It’s obviously a silly concept. It’s obviously not good to hate-read English media professing to be experts in Japanese culture treating the entire country and every person in it like a two-dimensional foil. Japan is the quirky backdrop to have frankly colonial (not neo-colonial) opinions about to pass the time.

Anyways, I should get off that train of thought.

I’m the HR guy at my new job. I was part of an HR team in my old job. It was a bigger company. I had specific roles and my colleagues were Japanese. Now I am the one HR person. And to be honest, yes, I will start a sentence with and. And to be honest, it feels like the nuance between 人事 (translator’s note: 人事 means HR) and HR are quite different. It may depend on the company.

This is all irrelevant to what I wanted to write about.

When I am being introduced to contacts: the water guy, the cleaning people, the building maintenance folks, the social/labor consultant, etc., it’s always the same.

This is 〇〇, he is taking over.

And in just replies, where more than half the content is pre-decided, it is amazing how much personality seeps through.

The social/labor buddy goes straight to osewaninatteorimasu, or his variation of it. Everyone has their variation. I for example dropped the itsumo in the beginning. Seemed disingenuous to me, but what do I know? Some people don’t do an orimasu, but just an imasu, which seems a little off to me, but what do I know. Anyways, there’s no addressing me, there’s no saying his name, just BOOM, we are sewa-ing.

When I called to get a quote for a different life insurance policy for employees, I loved how the person in charge forgot to give a password with the file. I’m not sure if it is dickish, but I did the “the password hasn’t come, so can you send it again?” thing. You know. Saving face. People have faces in Japan. It’s so uniform like that.

Anyways, I really wanted to mention this visa training. The new company does visa renewal online for employees. You can do that? Cool? Oh, our account expired! Oh, the previous HR person inquired and we got the new documents. No problem. Oh, she only emailed a general helpline. I guess I’ll call the actual office to confirm. Oh, we can’t just do a renewal it because it expired months ago? Training is required? These 13 companies on this PDF offer the training? The next one is in Aichi? Oh it’s online! Okay okay okay. Let us do this. Then we can saunter to the online visa office and hope it takes less than a month.

Now I’ll talk about what i actually wanted to talk about. You can ignore the above.

Zoom manners are always funny, I guess that’s worldwide. We all enter the zoom room. Most have our mics and cameras off, some don’t, those who don’t don’t realize they don’t, or they don’t care. My dark side wanted to take notice to what people’s reactions would be when they realized their entire conversation was being presented to the entire Zoom room, but they didn’t give a shit. Fair enough. No need to die of embarrassment like I would.

There were more than a few women taking the course who based on their background (what was behind them, not a made up backstory I invented), worked in a small company, had some dude in the back as the company president, and them who did all the day to day shit, like ensuring they can apply for the visas. This one young woman during the lecture found it obviously boring, and with her mic on mute felt free to have a great old conversation with old shacho behind her. I realize I am being a little sexist, but I swear old dudes who are confident enough to do that little with their legs spread that far apart must be running things.

There was this old guy who I swear was having problems with the sound the entire time because he looked befuddled the entire time and gazing almost blankly into the screen. Someone came over to help him with the settings. I wondered if he was the company president, but I felt like his legs weren’t that far apart when he was sitting. He also seemed gentle. Like me. We are gentle. I think he was in a tatami room, or at least it had that aura about it. He could have been taking the lecture from Showa 54. it wouldn’t have shocked me.

Anyways, to spoil the end of his story, he was the only one who actually got perfect on the test at the end. Motherfucker was sharp as a pin.

There were two other foreigners. One was Vietnamese, and the other I think was Indonesian. They were women. The Vietnamese woman also also rocked the test at the end. She was on the ball. I think I was slightly more on the ball, but she was not far off. We could have shared the ball.

The guy in the car was awesome. I think it was the backseat. He wasn’t the one driving, but it was not a stationary car, he was being driven around and he was taking the training whilst being driven. He had the hair of someone who owned a soapland. He wore glasses that I assume were expensive. Thick rimmed, but not normal thick rimmed. You know? I can’t explain it. Why write then I guess, but hey. I kept on wondering about his stable internet connection. The video didn’t falter at all.

There was one person who had a Japanese name, but didn’t look Japanese, but that may have been fashion biases on my part. Or maybe they naturalized. They often had their camera very close to them, or in other directions. I don’t think they cared about their camera and what it was showing.

The company running the event had their young MC who was reading a script at the correct times. I have done that job. I know how awkward it can be. And now as a person taking the training, I know how little expectation we have in this person. They’re doing a job. Sometimes they fumble the script. It’s all good. I know it’s 2024, but she was cute.

The teacher was the best, and by the best i mean the worst, and I by the worst I mean… I don’t know. He was a former cop. He worked for the ministry of foreign affairs too, I’m not sure if that was also as a cop or how that works. He was in America and in Oman. I think he was doing his current job after retirement. I respect that. I also want to open my own little thing as I approach 60 so I can still get that money in. We all have mortgages until we’re bloody 79 eh? Gotta do something.

He was the master of just talking. He had 4 hours to fill and he filled it. Some information was important, some was not whatsoever, and some of it was about his knowhow, which was equal to my knowhow, like “they don’t ask for this document, but I submit it just in case”, and “I know it’s an internet application, but I send a hardcopy afterwards to be safe, you never know”. Well, he never knew, and he did what worked. I did the same thing, but I never gave a seminar that was approved by the online visa department.

He had that old important person haircut. The hair doesn’t have a wet/slicked back look, but it’s flluffly and all going back. He had glasses that would be good in Showa 54. He had on a grey suit and I forget the tie color, but come on, it had to have been red. His dress shirt had to have been white. I mean, it may have had a light blue pattern on white, but it was close enough.

They gave us an 80 page text and the test before the training started, and as I am in a new job, and worried about fucking things up and failing the training, I read the entire thing and did the test beforehand. I wasn’t confident, so I printed out three blank tests just in case so if there was a chance to write the answers down later, I would do that. I was ready to lie, cheat and steal.

However, I forgot that we paid our money for the training, so we were all going to pass. After his four hour lecture, we had 20 minutes to take the test. Then, we went over the answers together as a class. We used the circle and X reactions on Zoom to signify what we got, and then we all had a laugh and were told the right answer. At first, I held back and saw what others were answering and answered the same. After a while, I realized how many hours I wasted, and how much stress was for nothing, and answered right away. I got 18/20, but no one knows that besides me.

There was one Japanese woman taking the training, and she was the one I felt sorry for. I think she was working from home, and she was doing her best to follow along, get all the answers and pass this thing. However, the instructor’s way of speaking about this, that and everything in a random order really confused her, and she just wanted to understand how to properly do visas for foreign employees, and she was not getting anything of real merit. It felt like the rest of us just wanted that piece of paper that we need for our application, and she wanted to learn. She did horribly on the test, but she dutifully presented her answers to everyone. She still got her paper. I wish her all the best.

The entire point of me saying all this, besides the fact that I need to get it out of me, and find the written word easier than forming it into a story I tell my wife that has a beginning, middle and an end, is that people are so varied. People are so different. People are all in their own situation with their desires, flaws and whatever else. They have their ways of talking and their reasons for being and it’s a fucking beautiful spectrum of souls. Yes, I made it spiritual.

And then you read how the Japanese don’t do X because they lack individuality or something about a fucking nail that fucking sticks out, and then you hit the whiskey.