2002-07-17 - 9:23 p.m.
Yesterday I said my official good-byes to Kimitsu City, although my contract doesn’t end for another week and a half. The Japanese love official beginnings and endings. My ceremonial farewell was nearly identical to my ceremonial welcome, giving me a chance to reflect on how petrified and clueless I was this time last year. Lynn, who is also departing, and Andrew, who is staying in Kimitsu but has finished his three years with JET, and I were ushered into the mayor’s swank eighth floor office. The mayor himself was off on official typhoon business -- a small one had swept through Kimitsu earlier that morning -- so we met with his deputy. The moderator of the ceremony made short speeches about each one of us as two women in vest and skirt uniforms scurried around the room noiselessly, serving us green tea. The three of us were presented with framed certificates. The deputy mayor gave a speech; we gave speeches. The moderator of the ceremony then announced that we were to drink our tea and have some conversation. A few forced questions from the deputy mayor were fielded by our supervisor, a picture was snapped, and then the moderator stood up and announced the end of the ceremony, and we were all escorted out of the office. As Andrew said, it’s impossible to relax in a situation like that.
Next we gave a speech to the sixth floor, the board of education staff members. Then we boarded a bus for our sayonara party. The party was held at a late-1980’s style bridal/event hall (hence the private bus). Andrew, Lynn and I had to wait until all of the guests arrived, then we were ushered in to a round of applause. A teacher gave a short speech about each one of us. Mine was given by an elementary school teacher, who had prepared a poster listing one good quality for every letter of my name.
S- sushi (as in, Sarah likes sushi, definitely considered a positive character trait here)
A- adventure (“learning English with you was an adventure”)
R- respectable
A- attractive smile
H - honesty
We made speeches and were presented with enormous flower bouquets and presents. I received a beautiful hand-painted folding fan. Then dinner began and the beer and sake started flowing. And flowing. I was seated next to the moderator from the afternoon’s sober ceremony with the deputy mayor, and things quickly went from sober to... un-sober. My supervisor posed for pictures with his glasses on upside-down -- his favorite joke. After exactly two hours, my old supervisor gave some closing remarks, which were significantly more spontaneous and witty than his opening remarks. He invited the three of us up to the stage, and our new supervisor lead the party in a traditional Japanese cheer for each one of us. In America, the cheerleaders are predominately female, and cheering consists of gymnastics as well as chants. In Japan, cheerleading is done by the boys, and it consists of clapping and call and response chanting at the top of one’s lungs. In order to achieve maximum volume, the cheerleader leans backwards about forty-five degrees with an arm extended forward. In this fashion we were cheered for, and then Andrew, who is six feet tall, was lifted by the crowd and tossed up and down a few times. Lynn and I were spared this fate because of our gender (and skirts). The Jews have got something going with the chair.
We all piled back onto the bus, and as a sign of the general level of intoxication, my favorite party guest, the man who implored us at my welcoming party to “please have pleasure time,” was now speaking his unique brand of English freely. The bus took us to Karaoke World, and we settled into a large private room with two karaoke TVs and a mini-stage. The highlights included a male English teacher’s rendition of the Celine Dion “Titanic” song, hitting all of the high notes, Mr. “Pleasure Time”’s performance of “Hey Jude” using my fan as a dance prop, and a duet of “Twist and Shout” by Andrew and our supervisor, who did not hold back on either twisting or shouting.
About half of us retired at 11 after karaoke, but the other half went out to another bar -- and this on a Tuesday. It’s not unusual behavior for a Japanese worker to be out this late on a week night. At any given office, the workday will officially end at 5:30, but many workers will stay two hours later or more to finish mountains of work or simply to show dedication to the company, co-workers, and superiors. Because the workday is frantically-paced and workers spend a lot of time out of the office making calls to other departments, agencies, or clients, social gatherings after work serve to build bonds among co-workers outside of the highly regimented workplace.
My mother commented that when she and my father traveled through Asia for his work, Japan was the only country in which she was routinely excluded from the business functions. This makes perfect sense to me now. In America spouses are considered an integral part of work-related social functions. If you have a company dinner, party, or picnic, it’s expected that you would bring a partner or spouse. It’s interesting to try to think WHY we have this custom -- and perhaps difficult, because it seems so natural to us. Maybe one reason behind this custom is that it introduces an employee’s private home life to his or her co-workers, thus facilitating more friendly and personal relationships among employees. By inviting spouses, the focus is shifted somewhat off of the work, and the business function begins to resemble a “normal” social function. Our co-workers begin to seem more “human” to us by introducing us to their loved ones. In Japan, co-workers also seek to recognize each other’s humanity through social gatherings, but spouses aren’t seen as necessary to this process. Japan has a highly homo-social culture, meaning that all-male or all-female gatherings are the norm. Just as in America there is a certain tension around single-sex gatherings (it seems “unnatural,” especially for straight men), in Japan there is a tension around mixed-sex gatherings. Here, social functions after work are explicitly about work, and spouses become irrelevant. That’s not to say that all anyone discusses is work (though certainly a lot of business deals go down over sake), but ultimately it’s about strengthening the circle of co-workers. Spouses fall outside of that circle. Work and home are starkly separate spheres and there is very little integration between the two. Actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but this is a diary entry, not a Vassar paper.
And now that I’m done with THAT tangent, I have nothing more to say.
