En Route

December is back again with a vengeance. It rained last night and this morning was the start of a very cold and grey day. I could hear the rain beating against the roof, and I curled up in bed and pulled the covers back over my head. Thankfully I got to work from home today, and I rolled over and slept for another hour…

Normally at this time of year I’m all ready to head into the year-end slowdown. There is a lot of activity for the first few weeks of the month, as people try to close out any outstanding business and gradually things wind down to a close. The foreign managers all head back home for the Christmas and New Years holidays, and soon even the emails from overseas slow down to a trickle and the weekly calls grind to a halt for a few weeks. The Bonenkai (year end parties) start up a well. I’m already slated to attend three or four, and that doesn’t even count the unofficial ones with friends and co-workers. Aside from Golden Week in May, this time of year is one of my favorite times to be in Tokyo.

But this week I’ve been watching with a great deal of curiosity the annual ramp-up of the job-hunting season for third year university students across Japan, which also coincidentally starts in the first week of December. The Nikkei has had a interesting series of articles documenting the process, and I’ve found it fascinating to read. Working in foreign companies as I have for virtually all of my time here in Japan, I’ve never had a deep understanding of what most of the workforce has to go through to get that first job after university; following it in the press this week has been a real education for me.

The first thing that seemed strange to me was the timing of it all: job hunting (known here by the term, “Shu katsu” 就活 – “employment activities”) typically starts in the second semester of the junior year. This means that if you don’t get a job offer by the end of your junior year (and most people do not!), you wind up spending one and a half hears trying to get hired.

And this year, some argue, is an improvement to the past. Previously the season started earlier, but then pressure was put on companies to start later in the year so that students could concentrate on their studies more. In the end a compromise was made to change the starting date from October to December – a two month delay. But with this change, students, schools, everyone really, now simply feels even more pressure to rush headlong through the process at an even more breakneck pace: to gather more information, attend more seminars, and get in front of as many recruiters as possible, now that the starting line has been moved back and there is less time. And the idea of getting more time to focus on studies? Gone. I read a story the other day that said that nearly half of all university students spend less than two or three hours a week doing homework. All the education now happens in the classroom; self-study is a thing of the past, let alone struggling to figure something out on your own.

Why all the stress about getting a job? For one thing it’s simply tougher now than it has been in previous years to get that first job, especially since the Great Recession of 2008. Employment opportunities for young people are harder to come by everywhere in the developed countries; in places like Spain or the inner cities of the US nearly half of adults in their 20′s don’t have jobs. But also, simply put, the employment market in Japan is not as liquid as it is in other countries. That means it’s harder to change jobs once you have one. People here tend to want to stay at one place for as long as they can, and those who decide to change jobs find out that they are met with suspicion once they do. So it’s all the more important to get the right first one. Someone I know compared getting the first job here to an arranged marriage versus a co-habitation. The idea is to try and live happily ever after, or at least look like it – you just don’t divorce.

This all worked well in the decades after the Second World War, when the economy was booming, the population was young and growing and there were plenty of manufacturing jobs to be had. However, the conditions have now changed dramatically. For starters, like everywhere else, the economy is still not going so well. Second, population growth is flat, and set to start declining soon. Making the demographic situation worse is the fact that the number of young adults is now starting to decline. On average for the past decade or so about 1.3 million people graduated from high school each year. Around half of this population has traditionally gone on to four-year universities, and another 25% goes on to some sort of two-year college (junior college, vocation college, etc.). That means that nearly 75% of all high-school graduates have gone on to some sort of tertiary education. When all is said and done, this means that about half a million new graduates enter the workforce annually. While all of this is impressive, on average about 30% of them won’t get full-time jobs. Some will go to grad school and try the job market again in a few years, but others will just be out of luck.

In the past it didn’t matter so much if these graduates spent little to no time on their studies in their final years, because virtually everyone got an offer and the companies spent much of their time training them for the first year or so anyway, rotating them to a number of jobs so they could learn the ropes and become generalists in their new families for life. But as the world gets more complicated and the vaunted lifetime employment breaks down (and actually it never applied to the majority of the workforce anyway), it’s becoming more important to have some clear idea of what it is you want to do with your life, and some sort of skills to take you in that direction. And even more important, it’s essential to have the ability to adapt; to discard knowledge that proves to be no longer useful and acquire new skills as needed; and to be self-directed and do all of this on your own without being told.

However, the unfortunate truth is that to a large extent, many institutions in Japan still do not want to accept these new realities, because it’s too easy to keep things as they are or too hard to tell the difficult truths. For instance, many students probably shouldn’t graduate, but with the overcapacity of colleges and their over-reliance on tuition as the main source of income, it’s too difficult to crack down on academic standards without significant reductions in infrastructure (i.e. colleges and professors). Similarly, many companies need to rethink their business models and figure out what they need to do to re-invent themselves so they can compete globally once again but this too means some painful decisions. There are a lot of very smart individuals in Japan, and a lot of the answers are already out there, but there is still an incredible amount of interia to keep things the way they’ve always been. But after a generation or so of miraculous growth and one of the greatest economic success stories ever, it’s hard to argue with success, right?

At least until it stops being successful…

Last night, one of my cousins, who I haven’t seen in more than a decade, asked me what was the biggest thing I missed living in Japan. I thought it was going to be a difficult question to answer, but my reply came all at once, without a moment of hesitation.

“This,” I said. We were sitting in my other cousin’s living room in DC (note: natives of the Baltimore/Washington area refer to Washington simply as “DC”) eating Thanksgiving dinner with about twenty people. One of my uncles had just re-filled my glass with wine yet again, and I surveyed all my family around the room and smiled.

As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s been a long time since I’ve experienced a Thanksgiving in the US. Honestly speaking, I never thought about them too much when I was living here (I’m sitting at the gate in Dulles Airport about to board an ANA light back to Japan as I write this). The day always seemed like a stopover before Christmas, which to me was always the big day. In many ways, the two days are very similar: the family gathers, everyone overeats, the meals are virtually identical. At least with Christmas you get presents.

But after having re-experienced the event for the first time in many years, I see it a lot differently. For me November 23, 2012 was about reconnecting. The entire week was about reconnecting in many respects, but yesterday was the culmination of an incredible week. I reunited with cousins I grew up with; I got drunk with my uncles; I roasted marshmallows with nieces and nephews; and I joined in the screaming and shouting of everyone as we cheered on the Redskins to their victory over the Cowboys. It was fellowship in the purest sense. We got together simply for the joy of being together. It was a great chance to recharge, to be reminded of who I am and where I come from, and to feel stronger because of it.

And now after four hours of sleep, I’ve got a long flight ahead of me, and plan on getting a good rest…

“US citizens, this way!”

The ANA agent says this and motions to the left, and it suddenly dawns on me that I’m about to step back into the US for the first time in more than two and a half years. Like the rest of my fellow travelers, I’m still a little groggy from the 14 hour flight. The immigration hall was renovated a few years ago, so now it’s brand new and much larger, but the same smell of US Federal Bureaucracy hangs over the place. It’s hard to explain. Irregardless of which political party is in charge, the hall is always timeless, non-partisan, and has exactly the same feel whenever I am here. The CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) guy takes my passport and customs form, makes a few pleasantries, then stamps my passport and wishes me a happy Thanksgiving. And with that, I’m back on US soil.

I know I’m back when I step in to the arrivals lounge right after customs and I see all the different faces: black, white, Latino, Asian. The US has always talked about diversity, but it seems to have become even more pronounced since I was last here, and much more so compared to when I was living here more than twenty years ago. It’s one of those slow-moving trends that you hardly even notice if you’re in the middle of it, but it’s pretty apparent to an outsider at one glance. This is a very different America now, and a lot of Americans are still trying to come to grips with what that means. Those who said they wanted “their country” back in this last election have got it all wrong. That country is no longer here and it looks like it isn’t ever coming back. And that’s pretty obvious when you walk into that lounge.

In many ways I’m returning home, but in others I’m closer to a visitor. My wife laughed the other night as I was packing when she saw some of the things I was bringing with me: a coarse Japanese washcloth, Chinese tea, and sembei rice crackers for the flight. “Don’t worry, that’s not so bad” a friend joked right before I left. “At least you’re not taking your own rice or soy sauce with you!” I suppose I have picked up a lot of non-American habits, preferences for things that I’ve learned to appreciate from my years of living abroad. But at the same time, it was also great to have a simple meal back home: fried fish, greens, and potato salad. I love living in two worlds; each one makes me appreciate the other all that much more.

I’ve got no plans this week, other than to spend some time with my sister and brother-in-law, and head over to my cousin’s house this Thursday for Thanksgiving. Hard to believe that this will be my first Thanksgiving in the US since 1995! After I moved to Japan I normally reserved Christmas/New Years as the time to visit my family, so this will be a very new experience for me. Once more, returning home but also a visitor.

Thankfully the jet lag hasn’t been so bad this trip, at least not so far. I managed to get a decent night of sleep, but laying in bed this morning, I heard a siren at around 6am and decided to get up and start writing. Unfortunately some things never change here in Baltimore. I’ve heard more sirens here in a 24 hour period than I typically here in Tokyo in a month. Pretty soon the Amtrak trains started running, and I could hear their whistles as they pulled though the commuter station a few blocks away on their way to DC. Next my cousin’s five year daughter (who is sleeping over) got up and I could her discussing her plans for this morning with my aunt down the hall. And few minutes after that I heard the deep baritone of my father downstairs followed by the radio. The start of another Sunday morning back in Baltimore, and it’s all right outside my door.

Time to get up, have a nice cup of Pu-erh tea and start my day.

My father-in-law died recently, at the age of 83 after a number of health complications.

We had known for some time that the end was near. And yet, no matter how much you mentally prepare yourself for the inevitable, nothing really prepares you for those final moments or for what comes next. I had just left work when I got a text from my wife, telling me to come to the hospital as soon as I could. By the time I got there he had just died fifteen minutes prior. The nurses had removed the IV and oxygen mask, and he laid there with a peaceful look on his face like he had just fallen asleep. I reached out to touch his still warm face. It took me a few moments to process it, but he was gone.

We all said our farewells to him, and I packed up my father-in-law’s personal effects while my wife called the undertaker to have his body transported home. Surprisingly it’s quite common here to bring the body of a loved one home one final time. It’s all very different from how we handle death back in the US.

After some time the hearse driver came, brought my father-in-law home, then he, my wife and I carried him into the house and put him into his bed. That was where he stayed for the next few days while my wife made the funeral arrangements.

The next few days were a blur. Emails to my job, friends and family. Intricate meetings with clergy and undertakers to plan out all the details of the ceremonies: wake, funeral, cremation, entombment. Although she was devastated with grief, my wife handled it all beautifully, with the sort of dignity and grace you hear about but rarely see except at extreme moments such as this. I did what I could to be the supportive, calm voice in the storm for everyone. It didn’t seem like much at the time but in hindsight it helped everyone quite a bit.

Part of me regretted not being there at the hospital when he died, not getting there a few minutes earlier. But then I recalled something I always used to hear back in Baltimore. There, people often refer to the death of a loved one as a “home-going”, meaning the person is going home to God. I thought back to when I was sitting there by the side of his bed the day before he died. He was having trouble breathing that morning and I reached over and held his hand. He was motionless at first, but then after a few minutes he gave my hand a faint squeeze. I squeezed his back and we stayed that way for a while, him squeezing my hand every now and then and me squeezing back.

And then for some reason the old Gospel song “Going to See the King” popped into my head. I started to cry. Then I reached over, stroked his head and told him that he didn’t have to worry, that I would look after his family, my family, and that it was okay to let go. I knew he’d be going home soon. I just didn’t know when.

We all miss him. But he’s home now.

Note: 万物流転 (“Ban Butsu Ru Ten” – “All things are in a state of flux”)

The other night as we were eating dinner the movie “Aeon Flux” came on television, and my wife asked me, “What does flux mean?” The first thing that popped into my mind was my freshman physics class in college, where flux had to do with the rate at which magnetism or electricity moves across a surface. I knew there was a more basic definition for the word, but I just couldn’t recall it. My mind does that sometimes. I’ve lived overseas for a long time and sometimes I can’t access certain words the way I used to. For instance, it’s hard for me to recall the word contradiction unless I first think of the Japanese word “mujun” (矛盾). Once I do that it’s easy to pull out the word “contradiction” which for some reason now is right behind 矛盾 in my head.

It was similar with flux the other night. I still knew the basic meaning; I just couldn’t put it into words. So I just spun my index finger in a circle. “It’s… you know, like this…” I said. And then the words I were looking for came out of me, “Always changing…”

The dictionary refers to flux as, “continuous change, passage or movement”. And there seems to be a lot of that around me these days at work. I like to think that I know what my job is every day and that I can plan my schedule accordingly. But inevitably all it takes is an email or phone call and everything goes into a tailspin. New assignments, new roles and responsibilities, more re-orgs. It never ceases. Last month we went through a massive project to re-segment customers. This month we’re being told to put it all back to the way it was. At some point dynamism ceases to be strategic and just becomes what’s known as “churn”, which is simply flux by another name.

Most of this isn’t even proactive strategy; it’s usually just reactive dancing to the rhythm of someone else’s music. Some unfamiliar beat that we’re told is the next big thing and if we want to keep up then we’d better do it too. But the music always changes. Or we dance in piecemeal so different parts of the same organization wind up moving at different speeds, or worse, in different directions altogether. I was involved in a project once where there were three different organizations doing essentially the same thing. And we were told not to talk to each other! After all, why do something one way in unison when you can do it in three slightly different ways at the same time?

If I remember my thermodynamics correctly, the Second Law essentially means that the universe’s natural state is chaos; additional energy is required to keep things in order. Work in any organization for long enough and that’s pretty self-evident. It’s exhausting to try and keep up with all the changes, remember who used to sit where and where they are now in the pecking order, or even worse, attempt to rationalize things and reduce the confusion. Nothing stays still, yourself included. And it’s far easier to just give in and let yourself go with the flow.

Or is that go with the flux?

“So did you hear about the Japanese athletes and how they were banned from the opening ceremony?” my mother-in-law asked me the other day.

She was referring to the story that has been circulating around the internet about how the delegation of Japanese athletes who had traveled to participate in the London Olympics, marched into the stadium and then were promptly escorted out of the stadium because they were wearing badges on their uniforms that had been made of debris material from Fukushima.  A few of my friends posted this on Facebook, and I dismissed it immediately as another one of those sensational rumors that get tossed around.

I hadn’t thought about it at all in the few weeks since I saw the story, but my Japanese mother-in-law mentioning this to me out of the blue piqued by curiosity and made me want to dig into it some more. It didn’t take much time to get to the bottom of the story. Originally it was posted by a Japanese blogger with the title “オリンピック開会式行ってきました！日本選手団退場の謎！” (translation: Went to the Olympic Opening Ceremony! The Mystery of the Japanese Sport Delegation Leaving!). The page has since been removed, but not before some readers mentioned it on Twitter, and other readers then re-posted an English version. Once that happened the story went viral as they say.

But as usual with stories like this, a lot of key details are left out, or changed altogether. For starters, the wooden badges were made from debris in Minamisanriku, which is in Miyage Prefecture, not Fukushima Prefecture. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Japan, Minamisasriku is about a three hour drive north of Fukushima.

The rest of the details to this story are just as flawed. Close to 300 athletes went from Japan to participate in the Olympics. Just like the athletes from other countries, many of them decided not participate in the opening ceremony, preferring instead to turn in early and focus on their events (many of which started the next day). That said, only 44 Japanese athletes participated in the parade. Once there, athletes have the option to just march in and return to their dorms early after the torch is lit, or they can stay for the entire ceremony. Of the 44 Japanese athletes who decided to march in, 30 of them decided to leave early and not see Paul McCarthy sing “Hey Jude”.

Now here’s where the details start to get sketchy. Either the athletes made a mistake and they all walked out together, or someone misunderstood and guided them all out, no one’s quite sure. The problem is that once you leave the stadium, for security reasons you can’t just waltz back in. When you go out, you stay out. And unfortunately that is what happened to the 14 Japanese athletes who marched in representing their delegation and had planned on staying for the whole show. Those are the facts.

The internet is a great tool for getting and receiving information, but at the same time it is also the greatest bullshit machine in history. And these days instead of trying to find the truth behind stories like this, too many of us are happy to blindly swallow anything that fits our preconceived notions of the world and use it as a weapon to ensnare others. I’ve come pretty close to falling for this sort of stuff myself, like the story about how US gold medal gymnast Gabby Douglas was banned from the Olympics for using drugs then turned out to be a malware hoax. But my first instinct is to try and spend a little time investigating these stories on my own before spewing them out to the world. This can be difficult to do when people have so little time these days, but I prefer to try and expand knowledge whenever possible.

Besides, maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I was always taught that if a story sounds like a whopper, then it probably is…

This afternoon was one of those lazy afternoons when I had to dial onto several regional calls. I generally don’t have to say a lot on these calls; I’m mainly on them to listen, to hear what system or process changes are about to hit those of us here in Asia, and let the rest of the group know sooner rather than later if any of these changes will have an adverse effect on our business.

Nine times out ten the topics don’t have much to do with Japan, so I usually spend these afternoons in a sort of “half-alert” mode. I program my ears to tune in when I hear key words like “Japan”, “Kawasaki”, or most importantly my name. The only problem with listening for my name is that there is another guy in our Xiamen, China office who also goes by James. This means I get a few false alerts. Once in a while I’ll jump up in my chair, take the phone off mute so I can make a comment and listen for a few seconds until I realize that the other James is explaining that China will have a national holiday next week so, sure, you can go ahead and do that system update.

There is probably a better way to disseminate information like this, but everywhere I have worked in the last five or six years this now seems to be the norm. You take 30 minutes or an hour out of your busy day and plug yourself into a phone, dial onto a conference line, and listen just in case something might happen that affects you. If there is nothing, then you hang up and try not to think too much about all the time you’ve just wasted. The other approach is to try and get something, anything, out of the call. I know people who will make a point of asking at least one question on every call they are on just for this purpose. This usually takes place at the end when the chairperson asks if there are any more questions, and gets silence in response. You start thinking about what you’re going to do with the 30 minutes you’re about the get handed back to you, and out of nowhere comes, “You know, since we still have time, I was wondering if you could give us a little more background about this project and how it relates to Project X?” This inevitably leads to several follow-up questions, and I sit there and watch the second hand on my watch as another 25 minutes of my life burns away before my eyes. Was this something we really needed to know? Usually not.

Making matters worse is the fact that I don’t have an office. Honestly speaking, I have never had an office in my entire professional life and normally don’t mind not having one. It’s extremely rare to have a personal office in most companies in Japan anyway, and my desk is surrounded on three sides by partitions so I can always read Google News in relative privacy. But on the afternoons when I take these calls, for some reason a lot of my colleagues have calls as well. So I sit there at my desk half listening and fading in and out of my call while there is a cacophony of voices all around me. I counted a few weeks ago, and I could hear five phone conversations around me: two in English, two in Japanese, and one in Chinese! There’s nothing more challenging than trying to hear a phone call when you’ve got three languages whizzing around you, two of which you understand. The sounds get all swirled together, and so I wind up understanding none of them. One of my former co-workers had a bad habit of getting overly emotional on some of her calls and would yell at the other people on her line sometimes. When that happened, I would completely lose track of whatever it was the people were saying on my call. So did everyone else who sat in that corner of the floor!

Maybe I should follow the lead of some of my team members and think about bringing some earplugs to the office…