Ow gov’nor, me words!

Let’s talk spelling.  It’s tough being an English English speaker in Japan.  Thanks to America’s supreme cultural dominance, the default form of English words in Japan are the American spellings. The wrong spellings.

America’s continual angsty, adolescent attempts to proclaim its rebellious streak against England via spelling are bad news waiting to happen.  Japan is like the kid who only half-willingly agrees to go and smoke cigarettes and read the dictionary with America behind the international bike sheds.  How is it to know any better that ‘defence’ should really have a ‘c’, not an ‘s’?  America swaggers around spelling ‘centre’ as ‘center’ in a less French-looking, more incorrect way, devil-may-care.   Japan’s obviously been led on to the wrong side of the tracks, but it’s a good kid, deep down.  It’s the Ponyboy of  the international schoolyard.

I want to help.

Although I work in a Japanese office, I often write reports and presentations for international audiences.  I’m one of the only native English speakers in the office, and I often need to get a Japanese coworker to proof my work for technical accuracy and silly typing mistakes.  It saddens me that conversations like this need to occur:

“I think you spelled this word wrong.”, says my sincerely helpful co-worker.
“Oh, which word?”
“It’s not a big mistake, but it looks like you made a typo in color.”
“No… that spelling is correct.  I’m pretty sure I know how to spell colour.”
“Then what is this extra ‘u’ doing in here?”
“Ah, that’s the Queen’s English”, I say, smiling.
“The Queen?”
“Of England.”
“Is that how she spells color?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.  America is wrong.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
“But why would you want to type an extra letter when you don’t have to?”
“Well, that’s just correct, you see.  You can’t just drop the ‘k’ out of ‘kick’ because it’s seemingly unnecessary.”
“But all the programming languages I know use ‘color’.  Lots of international specifications use ‘color’ too.”
“Well, they’re wrong too, but it’s too late now.  Anyway, the important thing is that I’m right.”
“Okay.  You’re the native speaker.”

More reading.

“Oh, but you’ve made another mistake.  I think ‘visualise’ is spelled with a ‘z’.”
“Gah!”

This has happened many times.  The saddest thing is that to avoid problems such as this, I’ve given up on all that is right and pure.  I’m beyond helping anyone.  I just automatically Americanise Americanize my spelling.  I run a US English spell checker. Each time my fingers automatically adorn my words with Anglo-friendly ‘u’s and ‘s’es, the tell-tale red underline comes up.

I don’t know what I’ve become.  I tried to cross to the other side of the tracks to bring them back to the light, but I only got stuck there myself.

If you need me, I’ll be behind the bike sheds, sitting on my motorcycle.  Of shame.

Lose weight, eat with your eyes

If you’re a fan of Asian food, perhaps you’ll agree with me that one of the biggest differences between Japanese and Chinese food is one of presentation.  If you go to some Chinese restaurants here, the food will be lovely, but decor often seems like an afterthought.  You’re seated on a folding chair underneath a naked fluorescent tube buzzing like a mosquito, your delicious Szechuan meal served on a card table on the verge of collapse.  A lady, who you hadn’t even realised worked there until just now, screams across the room that table 4 needs more rice gruel NOW.

If you go to a Japanese restaurant, on other hand, presentation is more often than not taken very seriously.  “You eat with your eyes” is the motto here.  Subtle, atmospheric lighting.  Tables and chairs build from classic, dark hardwoods.  Attentive wait staff who unobtrusively glide around the room like the soles of their shoes are coated in satin.  Dishes arranged just so to bring out the colour and shape of each of the individual ingredients.

This philosophy is extended to the supermarket too: perfectly uniform produce with nary a bruise or imperfection among them.  Strawberries that seem to be identical in colour and shape, lined in perfect little rows in their tray:

Or maybe cherry tomatoes just as meticulously sorted, but with the addition of a single yellow highlight in each cup for dramatic effect:

I didn’t have to go out of my way to find these, either.  Almost all the supermarkets I go to present their fruit and veg like this.  No big bins of bulk Brussel sprouts here for you to stuff into a bag.  Why, how perfectly crude that would be!

Apparently disharmonious produce is against the law here.  That, and paying a reasonable amount for a mango.

A most orderly bedlam

Everything they say about Tokyo is true.  Well, true in terms of the rail system being brilliant, at least.  During peak hour, trains arrive every two minutes.  The longest time I can remember waiting for a train Tokyo is about seven minutes.  After about three minutes, I was tapping my foot with impatience.

As well as being frequent, the trains run with military precision.  In peak hour, you walk up to the platform, and the electronic signboard announces that the next train will arrive at 8:27am.  Precisely as the clock ticks over to the appointed minute, the train appears from around the bend without fail, as if it had just materialized, summoned by the signboard itself.

Except for that one time in one hundred when it doesn’t.  I commute on one of the bigger train lines in Tokyo, and any fault on the line creates absolute commuter havoc.

There are a few different causes for this, usually.  Strong winds.  A freakishly large amount of snow.  Someone deciding to avail themselves of the rail system to end their life: interestingly, while the status message in Japanese flashing on the station screens shows it was due to a suicide, the English version shows something nice and euphemistic, like “personal injury”.

You know there’s been a problem on the line when you get to the station and there are about one thousand people anxiously mingling in front of it.

Because the trains are so freakishly precise and everyone is expected to be in the office at 9am on the dot, everyone immediately whips out their mobile phones and start calling and emailing bosses and co-workers that it’s terribly unfortunate and unforgivable, but they could possibly be up to TEN minutes late.

Actually, on the morning of this particular incident, the trains turned out to more like two HOURS late.  People who were desperate to get to work took the scenic route on buses.  With no buses to fall back on (that I knew of), I went home to monitor the situation on the Internet.

One thing doesn’t vary, though, whether the train is on time or late: prepare for some train moshing on your daily commute.