month less than he did before his annual performance review. In many Japanese companies, employees are evaluated each year, and placed somewhere in a 7-tier ranking system, the level of which determines salary, benefits, and bonuses. Hitoshi's performance was evaluated as being a level lower than last year's, so he slipped a point in the rankings. I don't know the criteria for the review, nor do I know how Hitoshi behaves at work. Maybe he sleeps with his feet on the desk and steals office supplies. But, he's a perfectly responsible and trustworthy individual outside work, so I couldn't believe it when I heard his story. Then I heard a similar story about this situation at another company, and it started to make a bit more sense. At this other company, a huge import/export thing suffering a decline in profit, an entire department had the same thing happen. About a hundred people had large chunks of salary lopped off without warning, all in the name of performance evaluations vs. the bottom line.

'Family' is a big topic in language classes - How many members? Who are they? What do they enjoy doing?, etc. In some company classes, the answers are telling and sad. Commonly, fathers have no idea what their kids are studying in school, what they do in their free time, and in more than one case, even their ages. This is certainly not a condition limited to Japan, and I realize that parents around the world could know a bit more about what their children are up to. However, it's startling to hear Kenji say, "My daughter? She's 13…no…15…maybe 14?". How can Kenji rattle off his boss' last 5 golf scores and not know his own daughter's age? Because he spends most of his life in the office. He works 10-14 hours a day, and gives up a lot of weekends to extra work. If there is a national holiday, he will make up the time off in the week previous to the holiday, packing in early mornings, late nights, and Sundays. You might be thinking what I thought - Kenji's piling up the overtime cash, and all the sacrifice will be worth it in a financial sense, at least. But no - he'll make no extra money for all that time away from home - that's just the way it is.

In each of these cases, the Outraged Westerner voice in my head starts shouting, "Hold on just a minute here! This isn't right - where's the union? Where's the champion of the oppressed worker?". In a more reasonable tone, and aloud, I say, "I see. What does the union say about all this?". After looking at me like I'd asked them to tell me God's middle name, they answer, "Well…nothing". It always seemed like a strange question had been asked, and I started to doubt my handle on what a union is for. So, I went to the source for the definition, the AFL-CIO. The folks at The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations have made shouting at management an art form, and on their website (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutunions/joinunions/), they tell us that

"A union is a group of workers who come together to win respect on the job, better wages and benefits, more flexibility for work and family needs and a voice in improving the quality of their products and services. Workers in unions counter-balance the unchecked power of employers."

Alright, good - that's what I thought. But when I ask Japanese company employees about the function of their labor unions, they very often simply have no easy answer. It seems that union dues have become nothing but a deduction line on the pay stub, and the union itself a shadowy group that has nothing to do with the workforce. When I ask what union dues are used for, I'm told that the money is to pay union 'representatives', and as far as anyone knows, that's the end of it.

So why is Ms. Yamamoto crying in my class? Why does Hitoshi just shrug and adjust his budget to suit his lowered means? Why is Kenji working 80 hours a week and being paid for 40? Why is the union powerless? Most importantly, why is no one speaking up? I have spent a lot of time on this one, dropping discreet questions here and there in classes, and the accumulated knowledge added up to a lot of nothing on the subject. There seemed to be a general acceptance of the situation, and little enthusiasm for examining the causes or possible solutions. I didn't push too hard - I thought it might be a bad career move to become a part-time agitator, so I just carried on asking questions and getting no answers…until last week.

My highest-level student works for a large company, and we'll continue in the fine tradition of unnamed sources and introduce him as Mr. Tanaka, an engineer for Nippon Widget. Mr. Tanaka has been with Nippon Widget for 17 years, and he's worked his way up to management from the widget assembly line. He spent 8 of those years working at one of the company's American branches, and came back to Japan with a different outlook than the average Japanese company employee has. He doesn't hesitate to express distaste, dissatisfaction, and sometimes outright scorn about subjects that other students won't even discuss. Again, I don't push him on these subjects - he just unloads freely, and he's become a goldmine of information about the 'real Japan' that so many visitors and foreign residents seek.

We had come to the point in a conversation where I usually ask "So…what does the union do about this?". I wasn't surprised to hear him answer, "Nothing.", but I shook my head and paid closer attention when he continued, "And I'll tell you why…". The following is the story that Mr. Tanaka told me about the way the union functions at Nippon Widget. I assume it's accurate - I have no way to check out the facts, but he's been on the inside of this company for a long time, and he's gone through the system he describes in the story. Also, I have no idea if this explanation holds true at all companies, but it seems to answer a lot of the questions I have had about Japanese labor unions in general.

According to Mr. Tanaka, Japanese unions operated along the lines of the AFL-CIO definition for a great many years, and as long as the cash was pouring into the company coffers during Japan’s amazing rise to economic glory, the companies didn’t mind granting some leeway and honoring contracts. This all changed in the mid-90’s though, when Japan’s economy went splat and profit margins became more difficult to maintain. Workers were told at that time that they would have to grin and bear it in order to keep their jobs, and labor negotiations would be put on the back burner for the time being. As with most unwritten understandings like this, the ‘temporary’ measures have become business as usual, and even though the economy looks like it has stabilized, the union reps aren’t exactly handing out picket signs.

The employees of Nippon Widget do not have a sympathetic advocate within the company. It appears that they do; the regular framework is in place - department, section and company representatives, a union president - the whole hierarchy functions just as it does in countless other companies, but with one important difference. In this system, the workers and the union want nothing to do with one another.

When a freshman employee joins Nippon Widget, one or two of them are told by the company management that they will run for positions as union representatives. Only university graduates are chosen by the company, and they run unopposed for the union positions. It is assumed that no one objects to this selection process because a) they are new employees - no one wants to be a troublemaker in his first month on the job, and b) they believe that only university graduates have the communication skills and sophistication to handle the high-level negotiations involved in holding the position. Part b) is an unnecessary consideration however, as these kinds of negotiations never take place at Nippon Widget.

Putting aside for the moment the ridiculous notion of the company management hand-picking union delegates, we need to look a little more closely at the reasons behind choosing only university graduates. It's actually quite simple: employees without post-secondary education are not allowed to write the exam to become a manager. And, if you are part of the management at a giant corporation, who better to be across the table from you in a labor negotiation than someone who wants to be on your side sometime in the future? An individual being groomed for a management position is not likely to cause many problems on behalf of that pesky workforce. Employees usually write the management exam when they turn 37, which gives the union reps about 15 years or so of playing ball with the head office, and they are sure to be near the top of the list when it comes time to change teams. An extreme example of this choice in career path is the story of the last union president at Nippon Widget. He stayed in his union position until a year before retirement, and spent his last year as a member of the board of directors. So, not only did he enjoy a very nice salary throughout his tenure at the union trough, he gets to retire with a full head office level pension. If it didn't make me queasy to think about it, I'd be inclined to applaud this kind of audacity.

In this system, traditional roles are completely reversed - the union is full of upwardly-mobile junior executives, and an employee with a legitimate grievance may as well write it up in triplicate and mail it to a random address. Anyone submitting actual paperwork to the Nippon Widget union is sure to get management’s ear, just not in the way they’d hoped. Anyone complaining about unpaid overtime or lost vacations would most likely be branded a troublemaker, and by someone who will most likely be his boss someday. This could lead to an unfavorable performance review, and we’ve seen what happens next. When the union is stocked with management ringers, what can the workers do? Organize and start a union to protect themselves from the union? That would be silly and illegal – they already HAVE a union.

The devil’s advocate in me feels it necessary to point out here that labor unions aren’t always the perfect answer, as we all know. When professional athletes and doctors go on strike, it makes me want to burn all my folk albums. Unions in North America have pushed the issue so far that a guy who presses a button all day won’t get out of bed for less than triple time and a half for working a Saturday morning. When the Labor movement started in the U.S. and Canada, it was to guarantee a one-hour lunch and washroom breaks, not 6 months of vacation and wages high enough to get the second bass boat for the cottage. This is not the kind of representation I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the union operating on at least a basic level – making sure employees are paid for overtime, and that they receive the vacation time they’re allowed in their contracts.

I’ve read some suspicious numbers in some studies about employment in Japan. In a textbook that I use for classes, there’s a question about workweeks in different countries. It says that the average workweek in Canada is 43 hours, and in Japan it’s 38. Now I know that I’m exposed to a very slim slice of the population here, but I’ve never heard anyone say they work less than 40 hours per week, and most say it’s more like 50-70. In a country that boasts a 2% unemployment rate, the number of hours worked can’t be that low, can it?  Then I realized that the problem may be in ‘reporting’. I’ve heard in the past that anyone who works even 1 hour per week is considered ‘employed’ – that takes care of the suspiciously low unemployment rate. As for the workweek, it’s my guess that all that unpaid overtime is simply not mentioned in the census. If it’s not official, it never really happened, and no one needs to be paid for it.

Another notion that should be clarified is that these employees are ‘working’ this many hours per week. I spend a lot of time in Japanese offices, and I see a lot of newspapers and computer solitaire. Being the first to arrive and the last to leave looks good when one wants to be promoted, but I’m not sure all those hours are filled with concentrated effort. Many students have also told me that they don’t want to be the ones to take off at 5:00, just because they are the only ones who are finished their work for the day. Teamwork is teamwork, and if that means staying until 1am, then so be it.

On the other hand, a great percentage of these employees really are working that long each week, and there’s a medical term to prove it. “Karoushi” literally means ‘involved, or bitter’, but it is also used as an official cause of death. Company employees who do nothing but work insane hours and sleep very little often end up very sick, and sometimes they die, literally dropping dead from work-related stress and exhaustion. In the West, we might say someone is ‘burnt-out’, and that they need a vacation. What if they didn’t get a vacation…ever? Karoushi.

Mr. Tanaka’s story is about one union at one company, and it very well may be an isolated case. I honestly don’t know what the practices of other companies’ unions are, but it seems like most of them are sitting on their hands as well. I have Ms. Yamamoto crying in my class, Hitoshi looking under the cushions for train fare, and Kenji forgetting he has a second son, and I don’t think they’re the ones to blame. The corrupt opportunists gulping down union dues at Nippon Widget need to be outed.

They send me hither and thither every day, and yon on alternating Thursdays. They don't understand that in order to communicate with others in my native tongue, I need to be here in front of my talkin' box at a time that matches the normal waking hours of those with whom i need to speak. I don't know if they understand the idea of 'time zones', but i would wager a guess that they don't - concern for worldly matters seems to start and end at the coastlines of this little colony they've set up in the Pacific.

As a result of their ignorance, I'm stuck in places with unlikely names like 'Himeji' or 'Tsurumi-Ryokuchi', when I really should be here, trading anecdotes and wisdom with you. Of course, I have all the best intentions about writing little electronic notes or even an actual letter, but then the other half of my castaway life takes me to a dinner party or moving picture show, and the intentions get shoved back another day.

The longer this situation persists, the less likely it becomes that a little note will suffice. When that happens, I decide that I must sit down and compose a tome - such as this one - which takes time that I typically don't have. It's the law of diminishing correspondence, in which the length of time between the last contact and the proposed contact is directly proportional to the length of the correspondence itself. It's an Occam's Razor sort of paradox, and I suspect that if I took the time spent thinking about these things, and spent it composing and sending letters, I could save myself all that time thinking about these things.

This has been a long and meandering way to say that I have been really busy, that that's really not a very good reason for losing touch, and that I'm very sorry for allowing it to happen.

I'll do better.

How many licks does it take? Approximately 1095 days' worth.

I'm looking at the final words written by our purple friend, on my desk calendar, in the box marked July 18th. It reads : "Roy - 6:00".

If I'd known they were the last words, I would have made them more eloquent; more resounding; more soul-licking. But I didn't know - we never do, do we? We'd certainly enjoy that last cookie a lot more if we'd noticed that it was the last. But no. We absent-mindedly chomp it down and reach into the bag with confidence and bravado - to find only crumbs.

I don't even like Roy, and that meeting was a drag.

C'est la vie de la stylo....

That was all last week, and now they're gone, because a bunch of guys with a crane are building a solid wall of scaffolding up the side of the building. I guess scaffolding is the natural enemy of the crow. Seems like a clumsy weapon to have to drag around to ward off the crows, but I'm glad those guys showed up. I can see the crows circling over by the castle, eyeing the scaffolding and cawing to each other about it.

I understand that when the crow-repellant scaffolding is up, the fellas are going to take the opportunity to paint all the balconies. This means, of course, that they will have to drape one of those gigantic tarps down the whole side of the building, obliterating my one and only view through my one and only window. I've been watching the progress of the anti-crow defense shield, and they should appear outside my window in an hour or so. Should I offer them coffee? Should I shoo them away like I do with the pigeons? Should I thank them for making my balcony look nice?

At least they got rid of the crows.

When I was young, I was scared a lot of the time. I wasn't scared of being beaten up on the playground; I wasn't scared of big machines that could tear something off my body and discard it; I wasn't scared of loud noises or of half-heard, out of place noises; there was nothing in my closet; I knew that the snakes under my bed wouldn't bother me if I didn't bother them; I didn't fear heights, depths, fire or ice. Small fears included the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, the Child Catcher from Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, Sleestaks, and bats. Bats still get me, but that's only because they're pure evil and should be systematically removed from our planet. But even these fears passed in time (except for the bats), and left me with the only real, big-time, ice-water in the stomach, lose sleep at night Fear. That one was, of course, The Bomb.

Like probably 99% of the people reading this, I grew up with The Bomb as a fact of my universe, and in a developing mind, it ranks right up there with the other immutables: "objects in Earth gravity accelerate at 9m/sec/sec", "Because I said so", and "the planet will probably be reduced to a smoldering match head before you're 12". There were people - responsible adults - in the 70's, who were actually teaching children the grisly facts of nuclear war. Why? What possible good could it have done to tell us about entire cities vaporized in a millisecond? What exactly did they expect us to do about it?

Living here in the 21st century, we chuckle in superior glee at the elementary school training films from the 50's and 60's - the ones with the Bell and Howell Man telling rows of scrubbed and smiling buttoned-down children to get under the desk when they heard the alarms. I guess the desks in the 50's were made of pure lead, and could shield Eddie Haskell and The Beav from 100 mph radioactive winds. By the time it came for us to be reassured in the 70's, the Bell and Howell Man was pretty sure we were screwed, and left us to our collective neurosis. I don't remember too many people patting us on the head and telling us not to worry. The message was as loud and insistent as an Emergency Broadcast System tone: "Worry".

exactly like you'd expect, except with less Martin

Sheen.

The weather has been a low of 22 and a high of 33, and

the five-day forecast says that's the way things are

going to be for the next little while. No complaints

about atmosphere - in fact, I can see it, so I know

it's there.

I've already eaten more in the last 24 hours than I

have in the last 24 days, and I think it's cost me

around $10 so far. 30-40 cent beer seems like a bad

idea, but, when in Rome...

There are approximately 1 million people on 250,000

scooters, just on this block, and those who aren't

trying to get me to drive or ride one are trying to

kill me with them. I had to side-step a guy earlier

today who was riding his scooter through a shopping

centre, and since no one else batted an eye, neither did

I.

The people here are nice, and seem worried that I

don't have enough coconuts or t-shirts or Yankees hats

or orange pop or dishes or cigarettes or silk or shoes

or rice or sandwiches or hammocks or pictures of Ho

Chi Minh or carved motorcycles or gum or books by

Jeffrey Archer or lighters. Maybe they're right -

maybe I don't have enough of those things.

There are also quite a few young men who think I'm

spending entirely too little time with their various

sisters, and seem eager to help me out of this jam.

I've tried to explain that I already have four

sisters, but they don't seem to understand what I

mean, and slowly shake their heads and mutter

something which I will assume has something to do with

my being a stupid American.

I'll try to send something else from here if I can,

but if I don't, just assume that everything's ok, and

I'm loaded down with every type of consumer product

created before 1990, and I can't get to a computer.

Until next year,

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from here.