Aisatsu 挨拶 means greeting. When you arrive at your work place in the morning you say “ohayō gozaimasu” おはようございます (Good Morning) and when you leave you say “osaki ni shitsurei shimasu” お先に失礼します (pardon my rudeness for leaving before you). If you pass someone in the hallway at the office or if someone leaves for the day you should say “otsukaresama desu” お疲れ様です (you must be tired). These are standard greetings.

When I first worked part time at an izakaya in Roppongi many many years ago, the manager sat me down and taught me these phrases. He said they were very important. I thought “yeah, whatever” and forgot about it until the next day when we had an impromptu meeting with all the staff in front of the dirty dishes. The meeting was called to basically scold me for having left the night before without saying “osaki ni shitsurei shimasu” to everyone. Geez, how anal, I thought at the time.

A few years later I found myself working in a sales office in Omotesando doing cold calling for an English Language School. The sales office had about 40 people. They had very strict procedure for aisatsu which was drilled into me during the first week of eigyou boot camp. When I arrived in the morning, I had to go to every person in the office in turn and say “ohayo gozaimasu” while performing a kind of bow-handshake hybrid. If someone arrived after me, they would approach my desk and I would have to stand up and say “ohayo gozaimasu” and do the bow-handshake thing. At first I tried to come earlier to avoid having to deal with this but realized quickly that it didn’t matter if you arrived early or late, the number of people you had to greet was the same. I had to do this regardless of if I was on the phone, smoking a cigarette, eating food etc. What made it even weirder was that more than half of the people were foreigners and I felt like I was in some sort of international-japanese-language-school-religious-cult. After everyone arrived, people who made a sale would go to the front and make a short speech followed by everyone else having to go up and shake they hand, again, and say “omedetou gozaimasu” おめでとうございます (Congratulations). During the day, if you were going to meet a client you had to go to everyone still in the office, shake their hand and say “itte kimasu” 行ってきます (I’m going and coming back) and they had to stand up and reply “itterasshai” いってらしゃい (go and come back). It was very exhausting to say the least and I didn’t really see any point to all this nonsense. I would say that a good chunk of my energy was spent doing aisatsu and I must have caught a whole pile of germs having to shake each person’s hand at least a half a dozen times per day. This was of course an extreme case, where part of the reason for all this ritual was to maintain the illusion of activity and develop a cult like culture in the sales office. Most Japanese companies aren’t this bad. Although recently at my workplace I moved to a quieter part of the office and every morning through the walls I can hear the company next door doing their rah rah chanting, shouting, jumping or whatever it is they are doing to boost energy.

Only recently have I really begun to see the importance of aisatsu and think a healthy amount of office ritual goes a long way to provide a pleasant and cordial atmosphere. Especially in Japanese culture where a good part of society relies on the safety of ritual to maintain the “wa” (harmony).

My current company is a British company and not a Japanese company although 95% of the staff are Japanese. There are no aisatsu imposed from management. When I started working here, the first thing that stuck me was that nobody said “Good Morning” or “Ohayo” when they arrived and people just left work without any kind of greeting. When you pass someone in the hall, they look away and pretend you are not there. Unless you know them. The phone often goes unanswered. At first, I would say ohayo, otsukare etc but I gave up when I realized that nobody was listening or couldn’t be bothered to greet me. This was not because they were rude people. When I got to know co-workers individually most were fairly friendly so it’s something about the culture of my company that creates this awkward atmosphere. This may be the case in other countries too but I think Japanese people function better when there are certain social norms present. It reminds me of the Yasujiro Ozu film Ohayo where two boys decide not to speak to anyone until they father buys them a TV set. They fail to say “Ohayo” to their neighbour which causes a chain reaction and subsequent breakdown of the neighbourhood ecosystem. A very cute little film.

Japanese people like to eat stuff with names that sound the same as lucky words. Like sports teams will eat katsu-curry (かつカレー) before important games because katsu also means “to win” 勝つ. This fish is called “tai” 鯛 and shows up whenever there’s something to congratulate because one of the words for congratulations is “omedetai“. New year’s is considered an event for celebration and you could find tai wrapped in fancy packaging in local supermarkets. This was a precooked fish and only required zapping in the microwave for 5 minutes before eating. At new year’s people get lazy and don’t want to do anything but sit in the kotatsu, eat mikan and watch vacuous variety shows on TV, it’s the one time of year when TV content hits an absolutely low point, IMO. A ready to cook tai is just what we all need. And of more interest is how this fish fits so perfectly into the packaging. Sugoi.

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株が上がる literally means “stock price is rising” but sometimes people use this expression to compliment you if you do or say something that makes you look cool. あなたの株上がった！In others words, your action makes your market value goes up. Technorati Japan has taken this concept and created the 芸能証券 Geinou Shoken site which tracks the popularity of celebrities in Japan. Each celebrity has a four digit stock code similar to company stocks in Japan and is listed on exchanges with names that parody the real Japanese stock exchanges e.g. Mothers→Sisters, Hercules→Pegasus, Jasdaq→Gasdaq. The price of each geinojin is calculated daily by the number of times the person’s name is mentioned in blogs, news articles etc. The idea is similar to Blogshares but you can’t buy and sell the celebrities. Too bad I think I would buy up Haruka Ayase in a second. That’s her 3 month daily chart above. Geinoshoken is interesting and serves as a convenient database for looking up the names of talento but I don’t really see this serving any other purpose. Since my work revolves around the presentation and delivery of stock market data over the Internet, I found it interesting to see how they used the financial market concepts with celebrities. They should really have a fundamentals section listing the celebrities vital statistics, skills, experience etc. That would be a better way to measure the valuation of the person.

For people planning to live in Japan, here’s some advice that will save you hours and hours of frustration (For those that are currently in Japan it may already be too late so you can skip this). It has to do with writing your name. There are two issues I will briefly address here:

Name in Katakana:
Katakana is the syllabic alphabet mostly used for foreign loan words and in furigana to help Japanese people pronounce kanji and non-Japanese words, like your name. When you come to Japan you will no doubt be introduced to the wonderful world of Japanese paperwork where you will have to write your name and address and phone number a gzillion times just to do something simple like buy bread (ok exaggeration). This includes writing your name in katakana. The challenge occurs when you have a name that can have a number of permutations when written in katakana. For example, I’ve seen people write “David” as デービッド or ダーヴィド or デーブ etc. Or a name that might sound like something else. E.G. My friend Deb insisted on everyone calling her Deb which would be written as デブ which means “fat”. I suggested Debbie or Debra but she was stubborn. Oh well. It’s a good idea to decide on one version of your name and use that consistently since this is usually what many programs searching and sorting databases use. If you have inconsistent versions of your name you may end up in a pinch when someone is trying to transfer much needed cash to your bank account and keeps getting your name wrong. It has happened to me several times, although the reasons were usually related to the next issue rather then with the kana version of my name. Look for the official katakana versions of famous celebrities that have the same name as you and see how they have written it. This is similar in a way to how there are so many different, dare I say “English,” versions of Chinese last names. When some Chinese immigrated to North America and they had to spell their surname using the alphabet, depending on their pronunciation the immigration officer spelled it differently, thus creating a whole bunch of versions of names which in fact were actually the same. I imagine this happened with other cultures as well.

Order of your name:
This is the one that has caused me so many headaches. Some application forms spilt your name into two parts, Last Name and First Name. Others do not. When the form only has one space for name, I used what I thought was the default order which was First Name, Last Name. After so many years, and hundreds of places where I had registered my name, this began to cause serious problems, especially when dealing with the government or financial institutions. This hit me hard recently when I purchased my house and I had to provide lots and lots of documentation from the ward office as well as from the bank and so forth. And then more problems when trying to change my address with credit card companies and utilities etc. The problem occurs when you have to provide some ID with your name on it, like your passport of gaijin card. If the name order is different from what’s on your proof of identity then the problems occur. Generally, they’ll just ask you to rewrite your application which doesn’t seem like a big deal until you have dozens of forms to redo where you have to lookup all kinds of other info that you don’t have on hand, like the addresses and phone numbers of the last five places you worked and lived. The best thing to do is to use Last Name first and First Name last as there will be times when this order is mandatory. That way you’ll never be confused.

I wrote this very quickly and half asleep so don’t flame me if I missed out on some details…

This is a handy little gadget that I picked up at Bic today. You know those little stacks of cards connected with a ring that Japanese use to study English vocab? This is an electronic version of that. You can enter your own words in an separate application on your PC and then sync it to the memoribo. Test your knowledge of English vocab while on the train, waiting in line etc. Of course, I don’t plan to use it to learn English, you can download a list of 1700 kanji from their website and upload that to the memoribo. Gonna try it out right now! Get a Memoribo

As everyone knows, the first sunday of December is the day of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). This is my second attempt at Level 1 but unfortunately I’ve been a bit distracted and had not spent enough time studying. That and also I’m just plain lazy. I’m pretty sure I got 100% on the listening and did fairly well on the reading. But, kanji, vocab and grammar were a disaster. After doing a few practice tests and scoring just under the passing grade I doubt my grade will be any better or worse. It will be a miracle if I pass. Well, there’s always next year! The photo is of some trees at the test site. I was bored inbetween the vocab and listening section so I went out and took this picture.

I was reading this Dilbert and wondered how you say “wedgie” in Japanese. The closest I could guess was something like “pants ga kuikonderu” パンツが食い込んでいる but that’s more of a description than equivalent. 食い込み translates to “eat into” or “cut into”. This expression would be fine if you are saying “I got a wedgie” but how would you say “give someone a wedgie”? パンツを尻に食い込ませる? That doesn’t seem to make any sense when you say it in Japanese, does it?

After I wrote my previous post about if I didn’t go to hanami I would have to deal with everyone telling me もったいない, I was reminded of the mottainai obake （もったいないオバケ） which is basically the “ghost that will haunt you if you waste something like food, water, electricity etc.” もったいない translates to “what a shame” or “what a waste” and オバケ means “ghost”. Parents often threaten children with the mottainai obake, saying that it will haunt them if they don’t finish their meal. Kind of like the boogie man. I wonder if I will be visited my the mottainai obake tomorrow if I decide to go for a long drive and waste lots of gas?

Ronpari （ロンパリ） is short for “London - Paris” which is used to describe when one’s eyes are pointing in different directions like if one eye is looking at London and the other is looking at Paris. I liked this bit of Japanese slang but wonder why they use these cities? It’s a little derogatory so better not call anyone this to their face.

Dave at work told me about this TOEIC like business Japanese test that JETRO holds twice a year. I didn’t know about it but apparently it is well recognized as a measure of one’s ability to commnunicate in a business setting. It’d look good on a resume. 100 questions and there is no pass/fail. People who score over 530 are eligible to take the oral communications test. I will probably take the test in June just to see what it’s like and then try again in November to get a good score. I’m studying for Level 1 anyway so what’s one more test? Anyone interesting in taking this with me?

Business Japanese Proficiency Test (JETRO Test)

Finally made some use of those Kanji Cards I bought some 10 years ago. I spent a good three and half hours tonight taking inventory of KANJI I know from those I don’t (1) After I started I realized it would take a really long time but I wasn’t going to quit halfway (2) I sorted them into 3 piles:

Left: KANJI I know most of the readings for (1053)
Middle: KANJI I know the meaning but not the reading (191)
Right: KANJI I don’t know at all (798)

There are 2042 KANJI in this set which make up the JOYO KANJI (general-use kanji) I never really studied KANJI formally but this year I’m planning to pass Level 1 so I’m starting my study early. I realized a few things tonight. One is that I know quite a lot of KANJI! Two, there are still lots of KANJI I’ve never even seen before. Three, there are lots of KANJI that look the same.

As incentive to study diligently and finally get that Level One, I decided that if I pass I will buy myself a new car :) Knowing myself I’ll probably just buy one anyway.

Heisig Kanji Index