Leave It Alone

We have been drinking and the woman about whom I am going to write is chotto yoparai, a little drunk. I have been drinking, but I am purposefully not drunk. I have been alternating alcoholic drinks with nonalcoholic drinks to slow my drinking pace without unnecessarily drawing attention to the fact that I’m not keeping up with the crowd drinkwise. I’ve had three or four drinks that might make me drunk. She’s had eight or more. She’s about two-thirds my size.

It is late in the evening and we have been drinking and drinking and eating sashimi and nabe and drinking and drinking and drinking. The woman about whom I am going to write, the woman whose going-away party I am attending, leans across the male Japanese teachers who is sitting between us and says to me, “You can’t see into me.”

I cock my head as though I don’t understand her statement. This is only me playacting. I do understand her statement. I understand what she means and I understand what she wants to believe. I understand what the consequences of the statement are to her and I understand what some of what the consequences of the statement’s opposite are to her too.

I’tera’shai

This month, three teachers are leaving The Kaisha school where I work.

Seth, as I have mentioned, is one of the dearly departing. He’s been here almost two years and is jonesing for Chicago, which is in Illinois, which is in a dream state he knows as America, a familiar and knowable place with familiar and knowable ways and manners. Seth is ready to go home.

The two other teachers who are leaving are home. Tokyo is their home, but they dream of greener pastures within Tokyo. One of them is moving on to a better job. One of them is moving to another Kaisha branch. It is the one who is moving to another Kaisha branch that I want to talk about.

Like me, this woman has a bit of a reputation for being tough and--even more deadly in Japan--very straightforward with her superiors (and, in fact, with everyone who deals with her). I like to think that she would be lauded for these characteristics in America. But this is not America. Here, she is seen as a troublemaker, difficult to work with because she is tough and straightforward.

For me, she is not difficult to work with. In fact, she is a delight to work with. She is generous and honest and loves her job and her students appreciate that she is straight with them. So, no, she is not difficult to work with. She is, however, seen as being difficult to manage. Perhaps she is--and, even more importantly, perhaps she is if one is an incompetent manager.

I’ll explain.

The Kaisha, as I have said, is a gig like any other. One of the characteristics of any gig is that there are often many people in management positions who should not, by any objective analysis, be there. They are usually in their positions by sole virtue of having outlasted everyone else who might have done a better job but were big fish too smart to stay in small ponds, or, alternatively, there are the management positions that are occupied by people who are in superior positions because those positions are sometimes inherently distasteful and no one any smarter would want them. People who find themselves in those positions are dangerously stupid sometimes. They are dangerous because they wield power stupidly, dangerous because they take themselves and their titles too seriously. These unintelligent yet powerful people can be dealt with, but one must deal with them as one deals with a misbehaving child who is not one’s own. To deal with another’s unruly child well requires an enormous amount of tact and patience. To deal with an obtuse manager requires a great deal more tact and patience than one needs with a child. It generally requires a much greater amount of tact and patience than one might feel that one should need to deal with any adult, much less an adult for whom one works. And it certainly requires a great deal more tact and patience than one should have in a job that pays as little as The Kaisha pays. One must, in other words, be willing to cultivate tact and patience on their own time. (See also: The massive number of unpaid overtime hours that one puts in in Japan.) Unfortunately--or perhaps unfortunately--the teacher who is being transferred has ways to spend her free time other than cultivating the enormous amount of tact and patience required to deal with an asinine, slack-witted manager.

I should say here, that one of the reasons I love this woman, this departing teacher, is because she is honest to a fault and willing to face whatever consequences arise as a result of that honesty. In her case, since she is Japanese and she works for a Japanese company, those consequences are more serious than they would be if she were an American working for an American company. In my case, I am lucky because here, my gaijin card means that I face fewer consequences as result of my being tough and straightforward in many situations. The people I work for know that I don’t know the Japanese way of doing things and they make concessions for this fact. What they may not know is that I wouldn’t follow any way of doing anything if I didn’t agree with it. That is not a characteristic of all gaijin, I mean, and they may not know that. So, no, I don’t do anything that I don’t agree with, but she may feel that she does not have the same choice.

She speaks the truth and she suffers the consequences and that is a terrifying thing for anyone who can’t bring themselves to do the same. She speaks the truth and she suffers the consequences and it is a terrifying and beautiful thing and people dislike her for it but they listen to her also. They listen because it’s the truth and they want to hear the truth even when it offends them. They act on that offense where they can because though they want to hear the truth, they don’t like being told the truth. They listen because they’re too afraid not to. Whether they believe her or not is another matter entirely. Most often, they’re afraid to believe her. Some have even gone so far as to call her a liar.

But they do believe her about me.

I don’t know exactly what she’s said about me to others though I do have some evidence that she has said something about me to others.

I’ll explain that, but I need to back up and get a running start. In fact, I need to back up all the way to my first day at The Kaisha, the Saturday on which I finished my training and rode the train into Tokyo to meet my manager and whomever else happened to be at the school on Saturday. She happened to be there. She wasn’t working, so we had a few minutes to sit and talk. When I found out she wasn’t working, I thought it was a bit curious, and I had the feeling that I was being observed by her. I had the feeling that she was doing reconnaissance. She wanted to be the first to see the new teacher and the reason why she wanted this interested but didn’t concern me really. I knew this and I wasn’t wary of her because I knew this. As we sat and talked I saw that she was the kind of woman who was always going to be working some angle. I saw that she was always going to be manipulating things in some manner and I decided that that was okay with me so long as I could avoid having her manipulations (where they concerned me) become malicious.

A few days later, she did me an enormous favor: She asked me my first impressions of everyone.

We were in a restaurant across the street from The Kaisha school where we all work. About eight of us had chosen to attend an after-work drinking party. It was the night I’ve written about before, the night when a Japanese teacher told a joke about Canada in English to an American in an Italian restaurant--a joke that made me realize that the interpretation of the dream that was Tokyo was going to be a lot more complicated than I had anticipated. That was okay with me. Complications are a gift.

About eight of us were on the seventh floor of a restaurant that has enormous windows that look out over the Ginza. Across the street, I could see our own gorgeous building, lit up and glittering as though it were real.

I was still a novice then at navigating the descent from one dream state into another. I had yet to ride the Yamanote line. I had yet to meet the student who would break my heart. I had yet to experience a single earthquake even.

She took charge, which I decided was okay. She ordered my drinks and posed me for pictures with the handsome teachers and she spoke in my ear and she did me the enormous favor of asking for my first impression of everyone. It was like a party game to me, a game without consequences and so I told her. She was shocked that after only three days I could nail up on the wall an accurate portrait of each person at the table.
Even with her experience, it had taken her over a year to do the same. Accurate first impressions are a skill I learned from my mother, but I didn’t tell this woman that because it wasn’t an important thing to say to her.

I may be important that she did not ask my first impression of her. Now that I think back, perhaps she did ask. I don’t remember. In any case, had she asked, I would have lied and flattered her. I was still getting my sea legs then, still trying to see which way she might go in her manipulations of the situations that concerned me. I can write the truth now--though really, I already have. The truth is that my first impression of her was that she was very catlike in nature. She was no housecat either, no well-fed, neurotic, spoiled pet sleeping away her days on overstuffed sofas in climate controlled rooms. No, she was an experienced lioness, a survivalist born and raised on the veldt and capable of bringing down the biggest game with her honed hunting skills. I decided that I would not to be prey.

I impressed her that night with my insight and she expressed this impression to others. She did not tell them exactly what I had said, but she did apparently pass on her impression. No one ever said anything to me about this, but others began to treat me in such a way that I could work back from their behavior to the knowledge that she had imparted to them.

I’temairimas’

“You can’t see into me,” she says, trying to convince herself.

She leans toward me and I toward her and we meet in the middle, across the handsome teacher who has leaned back on his elbows, stretched out so that we are like two lionesses who have hunted together with no small success. She says, “You can’t see into me.”

I agree with her because it is better for her if I do, but I am only saying that I agree. Even while I am agreeing with her, I think: As long as I am not attached to what I see, I can. I can see into you.

I think: I know you because I know myself.