Spring is here!

The Sakura (cherry blossom) has begun! And thus starts the most beautiful time of the year in Japan. The whole city is talking about nothing else but Hanami, a much-loved Japanese activity which basically involves two elements. Sakura and booze. Whilst filling oneself with liquor, one gazes at the beauty of sakura trees and ponder on the meaning of life while quoting classical Japanese poetry. Ok maybe the last part not so much, it's basically just the boozing and looking at blossom. But once you look at the pictures below, you see what all the fuss is about. It is absolutely stunning and Tokyo has a pinkish hue.

For the rest things are going well. I've integrated well at Canon and I've been working on quite useful and rewarding things lately which means I'm moving up in Canon-society (the first weeks were a bit like 'robert here go stare at these numbers for the whole day while we have meetings all day'). I'm having fun and my collegues are very relaxed and have all worked at at least two continents and know how the world works. Also, I've been strategically forcing my collegues to speak as much japanese to me as possible, which is sometimes hard since their English is pretty good. But sometimes for the sake of content we sometimes still switch to English, which is fine as it's still a bit hard for me to understand processes of 'static electricity loaded onto paper when exposed to laser beams and then attract negatively-loaded toner which is then tranferred via conveyor belts and finally fixed with ceramic heaters etc etc.' in Japanese. I know, I've let you all down.

For the rest it's all a matter of getting used to the strictness of the work environment. Start 8.15 and when the big-ben bell sounds through the speaker at exactly 8.30, the colleagues around me stop talking and do not communicate until lunch. After lunch, same bell, same story. And walking around or getting coffee is not really appreciated unless you are already on the way to do really essential things such as going to the toilet, or the copier. Culture shock, as in holland the most interesting gossip is told around coffee machines whenever someone feels like spilling their guts. For the rest, interesting people here. The IT-guy came up to my desk at Canon last week and confessed to me that his 5-day work week at Canon was just a 'side job'. His real job was being a magician during weekends. He proved it to me by doing a cool trick with merely two elastic bands.
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Being a good samaritan, the rest of the week is spent partying and hanging around in parks listening to indie bands, or tanning at artifical beaches, watching irish st. patrick day parades with Japanese in leprichaun outfits, drinking chili-pepper soaked vodkas at small bars, ordering unidentified things on menu's on a daily basis, going to ghibli museum, being abducted by rich chinese women at naka-meguro who want to be my tour guide, going for ice-cream at Ice-cream city near Piazza Maccheroni (a kitch plastic indoor version of Rome's Piazza Navona).

Will try to keep out of trouble!
Robert

At the extremely-popular-hard-to-get-tickets Ghibli Museum with my Japanese friends I met back in Beijing

Evenings in Tokyo: one of the memorable dinners with my JPP-buddies

Non-leprechauns were also allowed to show their stuff at the yearly St Patricks day parade

First Days at Canon part 2

This second day was again busy as hell. A summary.

from 8.30 to 11am
Canon schedule: address change for foreign registration at city hall
Realization: we were done in 5 minutes, which left us over two hours with our supervisor to kill time at a temple somewhere until our next appointment.

from 11pm to 12am:
Schedule: arranging Canon pass at canon HQ
Realization: again done after 5 minutes. Had to kill time with supervisor with cappuccino and food until 1 pm (lunch was 12 to 1).
1:00 to 2:00
Canon Gallery official tour

2:00 to 3:00
kill time at canon gallery playing with binoculars and high-end camera models

3:00
I finally got to meet the people of my division. They seem great. Naturally I had to do an introduction again today. ("he can speak japanese!"). I think I made a good impression and they seem to have been looking forward to greet a new trainee. They're even arranging a welcome party for me friday evening.

4:00
Home. Dead tired, as you may expect.

Seeing the HQ of canon was shockingly magnificent and everything I imagined it to be. I won't put in too much detail as it is not allowed, but it's a whole little corporate campus paradise where the grass is green, the buildings are superdeluxe, as is the restaurant and the (free) hyperclass fitness and swimming center for its employees... yay!

Also, (completely off-topic) Coming back home today we discovered there is a monstrous supermarket two meters away from the dry cleaner where we already dropped off some clothes yesterday. This is shocking as we have been looking for these kinds of obvious signs of civilization but could only find 'mom and pop stores' and had to walk 20 minutes for the nearest supermarket which is now reduced to 5. How could we have missed this.

And continuing the story of yesterday; I only scored two business cards today. I'm losing my touch.

First Days at Canon

@Shimomaruko, march 3rd, 2008

I haven't written anything these last few weeks and there is much to tell about for example the trip we made to Kyoto last week and the week in Tokyo before that, when Vincent (friend who came over from Holland) was in town. I'll write about that soon, but first, some recent developments....

Two days ago It was time to say goodbye to the Asia Center of Japan, the hotel in the heart of hip Aoyama where I where I stayed during these past two months. Now that the Kansai Trip is over, the final (and largest) part of the JPP Program is about to begin: the 5-month internship at Canon.

Consistently, the day before yesterday I moved from hip Aoyama the day to the small suburban town of Shimomaruko, 40 minutes west of Tokyo, where Canon's dormitory is located.
It's more roomy than my room in the Asia center, even with own washing machine and dryer. I am on te minus 1st floor, which means a tropical view of a high concrete grey wall one meter behind my window. Oh well, at least they made a concrete ditch let some light in; I feared the worst when I was suddenly ushered to take my bags to the -1 basement floor. Although the futon I sleep on is hard and furniture is scarce, I think with some work I'll be able to make a home out of it for the coming 5 months.

I had my first day at Canon today, together with Sjors, a fellow JPP-student -and recently, neighbour- who will be doing an internship at Canon as well, but at a different division.
We started the day at the christian time of 8.15, which will be the normal time to start the day these coming 5 months. (In return, I will not be expected to work much later than 5 pm). So we were escorted upstairs to the HR division and before being able to take off our coats we were introduced to the division and to us were whispered the well-known 4 syllables that referred to an activity that we had to do sooner or later on the day: 'JI-KO-SHOO-KAI', an obligatory self-introduction speech of about 1 or 2 minutes in Japanese (hm so this time it turned out to be 'sooner' rather than later). Still shocked by this sudden event, Sjors and I were taken to a room where we but on the were educated on the history of Canon, the company's keywords (kiiwaado) for doing business, and also many educational and promotional movies. We were educated by the general manager, mr. Kasamatsu, who gave us two a special treatment by giving us private lessons talking in Japanese which he luckily tuned down a bit for foreigner ears (later on we attended the exact same story in a lecture hall where he lectured to the normal Japanese trainees who also had an introduction that day, and was suddenly unintelligable. The confidence in the level of my Japanese which I built up being able to understand everything Kasamatsu san said to us privately before, was broken into pieces.

Also, we were given a manual with useful hints such as:

'please don't be late',
'during working time, your time belongs to us',
'don't think about your private live after five during office hours',
'don't blow your nose with a loud trumpeting noise',
'take a bath every day'

After lunch we had to do yet another Jikoshookai in front of a bigger audience. I'm getting used to it, but it's not my favorite I must confess. Will probable have to do another one on thursday when I start with real work at my division: global accounts marketing department of business office imaging products (simply: want-to-sell-copymachines-to-foreigners-division).

Although Canon is a global company, in many divisions a european face still evokes (mostly positive, but cliché) reactions, such as:

- "Man, they are tall!"
- "Wow, the foreigner knows how to use chopsticks!"
- "Your Japanese is really good" (after us having said: 'konnichi wa' (hi))

The people at Canon seem friendly and what I can judge in one day, I'll think I'll have a good time here. It was a good day. I also broke my previous record of amount of received business cards during one day. Four.
For a culture that basically revolves around business cards this is a bit disappointing. I'll try harder tomorrow.