You are hereby honorably discharged from your duties as a Japanese citizen

Talking about the "most famous" Japanese person outside Japan turns into a generation issue I would think, but I don't think that it would too far off to say that the wife of the late John Lennon of the Beatles, Yoko Ono probably is at least one of the most well known Japanese people world-wide.

However, something I find quite amusing is the ambivalence towards Yoko Ono that the Japanese media shows to her here in Japan. It is true that Yoko Ono has spent most of her adult life outside Japan (I'm not sure if she's now a naturalized US citizen or not, but I would guess that it's not unlikely). Her Japanese is of course completely fluent during the rare occasions that she does an appearance in the Japanese media (to my surprise I once saw her in one of those stupid variety shows with comedian duo 99) but her mannerism gives her away as a long time expatriate.

The thing that I find most amusing though, is that when her name is written in Japanese, they almost always chose to write it in the Katakana alphabet and not through the Chinese Kanji Characters (the Katakana alphabet is primarily used for foreign words/names). So in the media, it's written as "オノ　ヨーコ" instead of "小野 洋子". Since the katakana alphabet is primarily used to write foreign names it gives quite an odd impression, particularly since she was born in Japan and thus have formal Chinese characters.

I'm not sure whether it's her idea to have her name written in katakana or whether it's the media that for some reason has chosen to write it like that; but it does give an impression of "non-Japaneseness". Considering that she otherwise is usually treated with some amount of respect here in Japan (although most Japanese people probably doesn't care that much unless they're Beatles fans), but it gives an impression of her having been honorably discharged from her duties as a Japanese person. Remember, don't ask, don't tell!

How to emphasize a breakthrough (or not)

Sometimes I focus too much on the insanity going on in my current company and forget that it's almost as insane, or even worse, in most other companies around.
.
Recently I talked to a friend of mine working in pharmaceutical company here in Japan and he told me, with a very tired expression, on how a product marketing team in his company, about to launch a new drug had decided to talk about how it will "create a breakthrough in treatment of disease X, just like the movie Avatar revolutionized 3D cinema!".
.
After coming over the first shock of the ridiculousness of comparing new treatments for serious diseases to movies in the entertainment business, I started to see the opportunities that this could create in case it became industry standard to compare medical treatments to movies.
.
For one of our dying older products from the 80's that has seen it's brightest days, I'm thinking of creating a campaign comparing it to either Roadhouse, Next of Kin or Red Dawn. Something like "This product did for the treatment regime of disease X just the same way as Roadhouse added to the throw away 80's violent action movies; a small diversion and something for the fans but not much else" or maybe compare one of our urology catheters to "revolutionized urologic catheters in the same way as the Crying Game revolutionized penis exposure in major films".

The opportunities are endless!

Let's Domestic Abuse!

I think it's well known that Japan is the land of sometimes downright odd English, something that is catalogued pretty well over at the site Engrish.com and over at neighbor blogger Penguin. After almost ten years in Japan, most of it just slip by as background noise as you get used to it, but there has been a few things that caught my attention previously (thinking of "the toy" pants, "Minority" t-shirt and "I'm your C***" t-shirt back in ancient history).

But sometimes, odd English is not the issue as much as the downright disturbing messages that you can find on t-shirt. This t-shirt in the picture, I found in a local "anything goes" store and if you have difficulties seeing it properly in the picture it says "That's twice! Even my dad never hit me!".

I like the combination of making a t-shirt on the theme of domestic abuse and the added implications that a father usually would hit his children. Unfortunately they didn't have it in baby size, otherwise I would be a sure buy for Baby Sunshine!

No, it doesn't get better, it just gets worse and worse

With Mother Salaryman haunting the household, and adding work and baby Sunshine to that, things are quite busy as you can imagine. But with a three day weekend coming up now (yep, Monday is one of those great made-up holidays, "Sports day" this time), there will be some breathing room at least.

Last time I met up with dear old mother, she told me that she had joined a bridge club in the hometown in Sweden, for retirees. She was quite excited as she told me of this new found hobby and how many new people she met through the events. However, after a few minutes of excitement, she got a bit sadder and added; "no one wants to partner up and play with me though, they say I'm too bad at it...".

With Mother Salaryman back here in Japan, I felt a certain need to inquire as to whether this bullying had continued or whether she had started to get some enjoyment out of the Bridge club now after a year. Again, Mother quite excitedly launched into an explanation on how things had started to brighten up and how she had found her Bridge partner; it seems like the fellow that she got teamed up with had suffered some form of stroke and brain damage, leaving him quite prone to forget things and in addition, a previous accident had left him with only one finger left on one of his hands, making it difficult for him to properly manage to hold his hand on his own... But apparently she found this rising star to latch on to in the local Bridge tournaments...

In the end, Mother proudly announced that she's no longer always the person at the end of the ranking, sometimes her partner falls behind her... Well, I think the lesson learnt here is that for most of us regular guys, it just doesn't get better, it just gets worse, but you can always cover up with someone that's doing worse than you....

The most possible trouble with the least effort

I'm a "corporate Japan main office" type of guy at the moment which means that my tentacles reach out pretty far within and outward in the organization, both people located in our Japanese factory, local reps and people in the overseas functions. My main tool of the trade is e-mail, if the Internet connection goes down for even one hour I'll be whining about it to no end and while I hang around, drink coffee and disrupt everyone's work while waiting for the connection to resume.

Our reps are different though, they live and die by their mobile phones and this can sometimes result in culture clashes as I've been sending someone some important communication by mail while the rep just checks e-mail once a day and not even that if he's busy travelling around in his cozy little car doing whatever it is reps are doing (looking at our sales figures from some regions, it is clear that selling is not prioritized everywhere) and expecting me to call instead of mailing. Resulting in a delay of information and all the problems that could come with it.

Now, I do respect that they rely on their phones more than the office people but I always find it a bit inefficient as you can only annoy one person at a time and with no convenient copy+paste voice function, you need to repeat it again to annoy another person. Through e-mail, I can easily annoy and cause additional work for as many people as I see fit and with copy+paste and forward functions, there is no limitations to it.

E-mail truly is a CTMD (Communication Tool of Mass Destruction) with the capability to capacity to annoy a large numbers of human beings indiscriminately!

You're not just telling me what I want to hear now, are you?

Last week, me and a colleague had a meeting with one of our distributors to discuss one of our products that they were interested in starting selling. The distributor is made up of a bunch of really friendly guys and our companies have a quite long relationship in doing business together, so we are generally quite favorable to helping them out if possible.

However, during the meeting, when discussing their assumed projections a few years forward, it became quite clear that the volumes and prices that we were discussing really wasn't that attractive to us and could bring more trouble than it would be worth to us in the long run since some up front investments in getting systems set up etc. would be required.

As we were discussing and our counterpart mentioned the forecasted volumes and saw my big frown and concerned expression when they were quite significantly lower than we had been led to believe from earlier meetings, the guy promised that he would discuss with his boss an take another look at the volumes, but during our talk, it seemed like any significant changes in volumes would be difficult...

Two hours later, I'm back in the office and get an e-mail from them with a new estimate, this time the volumes are up five times from what we discussed in the meeting, turning it from a possible "volunteer" job to quite an attractive future business to us. I can't help but shake the feeling that I over-frowned it in the meeting...

Granny Goodness is coming

The Japanese in exile Salaryman Mother is now incoming to the island of Japan to visit the genetically 75% Japanese little granddaughter, haunt the household and generally hang around in the Tokyo area for a a little more than a week. To me, this is no particularly big deal since I have spent way too many years living with the mother in my younger days and am somewhat used to her antics.

Now, the relationship to the MOTHER-IN-LAW for a Japanese woman is quite different though, particularly if the MOTHER-IN-LAW also happens to be Japanese (as in the case here, even though she's spent most of her life in exile). So Mrs. Sunshine has spent the last days trying to come to terms that she'll be hosting the MOTHER-IN-LAW for quite a few nights and going from despair and bitter fatalism as I merrily entertain myself and Baby Sunshine with a few fun bouts of playing Peekaboo.

Normally, the MOTHER-IN-LAW would normally go under the revered title of "Okaa-sama" which is an extra honorable form of "mother" (note the "sama" as a suffix instead of the regular "san"), but mom has asked to not be called that and instead be called by her name with a regular courtesy "san" attached after it. This caused quite a stir in the Sunny side of the family and is often brought up when the extended family comes over and discussed with half-amazement and half-amusement and followed comments on how long my mom must have lived overseas to be so casual (with implications that she's lost some of her "Japaneseness").

To add to the stress for poor Mrs. Sunshine, the mother has this great habit of complementing her in Japanese with me there, then turning to me and telling me what she really thinks in half-whispering Swedish in a really obvious way (which often is quite different from what she said in Japanese).

In any case, the general strategy will be to try and divert as much attention as possible to Baby Sunshine, but it might fail miserably as mother has yet fully embraced the role as Grandma, we'll work on it.

Let's take a look at the statistics...

Ok, I have to admit that the coporate insanity, shifting weather and cranky baby Sunshine has diverted my energy in other directions than the blog these last weeks. So while waiting for the energy and inspiration to return, I can give you all a quick look behind the scenes of this great blog.

I started up the writing in early 2007 and have kept it up since then and aim to continue as long as I enjoy it. Here you can see how the statistics developed, but it's not really completely accurate since, for some reason, hits throughout most of 2008 were double-counted, so the year the number of visitors really started to grow was in 2009.

Well, not particularly exciting post perhaps, but could be a bit interesting for those of you who have, or are thinking of starting up your own blog.

"Autumn Equinox Day" - As accurate as always!

Last Thursday was a holiday in Japan; "The Autumn Equinox Day" which officially signals the change from Summer to Autumn. I never ceases to amaze me how accurate this day seem to have been the last years (at least as far as my feeble mind can recall...).

.

Last Wednesday we had 31 degrees celcius with high humidity, quite hot and miserable. On Thursday and the official coming of Autumn, it turned to 21 degrees celcius and quite chilly overnight.

At least this hopefully means that the miserably hot summer of 2010 now is finally over!

.

(Ok, I admit it, I couldn't come up with an amusing picture that illustrated this somewhat dull post, so I went with Christian comics; can never really go wrong with that...)

The Difference Between K-pop and J-pop in Pictures

In recent years, there's been quite the boom of korean pop artists here in Japan and the whole K-pop phenomena. First I was going to write a lengthy academic post discussing the differences between K-pop and J-pop and do an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of each, but then I realized that this is probably best illustrated for you with pictures.

First, let's see a representative example of a J-pop girl's group...

Then, let's compare it to the most recent K-pop stars here in Japan; "Girl's Generation"

Of course, it would not be fair to not make the same comparison between boy groups either, so find a representative example of a J-pop boy band...

Which you can compare to a typical K-pop example...

The above comparison should provide all the information you need to understand the differences between K-pop and J-pop!

(To help you out a bit; in J-Pop, the girls look like kids and the boys look like girls!)

Buying a house in Japan Part 8 - The LOAN!

(Go here to read up on the story so far)

Having found the perfect place for the Salaryman family and sitting down in the office of the real estate agent to start getting the purchase in motion, there was the slight issue of the loan we needed to take...

Basically we sat down and needed to fill out about hundreds of pages of forms to declare our intent to buy the house. Also, we needed to, within a few days, make a cash down payment of about a million Japanese yen (roughly $10,000 USD) which would not be returned in case we changed our minds our wanted to cancel the purchase. "Fair enough" we thought since our intent would withdraw the house from the market and make sure that it wouldn't be snatched up form under our noses.

Now, the only issue we faced was to secure the finances we needed to actually buy the house (generally, you need to cough up between $300,000-500,000 USD for a decent new house in the Tokyo area). Since we, the Salaryman family lacked the means to buy the house with cash, taking a loan was the only feasible option, and this is where all the hilarity started...

I had done some basic research on loans and stuff before we ventured out on this whole house buying adventure and was aware that most Japanese banks require the person to have "permanent residence" visa status and that a few banks might grant a loan even if that's not the case. I also knew that a number of other more exotic options existed that had no Japanese visa demands, like taking a loan from a non-Japanese bank etc. It should also be added that I didn't have permanent residence status at this stage, but was not particularly concerned about getting that with ~10 years in Japan, stable job, Japanese mother and Japanese wife.

Sitting down with the sales representative, we explained our situation and asked about his advice for getting a loan secured, something which he was more than happy to do since the money would end up in his company (likely with a nice commission for him as well for making the sale). After a few calls and a few solid "no, not unless he has permanent residence status" and some "we would need to look into this more in detail" that might take more time than we had to get the purchase done by the time we wanted, one of the largests banks here in Japan; the Mizuho bank stated that "we can grant the loan assuming that this person has filed an application for permanent residence".

With Mrs. Sunshine coming from a family with quite a few of the male members working in the banking sector and considering the stability of Mizuho, we decided that that would be the best option for us to go. The only problem was that we needed to get the visa submission in within a few days (yep, hadn't done anything really to prepare...)...

Coming up next: Visa applications, shady lawyers and massage parlors

Romasophie - Healing and Spanking in perfect harmony!

The latest years, Japan has been relatively calm on the "bizarre cults" side of life. Last year, I did a quick review of some of the more exotic cults out there in Japan (check it out here) but since then, it's been very quiet.

However, last week a new and quite interesting little movement calling themselves "The Romasophie Association" (check them out here in Japanese) made the news. It's not easy to understand what they really try to be about, but it seems to be some mix of healing, "energy manipulation" and some anthroposophy thrown into the mix as well on the spiritual side, but mixed with a bizarre imagery of miniskirts, Mexican wrestling masks and tight tops. Somehow it seems like they managed to turn this into a minor business with seminars, lectures, books, videos and bizarre festivals combining female wrestling, interpretive dance and spiritual talks. Quite a riot it seems.

This little cult came into the news spotlight after some pretty heavy-handed spanking abuse of a female member got revealed in their little cultish collective. The leaders of the cult are husband and wife team (see the picture) the Iwazawa.

Apparently the cult's little collective gathered some notoriety in their neighborhood as their cult member (primarily females it seems) stood out a bit in their colored tights or miniskirts.

As far as abusive cults go, this one seems quite harmless, they didn't gather more than a handful of members and did the standard routine of getting their member to donate their money to the "movement" and getting their members to do the chores for them, doling out punishment when things weren't done the "right way". The somewhat harsh spanking which forced one of the members to seek medical attention seem to have been a slight miscalculation on the Iwazawa's part as things started to come apart from there.

In the big book of Japanese cults, the Romasophie movement will not be more than a short parenthesis perhaps, but a slightly colorful and amusing one at least, so if you are feeling a bit down, please enjoy a little interpretive dance, Romasophie style here!

...and let that be a lesson to you all!

Ok, last Friday the trial of Manabu Oshio for that whole sordid affair involving a dead hostess, ecstasy and very dedicated managers (catch up here), finished up.

So yeah, he ended up with 2 years and 6 months in the slammer, don't know the correct terminology here, but it was judged that he had supplied the girl with the drugs and that she might have been possible to save if he had called an ambulance immediately.

Let that be a lesson to you all. I estimate that it will be very difficult for him to try and re-enter the world of Japanese entertainment, maybe he should write a very emotional book, do some talkshows when he's out and see if he can fool anyone.

Don't make her cranky, you wouldn't like her when she's cranky...

Most of the time Baby Sunshine is a little angel of a baby, but when she gets cranky, she transforms into something completely different ...

So far she has managed to scare of the baby-loving and always pleasant Mother-in-Law, from babysitting her, after a one-to-one 4 hour bout of savage crankiness, especially since the mere sight of a nipple made of artificial material (not attached to a boob at one end) seem to be one trigger of the transformation. She has agreed to babysit her as long as one of her handlers (i.e. me or Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman) is around to control her, which, mind you, kinda defeats the purpose of "babysitting"...

The Alienization of the Japanese people

I can fully understand how Japan is perceived as an exotic country, especially from the viewpoint of a non-Asian country, and it's of course true that there are some interesting peculiarities in Japanese customs and culture. However, if given some thought, I'm sure that this is true for most cultures, although the international exposure of local oddities is probably much lower than for the Japanese.

But at the heart of it all, Japanese are people like any other once you get through the cultural barriers. This might be easier said than done since it is difficult without strong knowledge of the Japanese language. Something that I do find extremely annoying though is when people, either knowingly or due to ignorance, throws gasoline onto the fire to reinforce how alien and different the Japanese are from everyone else in the world... Of course, in the world of business and corporate stupidity, due to trying to compress everything into an executive summary that ends up saying nothing at all, this can take pretty interesting forms.

In a recent Japanese healthcare market report from a US company I looked through in work, I found the below description on Japanese patients and their views versus physicians:

"The situation is sustained by the Japanese beliefs in conforming and an unwillingness to question seniority and/or implied authority. The honorific term for a medical doctor, “sensei”, is the same as that used for a teacher, and presumes that as the trained expert, the doctor knows best. Patients are extremely unlikely to dare to question the treatment their physician has decided upon. In many cases, similarly, the doctor feels under no obligation to explain even the basics of the treatment or regime they are prescribing, and may not discuss possible side effects." .

.
Like most things like this, the text takes a basis from reality, although an outdated one (not taking into account that Japan, Japanese people and the culture has changed in the last ~15 years), a misunderstanding of the word "sensei" (very common and it's not as fantastic to be called a "sensei" as some people might think, you could be the expert in building Gundam models and be sure to find someone that is impressed enough that they label you a sensei) and simplifies thing into pure stupidity.

My favorite part is how the text boldly states that “(The Japanese patients) presumes that as the trained expert, the doctor knows best”. I wonder how society works outside Japan if people do not presume that a trained expert knows best? In the West, when riding an airplane, does this mean that all the passengers question that the pilot knows best? Just because he/she is a trained expert it doesn’t mean that that persons judgement should be trusted?

Don't get me wrong, I don't have any problems with people poking fun at some of the more interesting oddities of Japanese culture (or Swedish for that matter, plenty of material there too), but these broad generalizations based on outdated stereotypes that I sometimes come across in business oriented material really annoys me.