サラリメン

Went to a Christmas party last night hosted at a cafe called Spoon. It was put on by the German language classes at KGU (Kwansei Gakuin University), and was a ton of fun. Anke, the token German exchange student, was I think made into a celebrity for a day. She ate it up.

I was talking with Kenta this morning about an article he'd been reading over Saturday brunch. I can't find it in English, but the gist of it is that the government has passes a law that will extend the legal maximum of hours a company can have its employees work per year. This is bad news for a nation that is already facing a mounting suicide crises, and media-flurries over deaths from overwork.

Not to mention the fact that お父さん (otousan, father) isn't even coming home this weekend. Nishinomiya is in central Japan, in between the major port city of Kobe to the west and Osaka to the east, which is the second largest and second most important city in Japan. But he spends most of his time closer to 東京 (toukyou, Tokyo), and has an apartment there that he stays in during the week. Like most Japanese males, お父さん works hours that are crazy, and as Christmas approaches getting crazier. He's a nice guy, but I don't see him much.

Generalizations about an Oriental or Confucian work ethic aside, it goes without saying that the employment culture here is very different. I don't want to over-state the importance of life-time employment policies, because to be honest they only started to appear in the 1970s, apply to a minority of Japanese, and are already showing signs of decline. But in terms of personal identity, I think corporations play an integral role for Japanese (by which I suppose I mean Japanese men). Japanese businessmen spend a lot of time eating and drinking together, building team work, attending mandatory group picnics and the like.

Anyway, I could blather on for some time about this, but the most concise way I can think of expressing this is to look at the language. A Japanese professor in a TV show we were watching in class on Friday pointed out that in English you say "get a job", but the equivalent phrase in Japanese is quite different. The phrase is 会社に入る　(kaisha ni hairu), and it literally means "enter a company". The verb is the same one you use when you are, for instance, entering a house, or a bath for that matter.

Anyway, that's all for today. I'm going to see ルミナリエ (ruminarie, Luminaria) tomorrow night, it's a spectacle of Christmas lights in Kobe. I'll post pictures, of course.

PS: Some worrying news from Tokyo as the resident conservative government pushes Japan's political climate back towards the pre-war Imperial Rescript on Education in the eleventh hour of the current session of parliament, and at the same time upgrades the Special Defense Forces to a ministry-level body. Some more reasons not to elect a party headed by the grandson of a warcriminal.