Hi, I hope you're all having a wonderful day! It's my day off today, so I thought it would be a good idea to come here and write something, since I haven't come here for more than a month. I always promise myself that I would blog more often and always end up lying to myself . lol
Well, I don't have a plan on what I'm going to write here today. I guess this is not surprising at all! I just wanted to write like a life update kind of thing today. As some of you may already know, I moved to Kanagawa from Kyoto in March, and started working in Tokyo from last month. I work as an personal trainer for English. Basically, I teach English to adults for living. I've worked as an English personal trainer for just a month, but I'm already sure to say that I love my job! I love using English myself, and teaching English allows me to use English everyday. Also, I think I am lucky because I can feel that I am helping people by helping them improve their English skills as my job.
Not all people love their jobs, unfortunately. And even if they love their jobs, not all people can work in a good condition. I don't know much about working conditions in other parts of the world, but in Japan, there are more than a few companies that force their employees to work overtime but don't pay what they deserve. We call that kind of companies "black companies". Sadly, some people work for such companies until they decide to take their own lives.
Have you heard of the term, "karoshi"? It literally means death by overwork. This really happens in Japan. Does this happen in other countries as well? I want to know. You may wonder why some people work so much. So much that their physical and mental health get affected. I think the reason lies in the Japanese culture. A culture that praises the "kamikaze spirit". I need to be clear here that I am not dissing young men who lost their lives. I am dissing the order or the Japanese way of fighting during that time that make them go even though they had no chance. It has been getting better over time, but the culture that values quantity over quality still lies deeply in Japanese people.
When I was in elementary school, they would always hold a marathon competition every winter, like many other elementary schools in Japan. One day, my class teacher told the class that we should all participate in a voluntary training every morning before class until the marathon event. He distributed a card to the class, and the card worked like this: if you run round the school yard one time, you can paint a little section in the card; if you run round the school yard two times, you can paint two sections in the card; and if you run round three times, you know how many sections you can paint by now. And it goes on and on. So the more you run, the more sections in your card will be painted.
I was good at running when I was younger. So I thought, "I didn't need much practice for the marathon event." And moreover, the teacher told us it was "voluntary practice" in the first place. I said to myself, "I don't have to feel obligated to go to school a bit early every morning to run round the school yard." So I didn't show up to the voluntary training. But after a week or so (I don't even remember how long it took before I was called in, to be honest...), the teacher scolded me. He asked me why I had not participated in the training, and told me I had to show up. He told me he didn't see my motivation, and that I needed to work hard like other kids. "Why aren't you participating in the voluntary training like your classmates? Everybody's working hard for the marathon event." He even made me write a statement of apology and regret for not participating in the training.
To be honest, I had nothing to be sorry for. The teacher told everyone in the class that it was a "voluntary" training. Does he know the meaning of the word, "voluntary"? I had the full right of not showing up because, you know, it's really self-explanatory; it was voluntary, which means that it was optional! If you want to do it, you are free to run round the school yard every morning; if you don't, you are also free not to come. I had no reason to be scolded. But I was scolded nevertheless.
That was the time when I learned what Japanese society is like. And Japanese people educated this way from their early days. The kid who painted the most sections in the marathon card is the greatest. The kid who doesn't have a lot of sections painted in the card but ends up getting a better records than the others, and thinks that he/she wants to spend that precious morning time before class doing other things are hated by the authority.
This is the same in many workplaces in Japan, I guess. The one who stays late is greater, thus the one who works harder, even though that's not a productive way of working necessarily. The one who tries to work productively during his/her regular working hours, and leaves the office on time will be turned a cold shoulder, like he/she is being lazy and not putting enough effort.
The kid who wrote the same kanji a hundred times on his/her notebook is greater and deserve to be praised, even if you can learn and remember that kanji by practicing writing it ten times. If ten times is enough for you to learn that kanji, don't you think having to write it ninety times more is a waste of time? This is kamikaze spirit. "They know how to fall asleep. What they need to know and learn is how not to fall asleep when they are sleepy." Something like this was written in the book called "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" by Ruth Benedict. She said that this is how Japanese soldiers are trained. Instead of instructing them getting enough sleep and nutrition is a productive way of preparing for battles, they told this. We cannot say that everything she wrote in that book is true, since the research she conducted to write the book was not sufficient. But the spirit itself tells the truth about our culture. And we need to change that. It has been changing slowly over time, but the change is not enough.
Oh, so this is not really a post of my life update after all. lol Luckily, I am not working for a black company. I'm working for a complete white company in that sense. But our society need to change so that all people in our society can say that working in a white company is just normal. Parents shouldn't be worried about whether their children work in a black company or not. Young people shouldn't be telling their friends and families that luckily, the company that they started working for is not black. The society that bears these kinds of conversations is wrong. We need to wake those people (those who value kamikaze spirit) up. Guys, it's 2018.
Thanks for reading this post! I'm sorry if there's any typos and grammatical errors. English is not my first language, and I don't review my work before publishing it to the whole world. So... I hope to see you in my next post! Bye :)
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