FREE KETCHUP!

I originally posted this on a sports blog named after the fact that the Oakland A's don't offer free sauerkraut at the Coliseum. I figured I might as well post it here, too.

There are some false ideas about service here in Japan. Granted, flying JAL is probably going to be a bit more pleasant than flying USAirways, but the stereotype that Japanese customer service is better than American customer service does not always hold--and restaurants are at best a mixed bag. At McDonald's today (it's edible in Japan), I asked for a packet of ketchup and was told that ketchup is only for people who order fries. I replied that I always ask for ketchup and have never had a problem, to which I got an uncomfortable stare, since most Japanese people don't respond after getting "no" for an answer. I motioned to another employee, who deferred to the manager, who gave me the single packet of ketchup I had requested.

I've been denied a refill on water once before at a big city location, and I've been told after requesting water after already having ordered that I would need to purchase something else. But never before had I been denied a packet of ketchup at McDonald's.

I'd also like to address the idea that I can somehow only have ketchup if I order fries (which I don't usually do). When you order fries in Japan, they don't give or offer ketchup. You have to specifically ask for it. I have not once seen a Japanese person eat fries with ketchup. Besides, ketchup is not just for fries--some people prefer a little more ketchup on their burger, or to add it to something that doesn't normally come with it.

Full disclosure--I actually am not a big fan of ketchup. I actually order it so that my daughter will eat her chicken (they have breaded, fried pieces of chicken on the 100 yen menu here--much cheaper than the 300 yen McNuggets, and better). That's how she wants to do it, so that's how I order it.

I'm a pretty level headed guy (in America--I'm the Incredible Hulk from a Japanese perspective). I don't like to complain when my order isn't perfect, and I generally just prefer to leave people alone when they don't do things exactly how I ask. I'm not driving through the drive through again or going inside to talk to a manager if they don't give me extra pickles or if they accidentally give me a chocolate shake instead of a strawberry one--if they overcharge me or don't give me something I paid for, that's another story.

Anyway, in the friendliest voice I could muster, I said, "It's hard to imagine not being given ketchup at McDonald's," causing the embarrassed employee to apologize. Later, I saw her going through the store policy documents with the managers, hopefully learning that ketchup is not such a precious commodity that it must be preserved with an iron fist. I'm sure there are a lot of aspects of the service industry in Japan which I'll miss (not having to tip, for example), but the faux politeness and bureaucratic unwillingness to adapt or make exceptions are not things I'll be clamoring for when I'm back on American soil.

The idea that the customer is always right is surely a western one. While I don't necessarily always agree with it, it's nice to know that many American business do take it into consideration. They realize that it's better to take a minimal loss than to lose a customer. Also, they give free refills on drinks. Hooray for America!

Joe & Gavin--If You Stay I'll Mow Your Lawn

My parents divorced when i was about 6 years old, and my mom won custody, except for every other weekend, which really is not enough time to spend with your father. I was jealous when my dad took my older brother to a Kings game, and kept pestering my dad to take me to a game some time.

I was eight years old when my dad got me tickets to my first Kings game for Christmas. The game took place two days later, on December 27, 1988. From the moment we arrived at the Arco Arena parking lot, it was magical—I stepped out of the car to see the first falling snow I had ever seen in Sacramento. I remember being impressed by size and skill of the Blazers’ Kevin Duckworth, and watching head coach Jerry Reynolds fall and lie face down on the ground—even getting a technical foul—before getting carted away on a stretcher. The Kings ended up winning that game on a buzzer beater by Harold Pressley. It was a fantastic way to initiate my true Kings fandom—I think I even got a free Jr. Western Bacon cheeseburger or something because the Kings won.

From that moment on, I started listening to all the games on the radio. Soon after, the Kings acquired Wayman Tisdale, who quickly became the player I would imagine myself as while playing basketball in my back yard (later, that player would be Mitch Richmond). I became obsessed with reading every newspaper article about the Kings, checking every box score, and gobbling up any information that I could. I loved those Kings, even if we were too poor to go to more than one game every three years or so. I was still just as much a fan as anybody.

I stuck with the Kings through all the tough seasons, and, together with my dad, cheered on the Lionel Simmonses, Briant Grants (future Karl Malone!), Sarunas Marciulionises, the Mahmoud Abdul-Raufs, and the Bobby Hurleys. Even if they didn’t win a lot of games for a few years, it was in no way a one-way relationship. The Kings gave me just as much as I gave them.

When the Kings won in the playoffs at Utah, I drove 40 minutes or so the airport to cheer for them as their plane arrived. I spent a few hundred dollars for two nosebleed seats in the game where Stockton killed us. The Arco Thunder is, to this day, the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

I moved to Guatemala for my church mission between 2001 and 2003. During this time, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV. It killed me to see in sports page clippings sent from home that after all the years of struggling, the Kings were dominant—and I couldn’t see it. When I got back, they were still pretty good. They were never quite as good as they were while I was in sports exile, but it was still enough to keep me hooked. I watched, listened to, and attended every game I could.

After I got married, my wife converted to Kingsfandom. She taught me to keep my emotions in check by actually being more crazy about bad calls than I was. One time, after the Kings were screwed in consecutive home games on blown goaltending calls in the final seconds, I got so angry that I threw my shoe at the front door, leaving a big dent in the metal. My wife and I screamed at the TV so loud that I’m sure the refs could hear. Our neighbors certainly did—they visited my wife’s place of employment the next day to make sure that she hadn’t been beaten by her husband.

The press and Sacramento City officials have basically conceded that the Kings are leaving for Southern Cal. I have so many more memories of my time following the Sacramento Kings. Some big, some minor. I’m going to miss things like being able to talk to just about any random person on the street, and them somehow knowing the score of the game. Sacramento was always passionate about the Kings. Maybe that’s changed since I moved away for college and subsequent life abroad. But now that I’m going back, one of the most charming parts of Sacramento will be gone. Luckily, I’ve got a good enough relationship with my dad and other family that I don’t really need the Kings anymore.

I’ll be grateful forever for the memories I have of this team. But I’ll always wonder what could have been. I won’t be able to take my daughters or my first son, due in a couple months, to a Kings game. My wife will never get to hear the Arco Thunder. Life will, of course, go on. Until the A’s get contracted.

But it Comes in So Many Colors!

I was recently reading about the upcoming release of the Nintendo 3DS, a handheld gaming system with glasses-free stereoscopic 3D. The article I read took a potshot at Nintendo for offering an “Aqua Blue” model in addition to the standard black version.

When I first bought a cell phone in Japan, I noticed an ad for another phone emphasizing the 30+ colors in which it was available. When I mentioned this to someone, they responded that they wanted to buy that specific phone because they didn’t like the color of their current phone. I’ve heard and read various comments by people saying that they bought a new gaming system or phone because they preferred the color of the newly purchased device. Nintendo makes a killing in Japan off of people who buy a new DS each time they release a newly colored model.

The factors that affect my own decision to purchase a device are as follows (in order):

1. Functionality


1a. Actual features (including storage space, available applications, etc.)


1b. Ease of Use


2. Cost


3. Cosmetics


3a. Durability of build


3b. Sleekness of design (compactness)


…


3p. Color

I appreciate the ability to choose the color of a device, especially if I’m going to be spending hundreds of dollars on it. However, were the company to only provide one specific color, I wouldn’t bat an eye. Perhaps if I cared about having a room where all the devices were the exact same color, I might think twice about buying “the wrong color”. But when it comes to a portable gaming, music, or communications device, can you really go wrong with black? Would the lack of a flashy color keep you from buying any specific device? Does that really matter to you?

What do you think? Would you buy something that had fewer helpful features or a higher price solely because you liked the color?

Get That Corn Outta My Face!

This just happened:

Me, in the staff room, having received some candy corn from a friend a few days earlier: Remember how we talked about candy corn the other day? Well, I got some and thought maybe you’d like to try it.

Fellow teacher with whom I had the previous discussion about not being able to help people for fear of discrimination against the poor: Put that away, a student may see it! (walks away from me quickly)

I’m not only baffled, but I’m extremely upset that I even entertained the idea of being nice to a fellow teacher.

...

Now that I’ve cooled a bit and had some good conversation with friendly Japanese people, I’ll back off a little, since I surely do enjoy living here most of the time. But I still disagree with said teacher’s response to me, which is becoming a pattern (she’s also the one who told me it’s bad to say “die” in class). It’s the fifth or sixth time she’s scolded me, and she’s a 24 year-old first-year teacher. None of the other teachers have ever responded to me like she has.

As a side note, the other day, I avoided another embarrassing situation. I was making a sheet to explain the rules for adding ’s’ to the end of third-person singular verbs, one of which was “to box”. I couldn’t remember if “to box” in Japanese required a specific article, so I looked it up on an online dictionary. Box (like a cardboard one) in Japanese is sometimes “bokkusu”, so when I saw the kkusu at the end of the definition, I hastily copied and pasted it to my chart.

I continued to work on my sheet, when I realized, “Hey, wait–they literally say ‘bokushingu o suru’, which means ‘do boxing’.” I checked back at my chart and realized that I had pasted the meaning from some slang translation of “to box”, “sekkusu suru” (“do sex”).

Crisis narrowly averted.

2 Years Later

A Post For My Rich Readers

So, I spent the last few days in a conference about effective team teaching with a few hundred people, including one of my Japanese coworkers and her mother, who moderated for my group and gave me a ride to the conference. My coworker’s seventh graders are struggling to remember the vast majority of the course content, and their grades are about as low as one could imagine.

On the ride home, we had an interesting conversation. Having some experience with programming and web design, I offered to build a web site which the students could use to study outside of class, hopefully helping them to improve their test scores, making life easier for the teacher in the process without any effort on her part.

She wasn’t sure if it would be OK for me to do that. I clarified that I didn’t plan on using any class time for my project, and that it would consist solely of me giving the kids a web address which they could access in their free time, outside of school. Entirely optional. Nobody’s forced to do anything–those who want it would have another resource outside of paper handouts that their teacher gives them based on an outdated textbook.

She said that she was afraid that students would somehow write in rude comments that others could see, to which I replied that it would be read-only, consisting of flash cards, audio and video. There would be no message board or any way for students to input messages.

Dead silence.

The three of us had previously chatted about differences in Japanese and western (specifically American) methods of communication, including how foreigners struggle to understand what Japanese people are really thinking (since what they actually say is often vastly different, and the listener is left to read between the lines). I tried, as best I could, to understand where they were coming from, but it was really tough. I was willing to use my own free time to provide a solution for the struggling children, one which cost the school no time or money, and which was completely optional. I told them that, from my western perspective, it was really hard for me to understand why anybody would ever oppose something that was so apparently harmless yet possibly beneficial.

Her mother chimed in. Students in our town, she said, are not all rich. Many of them do not have a computer. Not all of those who do have computers have internet access at home. By offering a learning resource that is accessed online, she said, we would be giving preferential treatment to those who had money, further widening the gap between them and the students whose families had little money.

I was blown away. First off, anybody can access the internet for free at libraries and local community centers. Furthermore, what is more important–the feelings of a few students or the students’ progress? At worst, nobody learns anything from the web site and everybody’s grades are the same as they were before. Realistically, some of the students would improve at least a little bit due to focused, technology-based learning resources, while those who don’t access it get the same poor grades. Are feelings so important that we can’t even say, “Hey–check out this website in your free time,” after class is over?

Baffled, I did my best to describe my feelings on the matter, wondering how on earth these kids would ever learn if more effective teaching methods were being passed over because they didn’t want to offend the poor kids. I phrased things as tactfully as I could, but received no response for the next few minutes.

Having just come from a seminar in which workshops were dedicated to dealing with breakdowns in communication due to culture differences between Japanese and foreign teachers (which I felt was a bit pointless as I got along just fine with my coworkers), I couldn’t help but feel the irony of my situation.

I changed the subject soon after, but not before my coworker told me that there was almost no technology involved in teaching the children at that school. There are no computers, no projectors, no televisions, and no other electronic devices in the classroom, outside of a CD player. Nothing but a dusty old chalkboard and some desks. Each class used to have a TV, but my school opted to remove them after some people in Tokyo got killed by falling TVs in the last big Japanese earthquake. Learning consists of worksheets and workbooks, with no interactive multimedia to speak of. This is not by design, as the Ministry of Education understands the place for technology in the classroom and, as such, sent every school at least one 60-inch smart board TV/computer–which was subsequently locked in a room to collect dust. Strangely, each staff room also received a huge flat screen TV which has only ever been used to watch baseball.

This is my last year teaching in Japan. We’ve decided to move back to the US at the end of July. There are many things that I will miss about Japan–the people, the food, the architecture, the clean and beautiful surroundings, the language–but I will not miss Japanese bureaucracy and the insistence upon sometimes outdated traditions. I won’t miss the lack of clothes dryers because people like hanging their clothes. I won’t miss having to wash dishes by hand. I’ll certainly not miss the awkward silence caused by my inability to read others’ minds because they’re unwilling to communicate what they actually feel.

In other words, I’m excited to be going back to America. I know we Americans are a bit rough around the edges, but I like that about us.

Please Shoot Me if I Ever Use "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow" as a Blog Post Title

Until I cut my curly hair recently, all the kids would ask me if I had permed it (since it’s unfathomable for a Japanese that such hair could be natural). The question actually bothered me, since I’m not the type of person to get my hair professionally treated. It turns out that the kids not only aren’t able to fathom hair that isn’t straight and black, but also aren’t allowed to have anything else. If your hair is wavy, curly, or not-black (or extremely dark brown) by nature, you have to receive a permission slip from a doctor showing that it’s natural.

I’ve heard stories of a Japanese girl in the area who was so embarrassed of her naturally wavy brown hair that she routinely died it black and got a straight perm so that she wouldn’t have to get a note from the doctor explaining that it was OK for her to be different.

So, now that my hair’s all gone, the kids have decided to ask me “why” my eyes are blue. How the heck do you answer that question?