Rumble

Recently, I've been doing a lot of essay correction work for one of my students. This is relatively unusual as most lessons are spent actually speaking with one another rather than my staring down at a paper scribbling corrections in silence. During these corrections, it's so quiet that I can hear the clock tick.

As of late, my student's stomach has been loudly rumbling during these periods of quiet correction. While she's very embarrassed, I reassure her that it's not a problem at all and it happens to everyone. She feels obliged to tell me it's because she eats lunch just before coming over and I continue to tell her that it neither troubles nor offends me. In fact, I've become adept at ignoring all sorts of bodily noises after years in Japan including the sort which are accompanied by less than rosy odors. The human body doesn't obey the will of its owner, and this is more often so as you get older.

In an effort to hopefully make my student feel more at ease, I told her a story of an incident at my former job about 12 years ago. In addition to making textbooks, my former company made CDs of various types of content to accompany the books. For one of the books devoted to improving TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) scores, my company decided it'd save some money by making a male coworker and I do the voice acting in the recording studio.

On the surface, voice acting may not seem like much of a chore, but it's actually quite difficult. Voice actors in Japan ask for anything between 10,000-25,000 yen an hour ($97-$242) (or at least they did at that time, rates may have changed by now). In fact, I believe the woman they hired for the Japanese voice acting chores may have been on the upper end of that range. Since my coworker and I were both North American (and therefore had the "right" accent for such work in the opinions of the Japanese), had reasonably nice voices, and, most importantly of all, were only being paid 2,000 yen ($19) an hour, we were pressed into service.

The sessions were held in a ramshackle studio in the armpit areas of Shinjuku. We sweat because using the air conditioning in the small, tightly-sealed space caused too much noise and would be picked up by the mics. What's worse, certain heavy traffic nearby would shake the room and the vibrations could be heard. It was hardly the ideal set-up for recording, but I'm guessing it had the same benefit that my coworker and I did. That is, it was cheap.

We would have to record for hours on end and we were not up to the task. Neither of us had any experience and there are certain "tricks of the trade" we weren't aware of like making sure you don't blow air out of your lips too strongly when you pronounce a "f" or a "p" sound as it'll make a strange noise on the recording. It also seemed that we never had enough "acting" skill and were both constantly told we sounded too "flat" and had to infuse our speaking about things like exchanging business cards or buying a pair of pants with more life and energy. They also expected us to time the pauses between dialogs and sentences by counting in our heads rather than offering us a watch, clock or timer, and I was always starting too fast or slow and being chastised for not waiting long enough. It was hard enough to focus on the script and not flubbing up or losing my place, not puffing out too much air on my "f's" and "p's" without having to silently count between each sentence.

After sitting in that small room for hours on end with the oxygen running out and the heat building up and being constantly criticized, it was rather difficult to build up much of an energetic vibe. Some sessions lasted 3-4 hours and we were pretty wrecked by the end of the first one. If all the various inadequacies of the soundproofing of the studio weren't enough to frustrate our progress, my coworker started to have serious empty stomach rumblings. They were so loud that the mics were clearly picking them up and we had to keep stopping and doing things over. Eventually, someone ran out and bought a bunch of bananas at a "Mom and Pop" fruit shop near the studio and he crammed a few down to try and quiet his disruptive digestive system.

After these experiences, I never wanted to set foot in a recording studio again and believe voice actors who are good at what they do deserve every yen of their high fees. Getting back to my student though, I told her this story mainly to let her know that it happens to everyone, and that it's clearly out of one's control. Even when you desperately need to stop it like in the situation we were in, there's nothing you can do.

Student Roster - February 2008

About a year or so ago, I wrote out my student roster for the sake of my own future recollection, knowing it was of little interest to anyone but me. However, this is my blog and I'll bore if I want to. ;-) I am posting this on a weekend day when most folks are outside enjoying their real lives (and I'm busy working) and less likely to read this blog, so I'm trying to exercise a little consideration here, but those of you who aren't interested in profiles of people you don't know and never will might want to find something good on T.V.

Looking back at my previous post, I'm surprised to see that I had 12 students at that time as I didn't think I had so many at that time. That being said, one was a "temporary" who was never meant to attend more than 3 lessons and one of the ones who appeared in that list showed up for one lesson then vanished not only from contact with me but the agency that sent her to me. Sometimes I wish I knew a little more about the types of agreements the agency makes with students as it's not uncommon to get a student or two who will seem to be "dabbling" and then go away after a one to six lessons lessons or after sampling several "demonstration" lessons with 2 or 3 different teachers. I have a feeling there may be some system whereby the demos or a limited number of lessons at the beginning may be cheaper than long-term lesson contracts. It could be they offer such lessons as "bait", but I can't be sure. The inner workings of the business and financial situation are often not explained to teachers.

At the moment, I have 11 students and 6 of them have been with me for over a year and appeared in my former post. Here is the current roster:

Wednesday:

(5:15 pm) 20-year-old university student who is studying French as her major. She works at a clothing retailer known for cheap casual clothing part-time and likes watching "Lost" and Disney sitcoms like "Hannah Montana". She's one of my 5 "survivors" from last year and one of my favorites. She tends to pick new vocabulary up quickly though she doesn't study much outside of the class because she's so busy at university. She's been studying and taking the TOEFL test and recently got accepted into an exchange student program. She'll be headed to Montana to attend university there for one school year starting from August and I'll be losing her at that point, unfortunately.

(7:45 pm) A woman in her early 30's who works at a bank doing accounting work. I seem to get a lot of female accounting workers for some reason. This student enjoys surfing and used to live by the sea, but recently bought her own condo in central Tokyo (with a hefty 30-year mortgage). She's unusual looking for a Japanese person because she's got very Western-looking eyes and you wouldn't necessarily conclude she was Asian by looking at her face. She's also had more of her share of being followed around by weirdos than my other students, though I don't know if these facts are related. She also goes to Costco more regularly than anyone I know and buys food which is always more than she can actually eat.

Thursday:

(4:00 pm) A 61-year old man who used to be a government bureaucrat then worked for an insurance company and is now retired. He has traveled all over the world and has a great interest in politics, social issues, and news. His vocabulary is advanced and he's very liberal and open-minded. He has lessons not only to improve his speaking for travel but also for the stimulation of discussing things with a foreign person. He has lamented to me on several occasions that he believes he cannot have such discussions with his friends because they think he's weird both for his viewpoints and for wanting to talk about them. His main goal is travel, particularly to world heritage sites, but his elderly mother is ill and he can't do what he'd like. I often sense he feels a bit trapped by his situation and once he asked me if I thought he was selfish for wanting his mother to get better mainly so he could pursue his dreams. I told him that I didn't think it was selfish at all to work hard your whole life then want to fulfill your dreams after retiring.

(7:00 pm) I haven't taught the student who will be in this time slot yet. I've only been told that she's a beginner and a nurse. In my experience with beginners, they don't tend to last as long as intermediate to advanced students. I think that the one-to-one lessons are a bit intense for them at their level and, when they don't experience rapid improvement, they tend to move on to give up. However, I remain optimistic!

Friday:

(6:00 pm) A 64-year old semi-retired man who is my second "survivor" from last year. This older gentleman is a dynamo for his age. He works part-time teaching people at community centers how to use computers and cell phones as well as proctors insurance exams for certification. He takes social dancing classes and has been on adult homestays in America. Though his level isn't particularly high, he's easy to teach because he plans for the lesson himself by choosing a grammar point or phrase he wants to practice and he's very self-motivating in carrying out the practice. I don't have to light a fire under his ass to get him to talk and that's rare. He's one of only two of my students who are married. He's also the student who holds the record for having taken the most lessons with me to date. Last Friday was his 100th lesson.

Saturday:

(10:45 am) A sales support staff person in her early 30's who works for a major computer hardware and services company. She looks about 8 years younger than her age and presents herself with a sense of energy and vitality that I envy. She really enjoys sports and golf in particular and is very dedicated to her job. I believe she studies English because her company is a foreign one, but also for travel. She has studied Italian cooking both in Japan and on a culinary tour of Italy.

(12:00 pm) An office worker at a major fashion designer's Japanese branch in her late 20's who is mainly studying English for doing business in Italy. In fact, as I write this post, she's in Italy now 3/4 of the way through a month-long business trip. Though this woman is a bit reserved, she's my kind of person on many levels. She's thoughtful, analytical, and candid. She's never frivolous or giggly, but is forthcoming and friendly in a way which isn't put on or overdone. She's also quite serious about improving her English and does work on her own in addition to coming to lessons.

(3:30 pm) A 24-year-old insurance company worker who would like to learn English for travel abroad. As I write this, she's in Hawaii for a vacation and she is another of my "survivors". She's a classic example of a well-rounded young woman in Japan. She takes flower arranging classes, works full-time, has an interest in live shows and performances of many types, travels, and reads a variety of books on politics, art, travel, and culture. When she first came to me, she had problems making sentences or having a basic conversation, but now can express herself much more freely, though not necessarily quickly. I've seen concrete improvement in her ability and that's a rare treat for a teacher in Japan since students tend to either bug out before you see improvement or they don't tend to take it seriously enough to get much better.

Sunday:

(10:45 am) A marketing representative for a pharmaceutical company who is in her mid 20's, this student is the younger sister of the woman who works for the fashion designer. She's the person who has been trying to break into journalism, but so far has only managed to get work doing freelance transcribing. I've only taught her about a half dozen times and don't have a good handle on her yet. She's nice and a bit more outgoing than her sister, though not nearly as hard-working when it comes to independent study. She mainly wants to improve her English skills as a means of selling herself to a publication company.

(12:00 pm) A 41-year-old company worker who was new to me when I wrote about her last year (when she came at 3:00 pm). She continues to work in the accounting section of an architectural firm and still hates her job rather passionately. Ironically, she was recently promoted but was completely indifferent to her elevation in status. She's been talking about quitting for the entire year or so that I've been teaching her, but hasn't found the kind of job she feels is ideal. She doesn't want to job hop frequently so she isn't keen on leaving her current job for an interim job. Her goal for study, career advancement, remains the same. She likes to attend Japanese puppet shows (bunraku) and live performances of artists who might be considered "has beens" in the West because they were popular in the 80's or 70's.

Random days and times:

A 32-year-old freelance translator who makes subtitles for mostly English (sometimes other languages) movies for the Japanese audience. Though she has been officially "with me" as a student for about two years, I've actually only seen her about 25 times because of the sporadic nature of her work. She only schedules lessons when she has a project which she needs help with. Her goal isn't to build her overall level but to make sure she does the best work she can when she makes subtitles. She took a part-time job at an office (doing subtitling) for better financial security so she could move into her own place last year. I don't tend to spend much time doing free conversation with her because of the nature of her lessons, but I do know she enjoys beading and travels to resort areas in Japan several times a year.

A 44-year old former pharmacist who currently attends a U.S. college on a military base. She's the second of two of my students who is married. At present, I'm seeing her 2-3 times a week to help her complete a copious number of assignments for a distance course she's taking. Among my current crop of students, she's probably the person with the highest level ability and definitely spends the most time doing independent study. She's very dependent on me in getting her college work under control and tells me sometimes that she's afraid I'll leave Japan and she won't know how to cope.

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Comparing last year's list to this years, I'd say I've gotten a better crop of people through time. I have more people who are easier to engage in conversation and are earnest about improving. I'm also pleased to have retained about 50% of them as it's always a better experience if you know each other well. I'm a bit saddened that I'm going to lose the young woman who is headed for Montana in August. It's always a bit difficult losing students who you've taught for a long time and gotten to know pretty well.

One of the interesting things about their departures is that they almost always ask for my e-mail address and ask if I'd mind if they write me. I always give it to them, but I never hear from them again. I figure they're sincere in their desire to keep in touch, but since the vast majority of them leave me under circumstances where they are having a major life change, they find themselves too busy and preoccupied to take the time to compose messages to me. I'm not exactly broken-hearted about it, mind you. I'd be happy to hear from them if they wrote, but I don't mistake a friendly business-based relationship for a friendship.

Room Without a View

One of the few trees outside our apartment on one of the few days that it snows.

It's snowing today in Tokyo. I know what you're thinking... 'snow, big deal.' Actually, I agree. Having grown up in the northeast, where it wasn't uncommon for us to experience copious amounts of snow, the few centimeters Tokyo sees every few years doesn't fill me with delight.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that, after living here for nearly 18 years, some of the shine of seeing snow falling has been revived. In fact, I might even be compelled to go out and walk around for a few minutes in it, take a few pictures, and attempt to wax poetic about the clean, quiet beauty of snow. Actually, that last part is a lie. I don't think I ever do anything poetic.

As some of my more astute readers may have noticed, my posting has become more erratic over the last several days after having been fairly steady for well over a month. This isn't because I have nothing to say but rather because I have no time or energy to say anything. This week, I'm working the equivalent of a full-time schedule (about 36 hours) between telephone testing and teaching privately. This requires me to remain tethered to the phone and remain in the apartment from about 10:00-8:00 for the better part of the work week to either answer the incessantly ringing phone or speak with the students who show up at the door. I spend the time between calls dashing around trying to clean and tidy up the apartment in preparation for the private lessons. It's pretty hectic.

There's no going "over the wall".

Working from home is largely a blessing because I save about an hour and a half a day in commuting time compared to when I worked in an office (though I make a fraction of my former income), but, on days like today, where something atypical is happening and I'm shackled to my living room, it can feel a bit confining. It doesn't help that the view from my living room is relatively bleak and uninteresting. In fact, the wall that separates our apartment building from the house next door gives one a bit of a felling of being incarcerated. I'm sure though that it's a pretty typical view for anyone living in Tokyo on the first or second floor of buildings.

Getting back to the snow though, if you ask Japanese folks who were born and raised in Tokyo if it snows in winter, they always say that it does. Technically, this is correct, but only in that every few years, there appear to be a few days in which a bit of snow falls.

Memories of how often and how much falls appear to be embellished at times. One of my students is 20 years old. That means that I have lived here for all but the first 2 or 3 years of her life and she has lived in an area not too far from me. She told me that it used to snow in Tokyo more when she was a child and she remembers being able to make snowmen. I was here "when (she) was a child" and I can't recall more than one year in which the conditions she mentions occurred and I'm pretty sure that she couldn't have been more than 5 years old at that time. I figure one of us has an altered memory of the way things have been, though I can't say with any certainty that it isn't me. ;-)

The Mind of a Student (My Speculation)

It's Sunday morning and I've slept in until 9:20 when I scheduled an English lesson for 10:00 am with my English teacher. I rescheduled this lesson from my usual Saturday at 11:00 pm lesson time and insisted on this earlier time because I told my teacher I just had to finish the lesson and be back home by noon. My teacher may have had to get up earlier than usual and prepare for my early arrival, but she said it was OK.

Now that I can't make the scheduled time, I think I'll call within minutes of rolling out of bed, still in a daze and with a cracked voice, and see if I can subtly pressure my teacher into changing my lesson to a later time, so I don't lose any money. Oh, sure, I could cancel the lesson because I can't make it in time or I could come late and take part of the hour, but if I call and state that I just woke up and then remain silent, the teacher might feel obliged to say it'll be alright if I start late. As long as I don't make any suggestions or overtly state what I want to do, the ball is in her court. As long as I don't take responsibility, perhaps I'll get everything I want and my teacher won't mind the fact that I asked her to rearrange her schedule around my needs once and am now asking her to do it again on extremely short notice. Though I know she has another student after me, I don't care about her need to prepare for that student or plans to do anything else in between my lesson and the other student's.

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I honestly don't mind if my students reschedule, cancel or are late. This troubles me not at all. I also don't mind occasionally rearranging my morning schedule to accommodate their needs and then having them be late or cancel. The only thing that drives me crazy is when they call me and when I ask, "would you like to cancel or just have a shorter lesson," they respond with absolute silence. The very act of just saying, "I woke up late" and then not stating any course of action (or answering any questions when given options) is a form of passive coercion in Japan which I don't think I'll ever be able to pry my mind open wide enough to accept with good grace.

And this wasn't the first time this has happened, but I'm sure it won't be the last.

"Consultants"

There have been many times during my business English telephone testing with students when the man on the other end has told me that he has been transferred to his current company from another company as a "consultant". Usually, it has been the case that the man's former company was a big name company like Toyota or NTT and he was working for a company of lesser fame and prestige. (Note: these companies are examples, not the ones my students have actually worked for.)

The curious thing about this situation has been that, when I ask these gentlemen when their stint as consultants will end and they'll return to their former company, they say that they will never return and that their assignment is permanent. After this, I usually ask something like, 'you no longer work for (big name company) then,' they say that, they do indeed still work for that company in addition to their current one.

My confusion results from the fact that, back home, consultants generally don't take up permanent posts at any one company. They either work freelance or they are contracted out on a temporary basis from an agency to spend some time at a succession of companies. For years, I just figured that this was a different way of doing business in Japan and that perhaps the two companies had some sort of joint business or that one company was a subsidiary of the other. In fact, with more advanced students, I've asked if one company was a child of a bigger parent and sometimes the students said that was the case and sometimes not.

Recently, I was enlightened about one aspect of this type of so-called "consultation" by a student who is an accountant. She told me that it's common practice for big corporations to fob off their dead wood to smaller companies as a way of getting rid of them to clear the way for younger, more driven, or more talented employees. The smaller companies accept these employees despite knowing they are being intentionally farmed out for lack of ability because they feel that even less capable employees of big name corporations can bring some "know how" with them and they desire the prestige that comes along with having a worker on staff from a blue chip company. The bigger companies do it (rather than firing such employees) as part of fulfilling their promise of "lifetime employment" in order to keep staff loyalty high.

The most fascinating aspect of all of this isn't that these choices are made but that there is a financial component which one might not anticipate. In order to encourage small and medium-size companies to take on these "consultants", the larger, more well-known company subsidizes the consultant's salary. My student said that it is often the case that about 1/3 of the employee's salary is paid by his former employer and 2/3 is covered by the new, smaller place. This allows both companies (from a certain perspective) to cut their costs while the employee gets the same salary. The big name company avoids keeping the dead wood in their offices as demoralizing "window tribe" (madogiwa-zoku) at full salary. The smaller company gets (what they hope is) an employee who has capabilities they can use at a reduced salary.

Unfortunately, at least in my student's company's case, these employees aren't always worth even 2/3 their salary. She says she feels that the people in her company who have been taking up such positions aren't worthwhile for her company. Nonetheless, I have to admire the ingenuity involved in such a system meant to fulfill the company's promise of lifetime job security to employees who give over their lives to their employers (often just after university graduation). It may not be perfect or productive, but it does seem fair.

Contracts

One of my students works for a major computer company and discussed a bidding war for a contract with a chain of convenience stores (no, it's not the one you're thinking of). During our talk about her situation at work, we talked about the differences between the way Japanese business deals with and regards contracts and American business.

On a layman's level, I've been aware of these differences for quite some time. In general, it has been my understanding that the Japanese do not view contracts as absolutes, but rather as a starting point for business. Customers may ask for services outside of what is stipulated in a contract, for instance, and the company providing the service will comply without feeling put upon in many cases. In the U.S., companies use contracts as a way of limiting demands outside of what is stipulated in writing.

This differing view of contracts and how closely one can be expected to adhere to the terms of one can cause a lot of problems in international business deals, joint ventures, and the Japanese offices of western-based businesses. In the case of the latter, the expectations of the home office abroad can be very different than those of the branch office in Japan. The home office in a western country may have very rigid notions of how a deal should be carried out in terms of goods, services, and payment while the Japanese take a more flexible approach in accord with the expectations of Japanese customers.

For those who come over from western countries and work in Japan under contract, this flexibility can be a big headache because we expect only to do as we are asked under the terms of our contracts. The Japanese will often freely ask all employees (not only the foreign ones) to do tasks which are far outside of any reasonable description of the job you are coming over to do. Helen has mentioned in comments that she was asked to answer the phone like a receptionist while she was a teacher. Turner said he was asked to clean white boards at the end of the day (more in line with a janitor's tasks) when he was a teacher. At my old workplace, office girls had to vacuum the floors and clean the kitchen once a week. Most of the time employees are asked to regularly do things which are outside their job description as a way of saving the cost of hiring someone with the proper job title to do it. Though foreigners often feel they are being asked to work outside their stipulated contractual duties because they're foreigners, the truth is that it's because they are employees and contracts are not seen as iron-clad or limiting in the same way they are in the U.S.

That being said, my discussion with my student this morning showed that the times are changing. More and more businesses are getting serious about following U.S. business practices and laws like SOX. Part of the reason for this is that following these practices clarifies expectations and simplifies transactions, but another reason is that companies can be removed from the stock exchange in the U.S. if they don't follow these guidelines and regulations. Of course, this sort of thing only affects the really big guns. The little guys can still be as wishy-washy as they want.

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Anyone who is interested in learning more about the business practices of various countries can check out Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands. It provides a good overview of the thought process and general ways of doing business in a good many countries.

Presidential Prerogative

Last week, there was quite a fuss made over what was seen as the indulgent and lavish offices of a failed English language school chain's (Nova's) former president's office. News programs showed us how large it was and the amenities that it included such as a big screen T.V., bed, bath with a closet-size sauna, a large tea area, and a big desk. I supposed the outrage was over the fact that he squandered lots of money on such a huge office while failing to pay staff and building a huge debt for his company. While it was a large space for Japan, it didn't strike me as incredibly opulent. In fact, mainly, it struck me as having a really tacky bad Vegas room decor.

In my opinion, it's not unusual for presidents of all companies to indulge their egos to the extent possible. In the U.S., the big cheeses of large companies tend to get private jets, chauffeured transportation, and put up at lavish hotels when they travel. I'd also guess most of them have roomy offices with amenities that the average grunt might envy. However, it's been my experience that even little cheeses will waste money to feed their vanity proportional to their company's size.

My former company, a small business with about 30 employees occupied two floors of a building in Nishi-Shinjuku when I first started working there. The office moved twice while it was still under the control of the president who started the company and he was certain to exercise complete control over how space was portioned out and where everyone was situated during each move. In each case, his office had to be right in front of the largest available window and an air conditioner vent of which he personally could control the temperature.

The president's office also occupied more space than the combined area of no less than 4 cubicles designed for the foreign teachers to occupy. His office had a large, high-backed chair and a desk big enough to use as a single bed. In addition to the desk, he always had to have a private meeting table in his office where he could sit and work should his spacious desk prove insufficient and conduct business with staff members in private meetings. Of course, his spacious desk was always completely cleared off since he didn't do much in the way of actual work so there was little risk of his needing more. There was also a side board which was about 7 feet long which he used to display various "awards", pictures of staff at anniversary parties, and one copy of each of the textbooks made by the company (which were rarely used and mainly for display). He also had a personal wardrobe closet for hanging his coat, stashing his umbrella, or hiding his ashtray. All of the furniture was huge, heavy and made of wood. His desk was so huge that it had to be abandoned during a later move to a more modest office space after his retirement and sale of the company to a larger corporation. The desk wouldn't fit in the elevator to get it to the new office.

Considering the relative size of my former company, his office was just as ostentatious and as wasteful a display of ego as the old Nova president's. We all crammed our desks into spaces between the support pillars in the office and shared lockers (two people each to one high school gymnasium-style metal locker) in the back of the office which doubled as a storage room for inventory and stacks and stacks of junk. Sometimes crap was piled so high due to lack of space that we couldn't get into our lockers but the president could have fit two king-size beds in his office with room to spare.

His wastefulness didn't stop with sucking up more space than he needed in the juiciest spot in the floor plan. Even when the company started to fall on hard times, he'd find ways to use company money for his own interests but peddle it as being a company-wide benefit. When he became infatuated with golf (no, not all Japanese men start out that way), he arranged for company golf tournaments and forked over money for a custom trophy for the winner. When one of the salesmen won, he kept the trophy for himself in his office rather than allow the winner to keep it and proclaimed it a "company trophy". He also maintained "company" vacation houses which he quietly discouraged others from using though he liked to keep brochures of them around and pretend anyone could use them.

There were also a variety of "anniversary" parties and indulgences on which great quantities of cash were squandered. The biggest was a party at a major hotel which we were all commanded to attend and schmooze with the guests without pay and with orders not to eat the food or consume the beverages except to nurse one glass of something for the duration. This allowed the president to stand up in front of his clients and nervously offer a speech to his own success while his employees stood around tired, hungry, bored to death, and aching to get the hell out of there.

There was actually a constant parade of high profile toys of the moment which he'd buy and set up in his office only to grow bored with them. The worst of these was a then state of the art PC which he never learned how to use but kept as a prop in his office while those of us doing actual work toiled on old, painfully outdated and sluggish equipment. After this PC passed into obsolescence, he unloaded it on his daughter who was hired in an act of bald-faced nepotism. Eventually, these expensive, useless, and underused items would migrate into the general work space where no one wanted them taking up their limited working area but all were obliged to keep them around as monuments to the president's ego.

While none of these things compare to an office with automatic curtains, a private bath, bedroom, etc. such as the former Nova president had, you have to keep in mind that our company was dying by yards each year and was very tiny. None of us were getting raises because the company was doing so poorly and salesmen were being forced to quit if their quotas weren't fulfilled even when they had new babies to feed. Office girls with university degrees were getting gross salaries of around 170,000 yen a month and working unpaid overtime while the president easily wasted money on his own vanity.

The old president used to get a magazine simply titled "President" which I never actually looked at as it went straight to his hot little hands. Since the teachers cubicles were directly across from his office (so he could keep an eye on us and put us in the spot with the fewest number of windows), I often witnessed him spend a few hours reading it just after it arrived. The cover usually showed some big corporate cheese like the president of Sony or Toyota. I think that a lot of presidents of pathetic little companies fancied themselves a part of a community of presidents heading businesses all over Japan and consequently afforded themselves all the perks that they believed went along with their titles.

Disservice

For the past month and a half, I've conducted five private lessons with a non-Japanese Asian woman. This wasn't my first experience teaching a non-Japanese person, though I can say that such experiences are not all that common. Because of their relative rarity, they stand out in stark contrast to what it is like to teach Japanese people and often make me consider how teaching English well to one group of people doesn't necessarily prepare you to do so for other people.

From my past experiences with teaching Chinese folks, I knew that at least two things were going to differ compared to my usual lessons. First of all, she was almost certainly going to be more assertive in lessons and require fewer leading questioning to elicit her opinions. While not all Japanese people express themselves reluctantly or are passive, Tokyoites are renowned for their reserve and, by and large, this is reflected in their lessons. Second, her pronunciation was likely going to be harder for me to understand since the types of mistakes made by Chinese speakers of English are not like those made by Japanese speakers.

When I have a non-Japanese student, it brings home rather strikingly how experience makes you a better teacher mainly for the type of people you typically encounter, but not so much for everyone in general. The fact is that you come to understand what your students are saying better as you become more familiar with the types of problems they typically have. There are words that you would never have recognized or understood if you had encountered a random Japanese tourist back home which you have no problems whatsoever understanding after spending some time teaching.

While this recognition is a blessing in terms of understanding what your students mean to say, it can end up being a curse in the long run. If that recognition means you stop correcting or noticing the mistakes because you've grown so accustomed to them that they no longer hinder your comprehension, you can end up not helping your student improve in ways that will assist them in the real world of English communication.

Another problem that comes along with experience is understanding and giving into the impulse to speak Japanese when you're an English teacher. Teachers who are even roughly proficient in Japanese often end up translating for their students rather than conducting a lesson only in English. Typically, a student will mumble the word in Japanese that he can't come up with in English and the teacher who recognizes the word will confidently and quickly offer up the English. What is worse though are the teachers who fail to explain things in English at all in a simple and slow fashion and ramble on in Japanese. The problem with this sort of teaching is that it doesn't force the student to think in English or learn to work with the vocabulary he has. It's very important for people to learn to be able to say what they have to say indirectly when they can't do so directly as it will serve them well in travel and business situations which require English. For instance, if the student can't say "thief", he can at least say the equivalent, "a bad person who takes things things from other people to get money."

Instant translations decrease the likelihood that the student will remember the English as he made no effort to find the meaning of a word and will grow accustomed to not having to study on his own with a handy living gaijin dictionary in front of him. That's not to say there isn't a time and a place for teaching English basics in Japanese but rather that that time is almost never when a native speaker is doing the job. It's a case for Japanese teachers who have training, qualifications and skill in teaching low level students with no or very rudimentary skills.

In both the case of the teacher who knows Japanese-English well and fails to correct mistakes and the teacher who uses Japanese, the student is being done a disservice if the study is about actually improving the students' skills (rather than about a paid, structured social interaction with a foreigner). Those teachers who use Japanese generally do so to make their lives easier rather than to help the student and there's really no excuse for it because it's easy to avoid using Japanese a lesson. With omnipresent electronic dictionaries, teachers absolutely do not need to translate for students. Even the act of punching in a word and reading what is on the screen for themselves will provide a small increase in the chance that a student will remember the translation compared to a teacher blurting out the word.

The other case involving a lack of correction due to so much familiarity with Japanese pronunciation and English errors is one which I find myself having to be vigilant about because it's not as cut and dry as choosing not to speak Japanese. I don't correct every one of those types of mistakes because sometimes it'd bog the lesson down completely but I do try to focus on certain sounds which are problems and correct them assiduously for a particular student until there is some improvement before moving on to the next one. Still, I'm not certain that I'm not doing as well with this as I might if I weren't so experienced.

It's a bit ironic that experience and cultural understanding may actually contribute to one being less effective in some ways when one is a teacher. Certainly there are ways in which having experience really helps. You learn the roots of typical grammar problems because of translation errors and the incomprehensible can be recognized and corrected more efficiently. Additionally, students have greater confidence when they can make themselves understood well and a lack of confidence is one of the bigger issues with Japanese people speaking English. Pacing lessons also becomes second nature as is how quickly or slowly to speak based on a student's level. All that being said, those that are truly interested in helping their students have to keep their impulses to make things easy in check.

Continuity

Continuity tends to make people feel secure and comfortable. In fact, most people feel the greatest level of overall content when they have a routine punctuated by enjoyably novel experiences. If you have too much routine, you get bored. If there's too much novelty in your life, you'll feel stressed and like your life is out of control. One of the (many) reasons moving to another country can be so stressful is that there is far too much novelty all at once and very little familiar daily routine.

There are larger types of continuity beyond our daily experiences. When you operate mainly on the level of a teacher in Japan, you don't tend to witness them because you're removed from a lot of what happens on other levels in Japanese life. You mainly witness the evolution (or devolution) of your students and your growing rapport and comfort with them. In my private lessons, this is certainly the case and it can be very gratifying because the way in which I have contributed to my students' achievement of their goals is crystal clear.

In my former job, I rarely taught the same student twice so I almost never saw any real growth in skills. Additionally, the nature of my contact with students was more of a short-duration testing via phone rather than an attempt to "teach" them. However, there was a type of continuity which I witnessed which has been rather interesting. That type of continuity change was in the corporate patterns for the various companies my students worked for.

The way my former company worked was to sell various lesson and testing packages to companies to allow them to either educate or level test their employees. It wasn't unusual for my company to repeatedly sell the same content to the same company for over a decade as companies tended to buy our services for new employees. That means I would get a yearly update on the state of the various companies my students were working at. Since I asked the same questions over and over of different people, it was a bit like polling thousands of employees at the same company over a long period of time.

This type of interviewing could be very educational because one could learn a lot about the working conditions and popular products among various companies. I know for a fact that not all Japanese people work overtime and that some of those that do are actually paid for their overtime hours. This flies in the face of the commonly-held notion that all Japanese work tons of overtime and it's all unpaid. It also became clear which industries had a high concentration of female employees and which mainly recruited men as well as demonstrated which places gave women lower-paying work with little responsibility.

While I don't want to give any company names out, I can say that companies that produced personal care items recruited the most women and gave them better positions. They also seemed to have better English speakers. The heavy industries and companies that mainly produced components that were sold and used to assemble more sophisticated products elsewhere (car parts, computer components) unsurprisingly focused more on men and demonstrated poorer English skills though they weren't as poor as those who worked at companies that mainly provided services domestically. In fact, sometimes I couldn't understand why companies that mainly served domestic needs even bothered to train their employees in English. I concluded that the absolute best place to work for Japanese people when it came to overall working conditions (limited overtime, paid overtime, equal treatment of men and women) was their major phone company.

There were several predictable overall changes in various companies as the years wore on. The most obvious was that companies were doing more poorly on the whole and downsizing. Up until recently though, I hadn't experienced any company that had done any large scale or obvious outsourcing though my husband did teach classes at a company at one point that was having a lot of its business siphoned off by workers in India.

At any rate, a company that I had dealt with for quite a few years ago recently seems to have changed its hiring situation such that the workforce is mixed with employees from the Philippines and Japan. This situation is rather different than the usual outsourcing which involves breaking off a chunk of ones business and sending it to another country. In this case, Japanese employees will be working side-by-side with people from another country. This is an interesting development mainly because it's exactly the sort of thing which is going to continue fueling the English language study industry. These people are employed by a Japanese company but because of cost-cutting methods are going to have to accommodate foreigners by speaking English. In the past, most of the mixed work environments I've heard of were the opposite situation; a foreigner has to learn Japanese in order to accommodate Japanese employees and employers.

It's interesting to consider that outsourcing may actually motivate the Japanese to learn to understand and communicate more with foreigners. With the diminishing base of young Japanese people to fill out the work force as the older generation retires in droves, working side by side with more foreign people, particularly those who will work at lower wages than the average Japanese person, makes a lot of sense for businesses. To be honest though, I never thought this sort of thing would actually happen in Japan and was surprised that a major company has made this move. It's an encouraging sign of increased Japanese openness and flexibility though the positive side is tempered somewhat by the fact that the foreigners in this situation will all be subordinate to the Japanese bosses.

Lying

During my formative years, I lied to my parents as many children do in order to avoid punishment. Around the age of 12, however, I developed a rock hard aversion to any sort of lying and stopped doing so. I'm not sure what motivated this change in character. Perhaps my trust was betrayed by a friend or fellow student in such a way that the long-term consequences to a relationship when someone lies were made clear to me. Maybe I just was born with the type of character that would eventually jell into the one I have now. It's also possible that I finally reached an age where I realized that my mother lied whenever it suited her position in discussions or power plays.

In regards to my mother, my father used to say that she lied so much that she eventually believed her lies were true. I recall on more than one occasion when she'd make up some "fact" to back up her assertion that my sister or I should do something or other that she wanted. When we challenged her "facts", she'd just make up more and more ridiculous lies to support what she'd said. When the lies upon lies resulted in the logic of her assertions folding like a house of cards buckling under a gust of wind, she'd get angry and start lashing out and attacking us verbally. I'm guessing that sort of experience might tend to cultivate a strong aversion to fibbing in a person.

During my youth, this wish to avoid lying at all costs translated into a character which was blunt, strident, and abrasive at times. It took until I was nearing 30 or so for me to start learning to seriously moderate these tendencies. While I still hate to lie and having other people lie to me, I began to realize that lies in the service of failing to hurt others, particularly lies that had no long-term impact, were not a betrayal of my principles. For instance, if a student asks me if his English has improved, I won't lie and say it has if it has not though I may say that one aspect has improved (if that is true) as a way of only partially answering the question. Sometimes though, I'll simply tell them that they haven't been putting in enough work to improve based on their current basic level.

"Lies" to students are a part of business though mine tend to take the path of avoiding the crux of the question rather than being out and out lies. I'm not so sure that Japanese people may not prefer this to a 100% accurate answer so that they can have a softened bit of truth. From a certain viewpoint, this may be seen as a self-serving lie since a student who is told blatantly that he isn't getting better despite taking expensive lessons may decide he should just give up and I'll lose a source of income. However, my impulse is not to keep my rosters full of paying customers. I don't want to hurt their feelings or discourage them.

When it comes to lying, two points are always key in determining whether or not the lie serves a positive or negative function. One is whether or not the lie miscommunicates information in such a way as to perpetuate a destructive situation which may eventually eat away at a relationship or result in a future devastating and extremely painful revelation. The most common lie of this sort is related to women lying to their partners about the extent of their sexual satisfaction. If a woman lies about this point, she starts a cycle which confuses her partner about what is best to do to please her and often finds herself pressured to continue to "fake" once she starts doing so.

The other point is whether or not the lie is primarily self-serving rather than in the service of the other party. Yesterday, I was exposed to what I'm certain was this sort of lie. An office worker at my former company was communicating with me regarding scheduling of telephone tests I conduct as freelance work. Since I worked in person with her, I know her character and I've also had issues with her in the past. She can be rude and often doesn't listen to my former boss when he directs her and follows her own counsel rather than his. This always results in a problem because he has good reasons for doing things a certain way but she only has her own interests in mind.

For over a year now, I've been scheduling tests on a case by case basis to accommodate my private lesson schedule changes. This means any time my former company wants me to do tests, my schedule for the times and days in question has to be confirmed. This woman suggested that it was too troublesome to keep asking me about my schedule so it should be "locked down" to avoid the need for the questions. What it seemed to me that she meant was that I should promise I would reserve hours for the tests each week so they could freely slot them in any time without asking about my availability. This would essentially put me in the position of refusing private students indefinitely in such time slots and risking losing income with no guarantee that the infrequent tests would even be scheduled into those slots. In essence, she can skip the part which takes time and set up a situation where I'm the same as I was when I worked in the office.

I told her that the only way they could "reserve" my hours was by paying a retainer for them and she claimed that her suggestion was for my benefit so that I wouldn't have to put up with answering schedule-based questions. This was an incredibly transparent lie as I've never complained about such questions and, in fact, insist it be done this way for maximum flexibility. I should note that that flexibility goes both ways. The company gets far more possible hours for tests (which the companies who buy the tests prefer) by consulting me than locking in a limited schedule of a few hours each week or day.

Like many people who offer up a self-serving lie, she tried to mollify me by saying the situation she wanted was for to my benefit rather than hers. This sort of lie makes me angrier than most because it seems to assume I'm very naive and gullible. The thing about people who lie without a second thought is that they have an unrealistic notion of how effective their lies are. They often believe obvious lies are credible. Of course, in the case of the Japanese, I sometimes feel they know the lies are obvious but they rely on the cultural tendency not to be confrontational to keep them from being called on them.

Goodbye, Student #1

On February 2, 2006, approximately 3 months after I quit my office job, I taught my first private lesson in about 10 years with student #1 from my referral agency. I went on to teach her 63 more times after that. I'll have my last lesson with her this evening.

As my first student after 12 years of working in a Japanese office, I'm sure she endured some of the bumpier roads of my teaching technique though I doubt she could tell. I can say that she was the person for whom the vast majority of the custom material I wrote for the Home Sensei was designed for and used. Her level was just the right mixture of passive competence coupled with assertive incompetence to require such types of structured discussion.

When you teach in your own home, teaching isn't just a matter of exchanging words and guiding a student toward better speaking. It's also someone coming into your place as a guest and, at 64 visits, this particular student has probably been in my home a great deal more than any friend I've ever had in Japan. We've shared a cup of tea or coffee and discussed her current life events every single time.

By it's nature though, a lesson isn't the same as a social visit. It carries all the trappings of one but it's a decidedly one-sided affair. While I tidy and clean the place, serve drinks, and give my guest the most comfortable place to sit and we chat amiably, I mainly ask her about her life and ask questions while she mainly answers questions and asks few of me. This is, of course, generally how it should be since the whole point is for her to practice English, not for me to jabber on about myself. This does, however, tend to be the reason why it's hard to develop sincere friendships with people who you meet as students. The experience, even when you encourage students to question you freely, is often quite one-sided.

This particular student's departure was one that I knew would come some day and I knew it was going to be sooner rather than later as the clock was running out. She told me long ago that her husband, who works for a very old and famous Japanese confectionery company, is transferred every two years. Since I taught her for one year and ten months, I've been with her for most of the tenure she's had in her current location. Her husband is often transferred on very short notice (two weeks) and she has to scramble to sever the ties she has to work, friends, and English teacher as well as pack and get ready to go.

I always tell students they can feel free to e-mail me or stay in touch when they've stopped taking lessons after we have been together for awhile but, they rarely contact me. I'm not sure if that's because the ties that bind a teacher and student are relatively transitory and weak or if it's because they lack confidence in their English writing skills or if they simply feel it'll put me out if they write.

My fancy teacups. R.I.P.

The odd thing is that I recently broke the tea cups that I started using regularly at the time that I started teaching privately after my prolonged absence. Prior to that, they had been collecting dust for the most part as they were too fancy for general purpose use. At the time that I broke them, I felt it was a bit of an omen of some change in continuity to come. Of course, it could just be a harbinger of increased clumsiness on my part. ;-)

Update: It turns out my student not only is moving but she's also pregnant so, even if her husband hadn't been transferred out of Tokyo, she would have had to stop taking lessons.

Impolite Pressure

About a month ago, the referral agency I use for getting private students called and asked me to accept a new student at 9:30 am on Saturday morning. The schedule I provided them with back when I initially signed on with them states that I don't accept lessons before 10:00 am on the weekend so they already knew this was too early before making the request.

The woman who spoke with me pleaded with me to accept this particular student for just two lessons either in August or September. At the time of this initial call, she said the student had contracted to do only 4 lessons and needed to finish off the last two of them. I told her that I would do it if it were only 2 lessons though I'd prefer it was in September because the two dates she gave me were August 18 and 25 and the latter is my birthday. With audible relief, she told me she'd contact the student about the dates and get back to me. Of course, the student wanted to come in August despite September being offered as an option to me.

After the first lesson, I realized that part of the reason she may only be taking a handful of lessons was that she required relatively specialized lesson planning and was dissatisfied with the type of generic lesson she'd received before. The teacher with whom she'd taken a lesson (or two) before was an older man who had her doing relatively low-level grammatical pattern practice from an antique book (which she purchased but then didn't want to use). She found this sort of lesson not only boring but rather tedious and pointless. She's 55 years old and interested in serious topics like feminism. She doesn't want to spend her time speaking like a child. It was her desire to express her opinions and ideas on topics she was interested in. She just had a lot of trouble doing so.

While it may not be what she technically needs, I concluded that she could have what she wanted if she was willing to put the work into it and if her future teacher was willing to be patient. As a courtesy to the referral agency, I wrote them a letter recommending that any future teacher find articles on issues related to the student's interests (particularly women's issues) and have the student read it and think it over before each lesson. The student would be able to consider the topic and vocabulary well beforehand and then they could discuss it with the teacher working on her grammar issues as part of the discussion.

The result of my voluntary good deed was that I got a phone call from the agency thanking me for the letter but also attempting to pressure me into teaching her in the future. I should mention that I not only made it clear during the initial phone exchange that I could not teacher her regularly at this time but I also mentioned it in the letter about her lesson planning. When I said that I could teach her if she could come later in the afternoon, the response was, "oh, you don't want to get up early." This struck me as incredibly rude and presumptuous. It was all I could do not to be angry on the phone but I explained that it had nothing to do with when I got up as I'm usually up early every morning but it's related to when my husband leaves for work.

The truth is that it's very inconvenient for me to have students arrive right on the heels of my husband's departure for work. We sit in the room in which I conduct the lessons and the folding table I use in the lesson can't be set up in it when we are both in it so I have to rush and set it up after he goes or leave it crammed into the space available such that he can't get in and out of the room easily because of the way it blocks the exit to the kitchen. I also have to rush and get any breakfast dishes done while he's still here and try to tidy up for the student. Additionally, it's not uncommon for my husband to start 20-40 minutes later than his usual schedule because of a late cancellation. In such cases, my husband has to hide out in the bedroom while I conduct a lesson and he waits to leave.

There's also a serious possibility that a student who is supposed to start at 9:30 am on Saturday will show up early enough that my husband will still be in the process of gathering his things and preparing to leave. In fact, the first week this 9:30 student showed up within two minutes of my husband's departure because she was 6 minutes early. Scheduling a student in the way they want would require my husband to regularly leave early to ensure there was no conflict in this regard and one more student is simply not worth rushing around, putting my husband out, and being stressed every week.

At any rate, I didn't go into this level of explanation with the agency, I simply said that my starting and finishing times were linked to my husband's work schedule and I couldn't accept students who wanted to start before he left or after he came home. One thing I can say for sure though is that this is the last time I'll consent to do them a favor which conflicts with my scheduling wishes. I don't need people foisting their conclusions about my lifestyle on me in order to pressure me into doing what they want me to do.

Poor Teaching

About a month or so ago, the referral agency that provides me with students sent along a new potential student. This was a 61-year-old man who had been having lessons with another teacher for several years but she was leaving Japan and he needed a new teacher. The agency had sent him to another (male) teacher but he had corrected his pronunciation "too strictly" and the student had rejected that teacher.

One of the plethora of things you learn early on while teaching Japanese students is that they won't like you unless you use a soft touch when correcting them. It's okay to correct frequently (if the student desires it) but not okay to do so sternly. I'm not sure if the teacher who preceded me was inexperienced or oblivious to this fact but he alienated my student pretty thoroughly and instilled in him a nagging insecurity about his ability to be understood.

One of the things the teacher made this fellow do was repeatedly count ("1, 2, 3, 4...") to practice pronunciation. Boring, pointless types of practice are generally the hallmark of a poor teacher who has a limited bag of tricks that he or she trots out in order to pass the time in the lesson without actually addressing the short-comings of the student. In this case, if someone has a pronunciation problem, it's in enunciating certain sounds, not in numbers or colors or types of animals. This new fellow's biggest issue is pronouncing "see" and "she" properly. How is counting off again and again going to help him except when he hits the "6" and "7" words? It was a particularly poor choice of pronunciation exercise for a 61-year-old man capable of discussing politics and social issues to be reduced to elementary school recitation exercises. I'm sure he was humiliated.

Unfortunately, the fact that most people come to Japan and stay for a short time and the fact that teaching English is seen as a crappy job which is regarded with disdain by those who have moved on to other work keeps Japan populated with people in the English language business who don't know what they're doing. The former simply never get enough experience to be good at it and the latter think it isn't the sort of thing you need to be good at (or even can be good at).

You find that the vast majority of teachers are spending their lessons teaching what is easy for them rather than what is useful for the students. When I was at Nova (15 years ago), we were mainly teaching 40 units of American Streamline per level. The teachers weren't trained in how to teach the grammar point of each lesson nor were they given sufficient time before each lesson to review the teacher's text (when they had one to work from). The student information sheets had a list of numbers, 1-40, and you marked off the lesson you did so another teacher wouldn't repeat it with the same student. When you got one of these sheets for a student who was stuck at a certain level and couldn't advance to the next, you'd find that the student had repeatedly done the same lessons with a lot of reading content again and again and had never done the ones with very little text to read. The reason for this was that inexperienced teachers would waste class time having students read aloud rather than practice the lesson points in a meaningful way. This meant less work for the teacher both in terms of preparation and imagination. Since Japanese students grow up in a school system which emphasizes rote memorization and often repetition to that end, they don't even realize how crummy the lesson they're getting is in terms of helping advance their English skills.

Teaching well is very challenging and generally unrewarding in terms of how you are regarded by fellow foreigners (who love nothing more than to climb on their high horses and look down on the English teaching rabble they've scrambled away from to their Japanese office jobs) or by the Japanese students and employers who believe what you do is a doddle because you speak English already. While a student may benefit from your skill, she tends not to realize that it is extraordinary in nature. Most students generally can't tell the difference between the gaijin monkey who fills the lesson time with pointless games or prattling about himself and the teacher who is working to improve the student's weak points while still making the lesson interesting.

All that being said, a few of my students have left teachers and language schools specifically because they felt they were getting nowhere. One of them recently told me she'd started doing a conversation exchange with a British friend and that she realized from trying to deal with his Japanese that it was extremely tiring. She wasn't even teaching him but just focusing on his mistakes and correcting them was exhausting for her. After this experience, she told me she really respected what I did. I must say that that was an immensely gratifying thing to hear as it is all too rare for anyone to spend time in my shoes.

Helium

After a brief e-mail exchange with newly-minted professional Internet author Sean P. Aune, I've decided to give writing for Helium a try. There are three main differences between writing for Helium and Blogcritics. The first one is that Helium seems to be less of a hotbed for political, social and cultural commentary. The second is that I'm pretty sure that Helium has a smaller readership than the mighty Blogcritics. Third is the fact that Helium is supposed to pay you a share of advertising profits.

While I'm not expecting to get rich any time soon (or necessarily make a few bucks, honestly), I figured that I'd give writing for Helium a try. At first, I'm probably going to be revamping content which I've posted about on this blog such that it suits a self-contained article format. I'll still write for Blogcritics on occasion but I'll be splitting content according to what seems most appropriate for a particular outlet.

My first article is an expansion and rounding out of a story I told here before awhile back. If you're interested, you can find it here.

New Eyes

This weekend marks the end of a 2-month stint of doing a very big freelance job for my former company. Every weekend in May and the last two weekends in June have been spent doing 8 hours of speaking on the telephone with 63 employees who work at a company that produces electronic components. Saturdays haven't been too difficult because it's only been two hours but Sundays, at six hours, have been relatively tiring and brutal.

While some people may feel that speaking on the phone makes teaching easier, it actually can be a lot harder depending on how you approach the work. For one thing, you have to project a great deal more energy and enthusiasm into your speaking because there is no other way to offer an encouraging atmosphere to the students. You can't smile or use body language to convey approval or foster the students' speaking. If you give it your all, it can be very draining. Since this group of people have been a very nice bunch, I've been giving it my best every weekend despite how tiring it is.

The last few days of this work have largely been made up of a final lesson which requires the students to ask me questions about myself. I already posted about the sort of questions I tend to get asked but the questions in this lesson tend not to all be entirely of that sort since they aren't random questions but part of a planned 5-minute question session. Good students will often pick a theme and ask a lot of questions about it and this company is full of good students.

However, I have been asked a lot of questions about Pennsylvania (where I was born and grew up) and it has made me realize how little I know about commerce and culture there. A good many students have asked me what the biggest food product is and I honestly didn't know what it was.

A look at Wikipedia revealed, much to my surprise, that Pennsylvania is the number one producer of mushrooms in the United States. I was much less surprised to learn that it was the third largest producer of Christmas trees, and fourth largest producer of sod, milk, horses, and nursery plants. Since Pennsylvania means "Penn's woods" and trees are present in great abundance, any product related to plants and trees could only come as a surprise the most ignorant of Pennsylvania residents.

Some of these "products" were a part of my upbringing. My grandmother often did seasonal work at a nursery when I was a child and the library my sister is working at is a beneficiary of funding from the namesake of that nursery. My sister and I were some of the lucky kids who had horses despite the fact that my family was relatively poor. Probably one of the reasons we could afford them was that abundant horses kept prices down a bit.

Researching the answer to this question altered my perspective and broadened my knowledge of my home area in a way that probably would not have occurred if I hadn't lived in Japan. Interacting with students pushes me to see my home area through the eyes of an outsider rather than someone who grew up there. Sometimes Japanese people ask me what the best part about being in Japan is and I often say that it's the ability to see your own country through new eyes.

Punished

The old saying goes, "no good deed goes unpunished." This phrase has been on my mind today because one of my students e-mailed me and asked to "reschedule" her lesson today. The contract the referral agency makes with students clearly stipulates that same-day cancellation is a loss for the student. The teacher is not obliged to reschedule or offer a make-up lesson and will be paid for the hour unless there is some sort of urgent mitigating circumstance (such as a natural disaster).

Since this student has had a variety of health issues, particular related to her "waterworks", and I'm guessing her cancellation may have something to do with that, I agreed to let her reschedule for tomorrow rather than do a straight cancel. She e-mailed me back and said she wanted to come Friday evening but I have other students and can't accommodate her at the time she wants to come. She then replied to that message demanding to know all of the free time on my schedule from morning to evening tomorrow.

Perhaps my student is poor at writing her messages and came across more bluntly than she intended to. Perhaps she is grateful and too busy to take the time to say it. Or, perhaps she's just taking advantage of my willingness to cut her some slack. The end result is that I'm wasting my time playing e-mail tag with her and what's more exhausting my patience since I'm trying to do her a favor and it's just causing me more aggravation.

As is the case with most people, this isn't the first time this has happened to me and it won't be the last. In my former job, I constantly went above and beyond the call of duty rather than simply did as I was told. If I wasn't busy, I asked if there was anyone I could help with their work rather than sit in my cubicle and do whatever I wanted (which I could have done without censure). I also used my own laptop computers for about 10 years to do my job because the company whined about being too poor to afford another Mac. They bought one for my boss. They bought one for the Japanese women who worked with us but they never bought one for me.

As time went by, I used my own Zip drive for back-ups, my own scanner for scanning work, and even my own registered versions of Adobe software because the company pleaded poverty and I wanted to be helpful as well as allow work to proceed more smoothly and quickly. Needless to say, this was never appreciated nor recognized in any fashion and none of the dedication or skill I applied to my job was recognized in my annual raises though, at least, my gaijin boss told me he appreciated what I did even though the Japanese didn't.

Being a philosophical sort of person, I wonder why it is that this type of situation is common enough to have a well-known saying attached to it. Is it that we have to get spanked for our good intentions in order to encourage us to build our characters such that we continue to perform such deeds in spite of how they are responded to? Is it that we should learn to stand up for ourselves and not be taken advantage of since going above and beyond with many people often offers us that dubious pay-off? Is it so we learn to roll with the punches and not let the lack of gratitude or recognition weigh on our overactive philosophical minds? Or, as I'm sure many less pensive or spiritually-minded people think, "things happen" and there's no meaning whatsoever to it.

I've actually grown sufficiently past my Christian upbringing not to expect any sort of reward for doing or being "good". I'm old enough to know that the best people in the world often get squat in the way of tangible rewards in life and I don't believe in heaven so I don't think there's a reward in death either. However, it'd be nice if doing good things didn't actually result in more hassle or stress. If a good deed can't be rewarded, at the very least, it shouldn't be punished.

What Does It Take

Since I started private teaching, I've been hearing stories about my students' workplaces and recently heard about a situation in my former workplace which have often left me wondering what it takes to get fired in Japan.

One of my students, in particular, seems to be in a place where even the most egregiously inappropriate behavior won't get you sacked. This student told me that one of her coworkers spends most of her nights (up until 4:00 am at times) involved in seminars for selling Amway-style products (though it's not actually Amway). This leaves her so tired that she spends a lot of her time on the job the next day sleeping at her desk. While she's been asked not to do this, she hasn't stopped and she hasn't been fired.

This same student told me that one of her coworkers is a complete and utter bitch with everyone in the office. If anyone asks her to do a job or for assistance in accomplishing a project, she feels free to bite their heads off. She is such a bear to get along with that everyone in the section feels obliged to bribe her daily with cookies, candy, and various other sweets. The bribes don't completely stop her moody outbursts but they do keep them at a close to tolerable level.

When I ask my student why her company tolerates these workers, she said that, in the case of the moody co-worker, she knows how to use a piece of proprietary accounting system software that no one else really knows how to use with any proficiency. Since this co-worker is so hard to get any cooperation from due to her nasty temperament, no one can learn it from her. The sleeping co-worker is simply tolerated despite having no special skills. She's unsure why.

Another of my students has told me that two of her coworkers have gone off on leave for psychological reasons and that they will receive 80% of their pay for 6 months to a year while they are at home recovering from the stress they feel. Meanwhile, the rest of the staff are busting their cans trying to cover for them. This situation didn't surprise me as much because the same sort of thing occurred with one of the employees at my former company. The explanation was that he was "nervous" and would work from home when he could but was mainly just resting. When we think of workers in Japan, we don't think of companies allowing workers to take months and months off due to stress but it seems to be a not uncommon situation.

Finally, I had a long conversation with my former boss about the situation at my company as of late and he told me that my replacement has been acting up rather fiercely. His job, as was mine, is to conduct lessons via telephone as well as correct homework reports that are returned to the students. When I was there, I helped write texts when I wasn't otherwise busy. He is helping make video DVDs for language learning when he isn't busy because his talents do not lie in writing textbooks or with using desktop publishing software.

My boss told me that my replacement always leaves work on Saturdays 2-3 hours early yet claims a full day on his time sheet yet he has recently been complaining because he doesn't get Monday national holidays because his work week is Tuesday to Saturday. What is worse is the fact that he recently was returning from a session of video shooting with a Japanese co-worker and he told her to "f*ck off" and that he couldn't face going back to the office and "talking to those monkeys" again. He not only went home rather than do his 2 hours of scheduled telephone work in the office that evening but he failed to show up at all the next day and would not answer his phone.

He did finally show up and apologize for what he did but he has since been complaining about the contract and salary he received upon signing up for his second year a few months ago. He feels he should be making as much, or more, than I did after 12 years there. He also spends at least an hour a day sitting in his cubicle reading novels instead of studying video software or enhancing his video editing skills or doing something job-related. When I was there, I spent most of my free time learning Photoshop, Pagemaker, InDesign, or Illustrator because I didn't feel free to goof off on the job day-in and day-out.

On top of all of this, my replacement got arrested a year-and-half ago and was in jail for nearly 3 weeks without any contact with the company. During that time, my boss covered for him and then allowed him back. He's also been absent numerous times for colds that seem to last a week or two and other people have had to cover for him. While I don't think that people should go to work when they are miserably sick, I do think that they can work during the later stages of a cold.

One thing I will point out about my former job is that my former boss (an Aussie) is not a hard-ass. In fact, he is very tolerant and understanding of how tiring things can be and is perfectly fine with someone leaving early if there's nothing to do provided they have cleared it with him and that they are good workers otherwise. He also let us play video games between telephone lessons on weekends when the office was empty as long as it didn't affect the quality of our work. In short, there's no reason for my replacement to feel put-upon or oppressed. I'm sure that, if he were a better worker, my boss wouldn't be-grudge him enjoying his book when things aren't busy.

The most shocking thing about this situation is not that my replacement is an ungrateful slacker but rather that, when my boss said my replacement may one day bug out and not come back to work, the Japanese manager of the office said, if that happened, he'd go to the fellow's apartment and "convince him to return." My boss was flabbergasted. Given this guy's work record, he should be fired, not begged to return.

So, I have to wonder what it takes to be fired in Japan. If you can sleep on the job, verbally abuse co-workers, disappear without notice for days and take copious amounts of time off due to stress or minor illness and still keep your job, it seems there's not much that actually will get you axed.

Most Popular Questions

After years of doing lessons by telephone and in person, I've experienced the same questions from Japanese people hundreds of times. For some questions, I may have been asked well over a thousand times. Here are the questions that I'm most often asked:

1. How old are you?

Every textbook my (former) company makes tells students, in preparation for lessons conducted via telephone, that they should not ask this question because it can be considered rude by some people, particularly women. Nonetheless, the vast majority of male students will ask the question anyway. Female students, who may be sensitive about their own ages, rarely ask this question.

I'm not one of those sensitive women who hates to admit my age but I don't like the fact that when I say I'm 42, the students are then embarrassed for asking now that it's clear I'm on the older side and they feel obliged to make some stupid comment to cover up their discomfort. The most frequent comment is "oh, you are so young." This seems patronizing because it's so absurd. I usually laugh and say, "I don't think so."

2. Can you eat sushi?

This is likely an incorrectly-worded question as students often confuse situations when they should use "do you ~" and "can you ~" but I'm not sure if the question is asking if I'm able to choke down raw fish or if I enjoy choking it down. The notion is that foreigners have a distaste for this Japanese delicacy and they want to test both how adventurous your are and the extent to which you've embraced Japanese culture through its cuisine.

In my case, I have had sushi before but I have an intense dislike for the texture of raw fish (as well as tofu). The taste doesn't bother me so much but it feels a bit like very tender rubber to me and I hate the way it feels on my teeth when I chew it. Eating prosciutto is a similarly unpleasant experience for me. I'm also not the least bit comfortable eating raw flesh of any kind. You'd never find me eating a rare steak or burger even if I were inclined to eat beef (which I'm not as I dislike it intensely).

3. Where are you from?

This question is rather understandable on the one hand but less understandable when you consider every single student I teach both face-to-face and via the telephone has been given a written profile about me which lists my marital status, birthplace, hobbies, and, in the case of face-to-face students, a work history.

I think that I get asked this question mainly as a way of introducing the topic and asking follow-up questions though sometimes it's simply the case that students pay no attention to the profile sheets they are sent. The most common follow-up questions are:

What is your home city famous for?
What festivals does your city have?
How many people live in your city?
What product is most famous in your city?

When answering these questions, I invariably encounter what might be called "incompatible data input" difficulty. When I explain to the students that I'm not from a city but a very small town which isn't famous for anything and produces no particular product, they invariably cannot understand. It's not that they can't understand my answers which I go out of my way to phrase simply but rather that they have a notion in mind of what sort of answers might be given and my answers are outside of that range so they mentally reject my answers.

This is actually a rather typical problem with communication between Japanese people and westerners. Since Japanese communication is indirect, people often operate from pre-conceived notions of what is to come in a conversation or what might be reasonably expected. On more than one occasion, a student has told me that he or she says something and expects that the party they are speaking to will conclude something else. This reading between the lines works fine in Japanese to Japanese communication but can be a problem in Japanese to western person communication.

4. Do you like natto?

Natto is a fermented soybean dish which has a relatively strong smell and is stringy and sticky. Even some Japanese people find it repulsive. It's supposed to be good for your health because it's rich in protein and low in fat. I've tried natto before and didn't find it particularly offensive except that it smelled very much like beer to me and I absolutely detest the smell of beer. I'm pretty sure I could eat it regularly if I put a clothespin on my nose since the taste was fine (though not mouth-wateringly enticing).

I think the Japanese ask this question because they expect a bad reaction. It's similar to asking someone if they've ever eaten a strange esoteric dish like snake in the U.S. or like asking about regional dishes which most people outside that region find disgusting (like blood pudding in the U.K.).

5. Do you like Japanese men?

This question is frequently asked by Japanese men and never asked by women. It's unclear why they ask this but one possibility is that they are hoping for some sort of affirmation that western women find Japanese men appealing. In my case, the honest truth is that I do not find Japanese men (in general) attractive for a variety of reasons so I tend to avoid this question by saying that I'm married and never think about Japanese men (which is actually true except on the occasions when I'm asked this question and am forced to think about this issue).

6. What Japanese food do you like?

You'll notice this is the 3rd food-related question. The Japanese are obsessed with food, as I believe I've mentioned before (as have numerous other Japan bloggers) so it's not so strange that they ask a lot of questions about food. It's likely that I wouldn't be asked this question if I said I loved sushi when I was asked about it.

I actually do like a decent amount of Japanese food but am not adept at preparing it nor am I sufficiently enamored of it to seek it out particularly. In the first decade or so here, my husband and I would frequent yakitori (grilled chicken, beef, or vegetables on wooden skewers) and, to a lesser extent, tonkatsu restaurants and sample a variety of non-seafood and fish dishes. I do like most chicken-based Japanese food as well as miso-based dishes and nearly all vegetables (though konyaku (gel) beats me on the texture front again - talk about rubbery!). I also have a very soft spot for Japanese curry. Since I'm not a noodle fan of any stripe though (not even pasta), I pass on the ramen and soba. I have had chanko-nabe (the sumo wrestler's stew) and thought it was quite good but it's not the sort of thing which can be ordered in local restaurants and I'm not making the trip to Ryogoku to have it.

I'm sure people will feel I'm missing out by not availing myself of the numerous amounts of seafood in Japan but I grew up in western Pennsylvania with minimal exposure to seafood and fish. Even when my parents, on rare occasions, prepared seafood or fish, I didn't care for it. I have sampled things but have not reacted well. My first bite of shrimp was so repulsive to me that I nearly regurgitated it on the spot.

Oddly enough, the things I've grown most enamored of among Japanese food is the bean cakes and sweet potatoes as well as nearly anything made with chestnuts. These are the things I expect to crave and miss the most when we finally leave Japan.

7. Why did you come to Japan/how long have you lived in Japan?

I'm not sure what kind of answers student expect (or hope for) in this regard but early on in my stay, which was when foreigners were still considered grotesquely overpaid for teaching English, I'm pretty sure they thought the answer was "to make money". To be honest, way back at the beginning, that was a factor in deciding to come here as the pay was relatively decent for the time. It's not nearly so lucrative as it once was though because salaries have gone down as hours have gone up. However, my husband and I couldn't really get ahead while living in the U.S. and do alright here so it's certainly not a bad place to make a living.

The main reason I came to Japan was that my husband and I met here for the first time and it seemed like life here was better for us than it was in the U.S. I tend to explain this to my students more simply by saying that my husband lived and worked here before we married and he enjoyed it so we thought it would be interesting if we both lived here for awhile.

Projection

In psychology, projection is when one attributes one's own thoughts or feelings, generally anxious or uncomfortable ones, to another party. Projection is one of the few things that Freud got right about psychology and behavior. For instance, if your boss is insecure about the quality of his work, rather than recognize his own insecurity, he may project it on to you and accuse you of not respecting or recognizing the quality and/or quantity of his efforts.

Throughout my life, I've both been the target of and purveyor of a great deal of projection. It'd be surprising if there were many people who weren't on both sides of the equation in this regard at one point or another in their lives. Projection seems to be especially rampant in one's younger years when insecurity tends to loudly rage on a regular basis.

In Japan, I've had two remarkable and related experiences with projection both of which involved coworkers in cross-cultural relationships. In the first case, there was a female coworker who had worked at my company for about 2 years before I came to work there and she took a rapid dislike to me after I was brought on full-time (which occurred after 3 months as a temporary worker). She was married to a Japanese man but was intensely dissatisfied living in Japan. It wasn't much of a stretch to say that she hated life in Tokyo. It was clear that she felt trapped though because her husband couldn't possibly have supported her if they went back to the U.S. and she didn't have the skills to get a job to support them both back home.

While this co-worker never came right out and said why she disliked me, a number of things became clear by the type of hostile comments she made on occasion. One of the things I did which irritated her the most was speak in any fashion whatsoever about my husband or the time we spent together. While I may speak glowingly of my husband in my blog (and all that glow is sincere and well-deserved), I didn't behave in such a fashion in the workplace as it would have been inappropriate. All it tended to take to irritate this coworker was answering a question from another coworker about my plans for the weekend or for dinner or whatnot and for me to mention my husband would be meeting me or we'd be spending all weekend relaxing at home together. The hostile coworker would make some snotty remark about how everyone didn't have to spend all their time with their husbands or some such thing which made it clear she felt I was pointing out how inadequate her relationship with her husband was compared to mine.

The thing is that I had no idea what sort of relationship she had with her husband as she almost never spoke of him or anything they did together. I never said a word about her relationship, and, in fact, I tried hard to refrain from saying anything at all beyond what was required for peaceful co-existence at work. Eventually, this coworker decided she detested me so much that she simply stopped speaking to me altogether. I can't stress enough that I never implied anything about her relationship with her husband nor did I put her down in any way but she projected her insecurities about her relationship and her general dissatisfaction with her life in Japan onto me.

Ironically, the second remarkable instance occurred as a result of my boss and I discussing this hostile co-worker's situation in the presence of a male coworker who came along several years later. My boss got along better with the hostile woman than I and knew a bit more than I did about her life and we were discussing some of the things she had done and how unhappy she was in Japan. He and I both said that we felt it must be very difficult to be in a cross-cultural relationship, particularly when both parties weren't fluent in either language and both had limited experience with the cultural preconceptions and communication styles of the other. At one point, we both remarked that neither of us had what it would take to deal with all the challenges such a relationship would present, particularly in terms of the indirect communication and reliance on inference which is so common in Japan.

After we made a statement about how we felt cross-cultural relationships were immensely challenging, this male coworker, who was a goofy fellow but not the least bit prone to angry outbursts said loudly and with a great deal of concealed frustration bursting forth, "now that's enough!" This co-worker was in a relationship with a Chinese woman working in Tokyo and he thought we were staging this conversation as a onion-skin-thin reference to his relationship with his girlfriend. The absolute truth was that neither my boss nor I had the slightest thought about his relationship with his girlfriend but clearly there were difficulties he was having so he projected his anxiety about those problems onto us.

In the case of this co-worker, he did talk about his girlfriend but he never mentioned any problems. There was no reason for him to think we were talking about him other than his nagging unspoken concerns about their relationship.

Both of these cases really stick out in my memory because they were the most baseless experiences I've had with people projecting their anxieties onto me and they both involved cross-cultural relationships. To this day, these experiences serve as a reminder to me that, though it may seem crystal clear that someone is talking about you in a veiled attempt to criticize you or make you feel bad about your life, they actually may not be thinking of you at all and it's important to keep your psychological "projector" under control.