Today is the 22nd of November. What is special about today in Japan?

This is Sakura-Kan, my local sento bath in Oota-ku. It even has an open-air bath.

The 15th of Novemer is shichigosan in Japan. It´s a celebration for Japanese children to grow healthy. So when did it start and what they do?

There is a photo exhibition of feet. What you can see are nothing but kids´ feet. But what about kids´ feet to Japanese?

Obon is one of the most important annual events in Japan, when there is a huge migration inside the island. This is an examle of Japanese lifestyle during obon.

Yoko Ogawa (小川洋子) is a Japanese novelist, born in Okayama prefecture (岡山県) in 1962. She won one of the most important prize in 1988 with her debut novel, "Agehachou ga kowareru toki (When the swallowtail breaks)" and since then she became one of the leading novelist in Japan.

 

The first book I pick was this, "Kanpeki na byoushitsu (the Perfect hospital room)".

The story is about the little brother of the protagonist who is about to die.

The theme is a little dark but some how it was subjective. I mean I know he is dying but the focus isn´t on his death.

 

One of the characteristic of Yoko Ogawa´s work in general is silence. It´s not plain nor dull, but it wraps you in the silence, as if you are in a crystal cubicle which is totally sterilized. Very clear her writing.

In the private life, she is an usual housewife who love music and a fanatical fan of Hanshin Tigers (One of the Japanese baseball teams).

 

Some of her book available in English are these.

ISBN : 9780099521341

ISBN : 9780099521358

ISBN : 9780099548997

 

Yes, breakfast. I love breakfast, probably the most favorite dish in the day. To have a good start, it cannot be unpleasant. So when my friend commented about horrible brekky in Madrid, I immediately thought about Japanese breakfast I ate most of the time at home.

Japan is still suffering from the catastrophe, the government still promotes to save the electricity as much as possible. As one of the solution, the government now encourages Japanese salarymen to work from home. For many of you, this might be a smashing news, even some already grab his bag and a half way out of the office. On the contrary, it´s not so good news for Japanese salarymen (サラリーマン), but why?

This is the first series of four which was a feature of JB Press a little ago.

Japanese salarymen have fear of  ¨working from home¨

A man in his 30´s to 40´s is strolling in the neignbourhood during the weekday is really strange, looks quite suspicious. If he bumps into someone he knows, even more complicated. They probably think that he´s been laid off because of the recession (Risutora / リストラ in Japanese).

This behaviour is the main issue which stops Japanese people work from home. ¨I can´t even go out to get lunch because I get worried about how they see me¨ says a man smiling wryly, who works from home twice a week.

 

It used to be more complicated to work from home for the matter of security as they needed to take documents out of the office.

However nowadays, most of work can be done with the computer unless you work in the factory. I mean, more work cannot be done without computer. This means that as long as there is the internet connection, we can work anywere. As the security system is improving, with an appropriate measure, it doens´t matter if you work in the office or in your house.

Despite of this technological advantage, working from home doesn’t seem to spread between Japanese salarymen.  

 

Working from home is also known as “tele-work” and there is even “Japan tele-work association” has been established in Japan. And according to a survey of this association in 2009, more than 68.3% of Japanese companies didn’t apply tele-work system. Only 18.6% of the companies had introduced “mobile work”, means they allow the workers to work from outside only when they are seeing clients or during the business trip.  The companies promoted working from home was just 4.8%.

It’s been two years since this survey was taken, although I don’t see much change until now. 

I would be the first one hopping out the office to home and there, I probably with my computer working all day in my pyjama Tshirt and my hair sticking up. How wonderful it would be working in a beach like this and still get paid.

 

The next articule will tell us the actual situation of working from home among bigger Japanese enterprises.

To be continued.

 

 

More about Japanese working situation

Service overtime work 

Kagome initiates no Zangyo after 8 

 

That day, I was watching BBC Live News on line just to check what was going on around the world. While people were so happy and excited about this young price´s wedding, what caught me was something different. It was William´s head.

Wow, you poor thing, William…

¨Poor thing¨ I thought. But why? He´s just losing his hair in his late 20´s and from the look at it, he´ll have a nice and shiny head top by the time he becomes 30. Then you might say, ¨so? what´s the big deal?¨

 

Then a Japanese girl over the coffee, has confessed me that she wasn´t sure if she could like a guy she´d recently met as her boyfriend. Because the boy in his mid 20´s, already shows the sign of boldness, well he has a bold patch.

The way people talk about boldness sounds like almost a phobia and actually I see many ads in everywhere.

Both of them are ads for hair restoration clinic and there are so many hair restoration products, hair tonic, spray, shampoo etc… in the market.

 

 

I´m sure anyone who has come to Japan must have seen salary-man with this type of hairstyle.

It´s quite gross. I mean this looks quite a loser to me. Once I myself was a student and used to be in the train with many ojisan (おじさん/ middle-age men). I wondered ¨how long do they spend to stick this much hair on the head?¨ As they put some sort of wax or oil in order not to move the hair, they all smelt greasy smell which we call oyaji-shuu (オヤジ臭/ smell of middle-age men). And this type of hair, grow one side and stretch to the other side of the head is called ¨barcode hair¨ as in barcode of the products we buy.

 

It seems like they believe that their bald head is well covered. It´s obvious to me but belief is incredible. Oh, I´ve read in somewhere that the barcode reader can read barcode hair like the one with the red T-shirt above. That´d be really funny, ¨peep! 280 yen¨.

 

Our PE teacher in the primary school had thin hair and as we were kids and cruel, we called him ¨hage (禿げ)¨ means bald in Japanese. 10 years after we had a school reunion and as usual, we started talking about the teachers back then. There, one said, ¨hey do you guys know that Mr.A has had hair implant?¨ We were all curious and decided to go to the school festival in that year.

Yes, he did have abundant fringe which used to be some fluff. We all saw him and had a little chat although some did have a strange smirk on their faces.

 

He is just a school teacher and was so conscious about his hair. So imagine if they are handsome actors or cool dancers.

He is a leader of one of the famous Japanese Hip-Hop group, Da Pump, Issa. 

He must be only 25 or 26 and his hair is in a danger. He often shows up in the TV with hats to cover his hage. Yeah, he´s got hair like chick.

Then he´s shaved. It looks much better.

 

 

Like him, there are many Japanese men worried about being bald. They are trying to deny, to hide and to increase their hair secretly. 

 

According to Kleopatra, bald men are sexually strong. It´s said that her powerful lover, Julius Caesar was bald but he was well known as a womanizer. In fact, his another name was ¨bald lady killer¨ in Latin.

I´ve never heard of this but this maybe true. They are bald because they have more male hormone. Hmm, Kleopatra was right, she had proved it. 

 

 

Whatever Kleopatra said good about bald men, yet it´s not so cool to be a bald man in Japan.

If you are sumo wrestler, how strong you are, you have to retire if you lose hair and no longer possible to tie a topnot, like this wrestler. That´s the rule. Being a bald man in Japan doesn´t give you a special bonus in your life, unfortunately.

 

 

I personally think that it´d be so much better if they shaved all off instead of trying to hide it by sticking stripes of left over hair. And I swear that almost all Japanese girls think the same.

He is Naoto Takenaka, an actor (photo right). He is hage and he´s accepted his baldness. It looks so much nicer like this than this (photo below).

I think having hair like this is just an adherence of men or pride.

It´s understandable that it´s sad to lose hair but it doesn´t mean they can traumatize the rest of us.

When we think about hage, it reminds us barcode hair and its smell. And that block us to think that it´s OK to be bald.

So please, guys,  just shave it off!

And girls, having a hage boyfriend isn´t embarrassing! 

 

Oh, those who just thought that Japanese men are sissy, this is not just Japanese men but is universal. Here are the photos of hage gaijin (禿げ外人/bald westerners).

 

Exactly two months later from the earthquake in Japan, on the 11th of May it hit a small town, Lorca in the south of Spain. I heard that someone predicted an earthquake in Rome and some how it moved down to Spain. 

 

I heard the news and opened Spanish newspaper, el País´ page. There were fotos of people´s faces in shock, crying and shouting. I thought ¨it must´ve been a huge quake¨. 

Then I saw the letter M5.2.

My first thought was is that all?¨.

 

 

I know it´s nothing like ïs that all¨ about in any disaster. Each one of them are serious and tough. So please don´t take it personal if you are Spanish but I´m from a country of earthquake and must say that M5 is a regular quake. Of course you can feel the shake but it´s nothing serious. 

Then how come Spanish quake looked more serious than Japan by the look?

I realised it was the facial expressions.

 

This woman had just lost her family.

This Japanese woman also had just lost her family.

 

Spanish people in shock

Japanese women in shock

 

Holds her scream looking at a collapsing building.

Holds her sadness.

 

Spanish men do cry

Japanese men don´t cry

 

A car´s been crushed

A car´s landed on the tree

 

As you can see, Spanish people are very expressive or you can even say that Japanese people are expressionless. The major difference I can see is Spanish people tend to up their face whereas Japanese people tend to down the face. When they cry, Spanish people will shout, scream and cry out, while Japanes people will just shed tears or sob.

Even the gestures are different. My teacher in the secondary school told us that it´s not so educated way to talk with your hands. She said it means you don´t have enough vocabularies to express yourself. Is it really?

 

I was always amuzed by American TV or film characters express themselves loudly. I thought they were exaggerating. Then I was even more amuzed when I saw my English teachers got super excited about a little present we gave them. Her face broke into huge smile, eyes wide open, screamed ¨wooooooooow! then started giving kisses and hugs to everyone. Have I ever seen any Japanese people have such facial expressions? I can´t recall it.

On one hand we are quite jealous of them expressing themselves so easily but on the other hand for us, it looks a little too exaggerated to get others´ attention.

There is a saying in Spain ¨No lloras, no mamas¨ means ¨if you don´t cry, you don´t get any food¨, and this is true, this seems to be a reality in Western world. Whoever shout louder will get what he/she wants. On the contrary in Japan we say ¨Awateru kojiki wa morai ga sukunai (慌てる乞食はもらいが少ない)¨, means ¨a desparated beggar receives less help¨. 

 

When a Japanese person comes back to Japan after living overseas for years, often notice the change of the face, even the shape of it. It seems to be noisier, in the sense of, as if the face itself is chatting. When this person talks, the eyeblows and the eyes move, even the mouth moves much more than usual. Of course they talk a lot of gestures, the soulders, the hands and body. 

Then some of their friends may say that person looks like gai-jin (外人/ foreigner) and some may say he or she is ¨acting like gai-jin¨.

 

Japanese people may have less obvious facial expressions than westerners and yet, we can feel others´ feeling quite well. We transmit people´s feeling. 

This photo might be one of the most known one and as you can see, the girl is wailing. Japanese people can express their feeling but they grow up learning to control their feeling, to pull themselves together all the time.

Perhaps this is a disadvantage for them, not being able to be understood well and I personally still like their modesty, try not to be all over the place or not to bother others. But at the same time, makes me so happy when my Australian friend smiles and screams when she sees me at the airport after four years since we saw last, or a Spanish friend just repeats ¨woow, wooow, woow¨ and keeps eating a little cake I made. Facial expression is a simple way to show their feelings even though sometimes it seems a little exaggerated and too comical.  

Is it possible to be somewhere in the middle? Not too attention seeker but not too subtle either? I´ve learnt the importance of facial expressions from the earthquake in Spain.