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.