On the first or second Friday night in April you’ll see swarms of young Shinnyū Shain 新入社員 (new employee) out to celebrate surviving their first weeks of being employed. At most traditional Japanese companies, a young person recruited right out of university usually has to spend a month or two just learning the basic skills of business, speaking polite Japanese, how to bow, how to answer the phone etc. This is a very stressful period for young graduates not used to wearing a suit all day and now having to deal with being at the bottom of the food chain. To quote Morpheus “Welcome to the real world.” This group of fresh meat were gathered in front of the Sony Building in Ginza no doubt ready for a night of drinking and bonding. They looked both exhausted and excited. How fun it must be to be this young and hopeful about your future.

In other news, some of you may have been wondering why I have gone a week with no blog updates. I didn’t think anyone would notice but I guess I was wrong. Let me assure you that I have not abandoned this blog and explain what’s been going on. Last weekend, my web hosting service in the U.S. decided to migrate their server farm without telling me. Usually, they are a great host and I never have any problems. However, since my server had all kinds of customized configuration and third party modules added, a lot of things suddenly broke. Without boring you with the details, basically I lost several unpublished blog posts and they backed up my website with files that were a few days old. I’ve been slowly rebuilding some of that lost content. Also, my domain mail and comment alerts were disabled so that took a few days to get back to normal. It was a big pain in the buttocks. I’ve reenabled hotlink blocking since I noticed a rather large number of incoming requests from some blogs that ripped off my content completely. So if you start seeing problems in RSS readers please let me know. I’ve also been rather busy with work and study which I’ll be focusing more on in the months to come, so there may be fewer updates than in the past.