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.

Amazon Vine Revisited

In September, I posted that I had been invited into the Amazon Vine program but found that it was impossible to be a participant due to some difficulties with the process of acquiring items for review. Since that time, the Vine program has made some changes that allow better access for all participants and my husband and I were able to finally get a book for review (pictured above).

My research into why the program was causing some to get no items and others to get a plethora yielded some results that reflected naivete or short-sightedness on the part of those at Amazon behind the program. In the first few months, participants were allowed to request up to three items and then to request more items once they had submitted a review for items reviewed. The result of this way of conducting the program was that people "gamed" the system in order to gobble up as many freebies as possible. To do this, they would request items and then submit reviews before they had actually received them in order to make them eligible to request even more items. Since the entire purpose of the Vine program is to get credible reviews for items that have not yet been released, this was clearly not in Amazon's best interest nor a reflection of their intent in creating the program.

To their credit, Amazon worked out what was going on based on the fact that reviews were submitted before delivery could possibly have been completed and changed their system. The current system allows each person to request one item per month until everyone has had a chance to choose something. Leftover items may then be requested the following month or later in the same month (depending on how things work out and what Amazon believes is best and fair).

The variety of items Amazon is offering has been diversified since the first newsletter which only contained CDs and books. The last few mailings have included keyboards, mice, software, DVDs, and vibrating chair pads. Presently, getting anything other than books is pretty impossible unless you make it a point to log into the Vine page and find out what items can be requested the instant they are made available. This is because the same greed that compelled people to cheat the system has them pouncing like a starving cat on a juicy mouse at the sight of any electronic items or items of higher value than a book. I'm wondering how many of those types of items end up on eBay or sold off to acquaintances at reduced rates at the end of the day as they have some re-sale value.

Personally, I'd never request electronics items anyway since international shipping costs still apply to anything I buy and there's no way a keyboard or electronic item is going to be worthwhile considering shipping rates to Japan. I'm happy to get a crack at a book for the sake of experiencing something new and submitting a review. In all honesty, I really looked at the invitation to the program as a means by which I could compel myself to be exposed to new things, particularly in terms of reading books I may not normally read. The items I get end up costing me $15 or more in shipping so they aren't actually free anyway. I knew this going in.

I'm pleased to say that Amazon took the problems in hand and fixed them and they deserve credit for that. I'm far less pleased to say that my previous post revealed a lot of the ugly nature of people when getting something free is at stake and they want to diminish the competition so they can have more for themselves. If you read the comments on my previous Amazon Vine post, you'll see people accused me of the following:

1. Misrepresenting myself as living in the U.S. to Amazon in order to be eligible for the Vine program
2. Failing to pay import taxes on items I receive.
3. Violating the "items cannot be exported" prohibition on Amazon.
   
4. Being generally rather stupid for heeding what Amazon said regarding newsletters being the conduit for requesting items rather than checking the web site and hammering the reload button at the scheduled posting time.
   

None of these accusations had a base in anything besides the imagination of my greedy and unsophisticated accusers. To spare you from going back to read the comments, I can say that:

1. I cannot hide my residence from Amazon as they have both my Japanese billing and shipping addresses. They knew where I lived when they invited me. I certainly never mislead them in any fashion nor did I request to join the program.
2. I cannot avoid import taxes as packages are randomly searched and custom tags denoting the value of the contents are attached on the outside. Amazon and the Japanese postal service have all the control over what I pay, if anything. However, the types of goods that Amazon ships are generally not the sort import taxes are placed on. For what its worth, clothing and shoes are the only goods I've ever had to pay taxes on. I think leather goods in particular are taxed based on my past experiences.
3. I cannot be an "exporter" if I don't resell the goods I receive. Besides that, the sample book I got is an advance release book. I can't even get credit for it at a used bookstore (should I choose to do so), let alone sell it to anyone.
4. I took Amazon at their word when they said you should wait for a newsletter and request items from it. Some people set their clocks for the wee hours of the morning to be first in line (the time that the items are posted has since been changed so that it's no longer necessary to do this), but I'm not that desperate and I seriously doubt that anyone in the Vine program is so incredibly poor that they need to be so hawkish about freebies.

As a final word, I'd hope that Amazon would prefer people who aren't so petty and greedy and who are interested in genuinely assessing the given products. Unfortunately, it appears they are ill-equipped to evaluate the tendencies of participants. Of course, a more cynical evaluation of the situation would be that all people will take as much as they can and knock over anyone who gets in their way if it's free.

Smells Like America

Last Friday, one of my regular students walked in and said that my apartment smelled good. This wasn't the first time this has happened but it was the first time it occurred when I wasn't baking bread in the bread machine or dinner in the slow cooker. The thing my student smelled was Downy fabric softener. She told me that, to her, it smells "like America."

I'm guessing the reason she associates the scent of Downy with the U.S. is that it's one of the most popular brands there and not necessarily because Japanese laundry isn't usually washed with fabric softener. I can't say for sure though since I don't tend to quiz my students about their clothes washing habits and it's not the sort of thing that comes up in casual conversation. I can say that fabric softener is quite expensive in Japan and that Downy is one of the most heavily stocked items at one of our local import shops.

I've always associated fabric softener use with dryers since they prevent static cling. Since most people line dry in Japan, they may not bother to use it so much. The truth is that, after my dryer broke, I stopped using it because of the price, but I recently grew tired of crispy clothes from line drying and had my husband pick up a big jug of Downy from Costco. I guess my student commented on the smell because she hadn't smelled it in my apartment before.

The fact that she associates the smell of Downy with the U.S. made me consider what scents I associate with Japan. One of them is most certainly the hay-like smell of tatami. This is a scent which is especially strong if you close off a room and leave the windows closed then return after half a day. You don't really notice it otherwise. I've been told, however, that our luggage has been infused with this somewhat musty smell and people back home can really pick it up when its used for travel. There are a lot of other smells in Japan, of course, but few are what I'd consider sufficiently unique to it that I'd draw a strong connection to Japan besides the wonderful fragrance of roasting sweet potatoes in autumn and winter and tatami.

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As of late, I've been reading a great deal of hateful commentary about the United States on other (Japan-related) sites that I can't help but make this post with the idea in the back of my mind that someone will drop by and make some sort of rude comment about how America or American people smell uniquely bad. I just wanted to take a moment to say that they need not bother to offer such thoughts here as any obviously prejudicial or ugly comments will be rejected in comment moderation.

Upgraded

A few weeks ago, my brother-in-law asked me if I wanted to purchase into a family pack for Mac OS 10.5 (aka Leopard). Family packs cost a little less than twice as much as two standard versions of an OS but offer you 5 licenses. I hadn't really considered upgrading before this as I wasn't sure if my Mini would run it adequately, and, being a lapsed Mac fanatic, I wasn't exactly itching to taste the newest OS. I had also been reading some reviews on MacWorld and, while positive, they weren't raving about it.

The lack of over-the-top talk on MacWorld is actually a good thing and a direct reflection of the fact that the Mac as a platform is much stronger than it was about a decade ago. When times were lean, MacWorld was more inclined to slant all articles about Apple hardware and software in the most positive fashion. Now, they can be a bit more even-handed because the platform to which they tether their continued existence looks secure and they no longer need to relentlessly convince everyone that the Mac is superior in every regard.

Despite the fact that I knew it wasn't going to be an awe-inspiring upgrade, I decided to take the reduced-rate plunge, though not without reservations and taking precautions. Since some of my previous OS X upgrades have resulted in some disastrous losses, I decided to clone my hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. This creates a disk image of whatever drive you tell it to copy. For my 100 GB drive with about 38 GB of occupied space, this took about 3 hours to create a "read-only" (non-compressed) image. It took another hour for me to copy this image over to a networked back-up hard drive due to the shortcomings of my LAN set-up. If Leopard really didn't run well or hosed my computer, it was my hope that I'd be able to completely restore the previous version of my OS from this image.

My Mini's internal DVD drive was rather sensitive to the installation disc and, in fact, spit it out in disgust a few times so I decided to try to install it off of an external double layer burner that was attached via Firewire. In the past, I couldn't persuade my Mac to let me install from an external drive so I was pleasantly surprised that permission was granted this time. The disc read slower than molasses in January but it went smoothly enough. Installation took about an hour and a half.

Most tech folks recommend a clean install rather than an upgrade but I couldn't be bothered to go to that trouble so the first test was going to be whether or not the contents of my drive remained intact after the installation. I'm pleased to say that, aside from my printer driver which disappeared (though I did successfully reinstall it), everything seems to be there. Well, OS 9 vanished but I expected that since Apple decided to no longer support its former OS. If I need to run anything in OS 9 in order to access legacy files, I'll run it on my old orange iBook.

The new dock. Click to see a bigger version.

My first visual impression of OS 10.5 is that everything was smaller and fuzzier. The dock was refashioned to give the appearance of icons sitting on a reflecting glass surface in a faux 3D fashion. The indication that an application is open is far more subtle now. It used to have a black triangle under an open application. Now, there's a reflective little blue droplet. This is the sort of visual tweaking that Apple excels at and why their OS always looks more stunning and beautiful than others though it doesn't do anything extra for functionality.

My next test was to see if anything that used to work stopped working or ran badly. I haven't tried everything but all the commonly-used applications (Photoshop, InDesign, Filemaker Pro, Toast, Mail, Skype, Adium, Excel, Word, iCal, and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction) were fine though launch times seemed a bit slower. Oddly enough, some of these applications, once launched, actually seem to run a little faster, particularly Diablo II. However, I can't say the programs have been put through their paces as I just did a quick launch, type a bit, click around a bit and quit test. The only exception to applications running faster or at the same speed has been Firefox which was rather noticeably kludgy until I updated it.

Running multiple applications has gotten slower when I have more than 3 running (or one of them is a memory pig) but this isn't too shocking since, with 1 GB of RAM, my Mini isn't exactly overloaded with free memory nor is it a speed demon at 1.42 Ghz. However, it is decently over the minimum requirement of 512 MB of RAM and 867 Mhz (G4 or Intel processor) for Leopard. I think Leopard is the last meaningful upgrade I can install on this particular machine unless I want to appreciably sacrifice performance on the altar of Apple's ever-demanding eye candy.

The visual differences which I have found unappealing include the miniaturization of certain Finder elements. The names and icons on the side bar are much smaller than before (see the screen shot a few paragraphs down to see to what I'm referring). This is very likely a means of accommodating more items in the list such as the "search for" portion at the bottom. Also, the blurry font smoothing in its default setting just about drove me crazy and I had to change it to "standard" (which I believe means it is actually "off" but Apple didn't make that clear by their wording in the System Preferences panel as there is no "off" option). Keeping smoothing on made the font in my blog look about 3-feet thick and made me wonder how others see my site's lettering with font-smoothing on.

The big gun in Leopard is the backup utility named "Time Machine". Unfortunately, my hard disk is not partitioned and I don't have an external drive directly connected to my Mac so I can't use it. I do have a networked hard drive which is currently tethered to my PC via USB 2 but that drive is not recognized by Time Machine and I cannot use it for backing up unless I do so by dragging things to the drive myself (the Mac does recognize the drive, only Time Machine does not). For the moment, I can't really take advantage of the most impressive feature so I'll have to continue to do manual backups until I'm willing to fork over some money for a dedicated external drive for the Mac, move my external drive to the Mac (not bloody likely), or partition the hard drive (also unlikely). I'm not going to go through one type of trouble (changing my existing back-up set-up) to avoid another (manual backing up), particularly when I can't be sure the two PCs that also currently access my external drive will recognize it if it's hard-wired to the Mac.

The nifty-looking but relatively pointless (for me) "cover flow" view option.

I can see the benefit of some of the visual aspects for select users even if they aren't doing much for me. There are probably some people out there who think the "cover flow" view option is better than other views, for instance. If you have a ton of pictures and want to be be able to rotate through them rapidly to see them rather than look at thumbnails, it probably has a higher utility factor than using Apple's "Preview" to open them all up and scroll through a list of thumbnails. Personally, I think using Preview is better as it opens the thumbnail you select at a large size in the main preview window.

By clicking a folder in the dock (red box in t he screen shot), you get a pop up of all the contents of that folder as part of the "stacks" feature.

By far, my favorite thing in Leopard is the "Stacks" feature in grid view. The "fan" view just looks stupid but the grid allows you to see the contents of all folders within a folder that is stored in Dock with a click. This means you don't have to store as many frequently-accessed folders in the Dock (which shrinks the icons to ever tinier sizes as you cram it full of more of them) or tunnel through nested folders.

There are a lot of cool-looking things in Leopard and I can't say I regret the upgrade at this point in time. However, I also cannot say it's a must-have upgrade for any particular user of Mac OS X unless there is a compatibility issue at play. In the end, the biggest reason to upgrade generally ends up being the fact that software developers will write to the newest version of an OS and running older versions increases your chances of having problems if you don't upgrade. However, that does not yet appear to be the case with Leopard but only time will tell.

Table Manners

A post on "What Japan Thinks" which offered survey results about what sort of chopstick-related faux pas people notice got me thinking about western table manners and about how and why such rules come about. If you read through the list in the "What Japan Thinks" article (and I recommend you do so as it's pretty interesting and information), some of the "violations" seem relatively arbitrary and, in my opinion, inoffensive.

To some extent, I believe what constitutes bad manners at the table is related to considerate and sanitary behavior. For instance, being pointed at with cutlery of any sort isn't a comfortable experience as it brings to carries a hint of someone attempting to gut you with a salad fork or scoop out mushy body parts with a spoon. Allowing your eating implements after they have been in your mouth to touch any communal dishes or spaces transfers your cooties to everyone else.

Some rules, however, seem very strange things to consider poor manners such as "eating one dish continuously." Why should others care if you eat all of one dish before consuming another? In the west where people serve themselves from a large dish placed in the center of the table, this may be considered a problem because someone might be consuming more than his fair share of a select dish. In Japan, where food is generally served to each individual in separate dishes (unless you're at a bar or pub), you're eating your own portion and not taking away from a community platter.

The interesting thing about manners and food-related behavior is that, if you look at the etiquette across cultures, you can find a lot of conflicting ideas. In fact, sometimes you can find that ideas conflict within the same culture. One of these points in the U.S. is about whether or not you leave food on your plate. My family, and this is probably because we were poor and food was not to be wasted, always insisted on cleaning ones plate. In other parts of the U.S., it's perfectly fine to leave food on your plate if you're not hungry enough to eat it all. In fact, some people consider it bad manners to eat everything because it makes you look piggish. In Japan, while I don't believe it's bad manners not to finish what you are served, it makes your host believe you didn't enjoy the food.

One of my students decided to prepare a simple Japanese meal for her host family during a home stay. Before she left, she asked me what she could prepare and I told her that it really depended on the people. Some people are pretty open-minded about various types of food and some have limited palates. I recommended she consider some sort of nabe or Japanese stew. She opted to do a simpler sliced beef dish which was mainly based on seasoning with salt and soy sauce and served with rice. The homestay mother praised the dish, the son openly disliked it and no one cleaned their plates. She assumed that none of them liked it because they didn't eat it all. While it's possible that the family didn't like it, it's also possible they just aren't the sorts to clean their plates. When I explained this to her, I don't think she actually believed me.

Fortunately for foreign folks, the Japanese forgive us all our failings in terms of manners when we are their guests. They don't expect us to know enough not to leave our chopsticks sticking straight out of our rice (which is actually one of the nastiest things you can do as it relates to funeral practices) and tend to be impressed if we are proficient in using chopsticks at all.