Category: experiences

As you know, I have been writing facebook posts for Kyotogram, and just recently, we have celebrated our first year online. We are doing this by collaborating with a local store; so if you’re in Kyoto during November and are a fan of Kyotogram on facebook, then you get 5% off at the Kurochiku souvenir shop.

Anyway, besides that, we also had a more private party in the office last night – my very first Japanese business party! It was only a small affair since the office is rather small with only 10 people or so, but it was fun anyway. Even though we were told that there would be no dinner provided, we had a selection of sushi, oden, pizza; popcorn, chips, and chocolate. And lots of alcohol, of course: We quickly finished a large bottle of Sake, and while the others moved on to beer afterwards, I downed some cans of Chu-Hi. It was fun!

Of course, it wouldn’t have been a decent office party if the department head hadn’t given a (thankfully very short) speech at the beginning. And it wouldn’t have been a decent Japanese office party, had it not been timebombed: Just before 22:00, there was another short speech ending with en mo takenawa, which is a formulaic expression meaning something like: “I hate to say this when we’re having a great time, but we have to close this party.”

And in truly Japanese fashion, all of us were helping together to clean up, the office was back to normal within 10 minutes, and then everybody left. Except for the department head, who had some extra work to do afterwards… Even drinking parties in Japan are very formalised and restrained. Or maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg?

Tuesdays, I have my Japanese class in the morning and a meeting in the afternoon with a two-hour break in between. Usually, I try to get something done in that break, and I have written a lot of letters, emails, and blog posts over lunch. But today was such nice and sunny weather, that I decided to go down to the river and have my lunch box there.

And there I sat musing… I looked at the houses nearby, some old wooden buildings, many apartment blocks, some new, and some older. And, looking at them, I thought how easy it was to distinguish them: It seems to me that the older a house is, the more pretty it is, or at least, the more time and thought appears to have gone into building something that is pleasing to the eye – and probably to the people living there.

Modern buildings today are not like that anymore, especially individual houses look like shoe boxes. To begin with, there are no gardens that need daily care and attention and pruning. Instead, we get parking lots in front of main entrances, in concrete slabs that be hosed down quickly if ever the need arises. This is not only striking when comparing family homes, but also clearly visible at the apartment blocks. To me, modern buildings look cold, mass-produced, and rejecting. A current architect would probably rather call them “functional”.

But, we are not machines that need to “function”. We are humans, we are only living. And living is messy and dirty sometimes and it has no straight lines and right angles as far as the eyes can see. It is rough and random and unpolished. It would be nicer, I think, if people’s homes would represent that again, somehow. Meanwhile, I’ll keep dreaming of my house with garden…

Sorry for not writing on Tuesday, I came home exhausted and went to bed at 9 already.

I have just taken a step further towards my Japanification. For the first time ever, I bought a five kilo sack of rice, and I have to admit that I was even tempted to buy the big ten kilo sack, and I only refrained because I don’t have a proper spot to store that much. I feel very Japanese now, I am not even sure you can buy that much rice in a single package in Europe (other than in an Asia shop of course).

Even though Japan produces about 120% of its population’s consumption of rice, and even though rice farmers are heavily subsidized by the state, it is very expensive here. One kilo usually costs about 1000 yen, and that’s the bog standard Japanese rice you can get in any supermarket. That’s why I was tempted to buy the 10 kilo sack of newly harvested rice for only 4500 yen, but as I said, not enough storage space.

Interestingly, and something I didn’t know for a long time, even rice can go bad! Fresh rice has a very slight and sweet smell that is hard to describe – a little bit like milk. When it goes bad – only after a long, long time usually – it smells musty. I found this out in Korea, when I once tried to cook rice pudding and the milk curdled unexpectedly – even though I had just bought it on the same day. I hope that I’ll be able to finish all the rice before it goes bad – in the worst case, I can always eat it in hearty dishes like Bibimbap or Reisfleisch…

I hate facebook. I mean, that’s no big news to anyone who knows me, but now I have an official reason for that… Let me explain.

As you know, What’s up in Kyoto has a facebook page. Not that I’m happy about spending all that time and effort there, but as the owner of a company that essentially deals in online services, you need social media presence these days, and facebook (unfortunately) is (still) the number one in that respect. It is a modern version of the village pump, and word of mouth can go quite far there, if you hit the right people – even without advertising.

And it did go very well indeed: it took me several months, but from one week to the next my posts had a reach (i.e., the number of people seeing them) of some 600 people each day. That made me very happy, and I could see the click-throughs to the main page increase, even though by far not all of these people would look beyond facebook. This state lasted maybe a month or so, and now, equally inexplicably, my reach dropped to about 20 people each day – that is back to the reach I had when I started out on facebook, which is really bad for more than 6 months of effort, and many more followers than I started out with.

I had no idea what happened, until I found an article somewhere: facebook changed something in their internal workings. To put it simply (or at least, as I understood it): Whenever a user logged on to facebook, they got a “news feed” on their facebook page, which included any updates their friends had posted, and any new posts on pages they had liked. But now, facebook has changed this, the “news feed” only contains posts from friends. There is now a new “explore feed” where facebook suggests pages that are similar to what people have liked before. But not necessarily the pages people already did like! If you want your (business) page to show up in the news feed of people who liked the page already (!) you’ll have to pay for it.

As an analog example, just imagine that all of a sudden you have two mail boxes, one for letters and postcards of people you know (which is probably mostly empty) and another one for stuff the mailman thinks might be interesting to you, depending of the mail he has delivered before. However, for the newspapers you have already subscribed to, you have to out and get them yourself at the newsagent’s…

I’m not sure how to feel about this to be honest. Half of me is furious because the whole thing is simply yet another way of making more money for facebook. And there’s now a lot of people I can’t reach anymore – including ones that already liked whatsupinkyoto. If you did – I’m afraid you’ll have to manually visit the page each day, nothing I can do about that. The other half of me is happy that facebook was always just an add-on to the main page, so if things go well there it’s good, if things don’t, there’s not much lost. Especially since I never paid a single yen to them. At least that is not going to change. Ever.

It was raining – no, pouring – all weekend because of an approaching typhoon. Sunday night the storm was so heavy that I couldn’t sleep, and at some point in the middle of the night I even got up and cleared my balcony to prevent anything from being blown away.

Next door to my apartment, there is this garage for garbage trucks. And just this Saturday, they had their open day again, with games for the kids, allowing them to sit in a garbage truck, stalls for food, etc. There was even a brass band, which played a medley of Queen songs some time in the morning. From what I could see from my balcony, it seemed pretty empty. I felt so sorry for them, putting in all this effort, and then they are washed away by the typhoon.

The big event on Sunday – Jidai Matsuri, a favourite of mine – was cancelled altogether. It was a wise decision, and even though it had cleared a bit by Monday, the auxiliary date, it would not have been much fun for anyone. Even the Manga museum closed early on Sunday.

By now, things are back to normal again. The temperature has dropped even further though, and I now have put out my gloves and woolen scarf and hat in case I have to go somewhere on my bicycle in the evening. Also, tonight is the first night this autumn where I am using my space heater. My fears for a long and cold winter are probably justified…

On a somewhat lighter note, it seems that Japan has been taken over by Halloween altogether. There will be a Halloween-themed cosplay parade next weekend for example, and of course, Halloween costumes and trinkets are for sale everywhere. Even serious Japanese businesses are jumping on the bandwagon. Today, I passed by a very old Japanese sweets shop that mainly sell traditional sweets with red bean paste, and waffles with simple sugar cream inside. Said waffles are now having a cute design – Halloween inspired, of course.

Last Sunday, there were the Austrian general elections for parliament. I took it upon me to wait for the results until about 2 am.

Personal opinion: On the one hand, it’s not good. Not good at all. We now have – with high probability – a right-ish OEVP chancellor who is definitely populist, and with 31 years has no experience in anything whatsoever, except for being a party member, which was the only reason he became foreign minister the last time. I’m worried.

On the other hand, it could have been worse: At least the very far right guy with friends in all the other far right parties in Europe only got as far as third place. Just. So, even though it is highly unlikely, there is a chance that the SPOE social democrats – now at the second place – will form another coalition with the OEVP.

And then there is the green party, which will not be a member of the next parliament any longer, after 31 years. I think this is well-deserved by this green party, due to all the BS they managed to do in the last half year at least. Unfortunately, this also means that the opposition is not very strong anymore, which is not good for the country as a whole.

Anyway, we’ll see where this will go. I have received already a number of questions and comments from Japanese friends around here (who will vote for their own parliament next Sunday, by the way), and I gave them the following answer: Well, I already emigrated…

Today was the first Kyotogram meeting since we two writers had the talk with the big boss last week. I had thanked him in an email for meeting with us and giving us the opportunity to complain, and he replied that he in turn had had a meeting with the other two members of the group. So, I was slightly anxious about today, about how Junior would react, but then again, I had said nothing that I wouldn’t tell him to his face.

The meeting went very well, and we addressed the issues we had raised with the big boss. Junior seems more willing to see the whole thing as a team effort. And we in turn have promised to speak out earlier if things are going in a direction we are not happy with. We’ll see how this is going, for now the waves have calmed again and we’re looking at bright weather and a smooth sailing.

 

I’ve just heard that Kazuo Ishiguro received the Nobelprize for Literature this year. I’m so thrilled! His books are wonderful, and even though he is a British citizen and had left Japan at age 5, his books have a very Japanese style. I wasn’t planning to, but since I have another review for one of his books ready, I’ll post it on Sunday.

In other news… it is getting really cold now, and I feel that it is much too early. Night temperatures are about 18 degrees, even though it can get quite warm during the days still. I need to close my windows at night now, and even during the days it is quite windy, which is not very conducive to open windows.

This might be the reason why I have developed problems with my left shoulder in the last three weeks or so. It’s very painful, although I have still the full range of movement – for now. A friend of mine thinks it may be “frozen shoulder”, a condition that starts out with shoulder pain that changes into immobility at a point. It may take up to one year, sets in suddenly, and also ends suddenly, and the cause is unclear. All that is known is that it starts out with an inflammation of the shoulder joint, but why…

I have now started to use an anti-inflammatory ointment during the day, and in the night I use “hot plasters” on the shoulder to keep the area warm. The pain seems to subside a little – I can sleep through the night again – and moving is still possible. So, maybe, with a bit of luck, it’s not frozen shoulder after all, but just some sort of cold from sitting in the draught for too long.

As you may have forgotten by now, I am still writing posts for the facebook page of Kyotogram, a local business with the aim of bringing foreign tourists to Kyoto and Japan. By now, there is also a website, essentially a daily blog talking about Japan, but I am not involved in this one. Our group of four people meets once a week for two hours to talk, and most of the times, the meetings are nice and productive.

Although, the last two weeks, they weren’t. The reason is that Kyotogram will soon celebrate its first birthday and the big boss is starting to want to see results, obviously. In this case, the results essentially are the number of likes per post, and for some reason or other, this number has been going down the last month or two. It’s hard to say why because facebook doesn’t reveal the algorithms with which they provide people with our posts – and the more people we reach, the more likes we get, obviously.

So, two weeks ago, the team leader (let’s call him Junior because he’s a recent uni graduate, 23 years of age, with zero experience in anything) has started to search for reasons why the numbers are down, and, lo and behold, he has made it out: all the posts that are not scenery. Since those are all my posts, he was more or less attacking me and saying something that “we need better content” (not that he explained what that would be, of course). I let that go – until last week Junior attacked me again in the same way, and I couldn’t quite let that go twice in a row…

Fast forward to this week’s meeting: I was prepared to tell him I’d take a week off in case he attacked me again today. And I was definitely planning to ask the big boss for a meeting to talk about Junior and his attitude in depth. None of that happened, since there were preemptive strikes by both of them:

First of all, Junior apologised for his behaviour last week and the week before, right at the beginning of the meeting, which was totally unexpected. (I accepted.) And then the usual meeting was cut short because we two writers had an extra “review meeting” with the big boss! The three of us went to a cafe nearby where the big boss bought drinks, and then we were … what’s the term … airing our grievances. For one and a half hours. I don’t want to go into details here, but I feel that it was a constructive meeting, that the big boss was listening to what we had to say, and that he will try to solve the current problems.

I trust the big boss to come up with something we all can be happy with (even Junior). I wouldn’t want to leave because I still like the job (and I do learn a lot of things that can be applied to my own work), the people are nice (mostly), and I can definitely use the money… Let’s see where this is going.