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So I guess you could say that I am now getting further along in the assimilation and integration into life working at a Japanese company. Still there are some things which I find really – glaringly even – different to back at home. Both are around food. Reading my little “Japan News” app on the metro the other day I read that the Japanese find eating on the go to be rude, and not very appropriate. So clearly there is a degree of quirkiness to the whole food thing which I am not privy to yet. I have read the “10 tips for using chopsticks” and the guides that remind you that slurping is polite here (regardless no chef here has yet to get this traditional clarification of my enjoyment of their culinary efforts from me) but there is something else about the whole food thing in the office.
Point 1 – there is no office kitchen. This is a big issue for me. For a person that likes to have a water bottle on his desk, and a plentiful supply of instant coffee (or the acid replicating dependable office coffee machine) the fact that there is no kitchen, no coffee, no water… its like the whole floor has a desire to become as dehydrated as humanly possible! In the famous words of Bones “I don’t know what that means”. I can’t understand it. This is winter I can only imagine what it might be like come summer. There is a vending machine on the floor which has bottled water. But do I really have to budget in spending a few hundred yen a day on water each day to get through?! Surely this can’t be the requirement! It also has hot and cold cans of coffee and tea (yeah… have I done that blog on the vending machines having hot drinks as well?! Seriously good idea!) But the coffee also costs money, and then it also is pretty crap! Why do they need to sweeten the bottle until its like having sweetened water?! No matter how acidic the coffee is they cover it with sugar. I’m drinking right now from the coffee vending machine a “Fire Black Special Double” which translates into “I’m as week as filter coffee and Denny’s has brewed a less rancid drop”. It’s aKirin disaster (the name and website are the only items I can read on the bottle – kirinfire.com) which I’ve only purchased because I slept in this morning and didn’t have time to brew up a pot of coffee. The result is a killer headache right now.
So my solution so far has been to pack with my 2 bottles of water and just take them to work with me. I feel like that numpty that was on TV years back running around with a car tyre around his waist going “this is how much more I used to weigh.. Imagine walking around with this”. That is me now albeit with a litre of water. Not as dramatic, but still, its pretty crazy I reckon. Give people a kitchen area for the love of god! One can’t even say resort to using a tap in the bathrooms (not that I had felt that desperate) because the taps are all sensor taps with water pre-heated to 38 degrees. At least I think that is what the sign means when it has ‘caution 38’ on it and the water comes out warm.
At least my headache is starting to subside now. Perhaps I’ll be a little more hospitable for the rest of this post given this new found absence of pounding in my head.
The lack of kitchen brings me to Point 2 – Lunch in the Office Cafeteria. Back home I think it is fair to say that lunch is a sacred time which one uses outside of the office, or at least away from the desk. You stay in the kitchen/lunch room, you make some food, you read a book or the newspaper, you go out for lunch with friends, you chat about non-work things, you bitch about work things etc etc Its all very civilised.
Here I have found lunch is for the weak. The longer you take at lunch the weaker you are. You are nothing if it takes you an hour to eat lunch. What a weakling you are! Pfft. 30 minutes is barely passable, if you can do it in less then that you might have a chance of surviving in life (note not succeeding). Of the 4,000 people in the building in which I work, around …. 3,800 appear to start cueing for lunch right on 12pm. You can tell it is 12pm because an electronic 18th Century clock chimes away announcing this event. All the lights and air con also shut down for the hour (ironic given the time people take). Everyone heads to the cafeteria, makes their selections, eats at an alarming pace – truly frightening. Whereas it might take FordAustralia 27 hours to assemble one car,Toyota can do it in around an hour. This kind of efficiency has been put into lunch as well. There is to be no talk, once eats everyone as fast as possible, then leaves and heads back to the office! Today is an example:
12:25 Leave office desk (as rebellious legal people we wait for the queue to subdue)
12:30 Down in B1 at the entrance to the Cafeteria
12:32 Have walked through the rows and selected all our food, poured green tea and found a seat
12:33 EAT
12:43 Finished eating, everyone looks at each other and gets up
12:45 all paid for and all plates cleaned and placed in the wash basin to soak
12:50 Back in the office.
At around 12:53 my stomach was protesting profoundly at the massive ingestion of food which included:
– A plate with BBQ Pork, noodles and green beans
– A large square of tofu with soy-sauce, green onion and freshly ground ginger on top (personally this is one of the surprise favourite that I have found here – its so clean and refreshing and surprisingly tasty)
– A bowel of miso soup
– A bowel of white rice
– A ‘cup’ of green tea
Perhaps if this was something my body was familiar with digesting in such short time frame it might put up more of a fight. But given its relative novelty to my digestive tract I think it interprets this as a declaration of war by the mouth – at the least a show of extreme aggression. Whilst it begrudgingly does its sworn duty for the team, it makes itself very clear that it is NOT HAPPY JAN.
It was this combined with the headache that drove me to the Kirin Fire, which ironically has managed to put out one fire, and perhaps might help the digestive process with its high levels of acidity.
The positive in all of this is lunch cost me 370yen – $4.25 in the old money. Plus no one had to prepare it, shop for it, carry it (along with the daily water ration) to work, and clean up after it (lets not forget the lack of trash cans!).
For me, for now I am indulging them in their crazy lunch ritual, just so people think that I am making an effort to be ‘one of the gang’. Pretty soon though I think I’m going to have to rebel against this crazy process and take some time eating, perhaps find a chair in the Cafeteria I can keep my kindle company with for a little. Or go for a walk into the deserted streets ofTokyo(everyone is working or eating underground, why would anyone possibly be on the street?!) and get some fresh air. .. Perhaps stare at the river across from my office in a longing many… watching the water flowing by taunting me as I go through my daily ritual of forced dehydration…
So there we have it – another couple of oddity which I’m still trying to come to terms with…. One of which my digestive system is still trying to come to terms with…
An Aussie In Japan 