Day 1: Orientation

And so it begins once again. This is my sixteenth year beginning school in Japan and many things never change. Compared to last year, the first for the new department, this year's orientation went incredibly well. It was micro-organized, as all things are in Japan, and, with that, came the inevitable expectations that some events would last a lot less time than they actually did (10 minutes for 300+ students to individually sign a pledge of loyalty to the school!), but otherwise a lot of effort, and a lot of learning from mistakes of last year, really paid off.

Students, almost all of them 18 years old and, compared to similar kids (here, definitely 'kids') in the West, extremely wet behind the ears. Naturally, as ever in Japan, the whole business of 'study' began with two hours of speeches and explanations, by the end of which, the 300 new entrants were getting pretty bored and restless – cue professors running around the room shouting, "Shut up! Shut up!" Our Dean only took about 18 minutes to deliver his 10 minute allotted speech so, as ever, this can also be considered a success. I was amused by the references to our PR of being a school with Global Values (which is true as far as it can be in somewhere as insular and parochial as Japan), our new school pledge (which is also fine on the whole, except that students were basically forced to sign it regardless of what they thought), and comments from our principal that students should develop the ability to think for themselves and speak for themselves – clearly the pressure to conform and be part of the group in our own department still outweighs the hopes of our principal. I doubt, however, that many people were really listening that closely or even considered this small ambiguity.

But that really is the point. We have a large number of 'English speakers' amongst our students, but the other day an very experienced English professor pointed out something to me that is very true indeed. He said:

Those who grew up overseas before they reached puberty really do have English, but those who've just studied it simply don't have the same spark of understanding or the freedom of thinking that you get from people outside Japan.

I'd never thought about it before, but this is inherently true. Many speak English, actually quite well, the ability to think "outside the box" (or, here, 'beyond the society') is something that comes from experiences other than those that can be learned in a grammar book. As a result, students are quiet, docile, pliable, and almost entirely unquestioning. And, as a consequence of that, teaching takes a very clear 'force feeding' method in many cases. I know for a fact that too many students accept exactly what the professor tells them. It's easy to make mistakes in your kanji (Chinese characters) on lecture slides simply because Japan has so many homonyms, and all too often, I've seen students loyally copying down my slides even when it says things like 小婢 (shohi meaning slave) rather than 消費 (shohi, meaning consumption).

But in the end, teaching is easy and fun. There's nothing as great, work wise, as being in front of a group of students and knowing that they're listening and learning. The great thing about this school is that students are sharp and keen – at least at first. Much of the teaching system quickly deadens that keen-ness. Over the next 2-3 months these same eager souls will have numerous occasions where they have to sit through completely boring, meaningless, but compulsory lectures and, the number one Japanese designed torture of the modern age, the dreaded symposium. The one thing they will learn from these events is that their elders (although not necessarily betters) certainly believe that youngsters should listen (if not actually benefit) from their experience. Too many love their own voices far too much.

My job is to counter balance this to some extent. It's pretty thankless, but at least here there are others who make the effort to provide some meaning to what students study and some interest and challenge in the way they study, but we're still in the minority. Because we're too few, only a handful of students will really get it, thinking for themselves and developing flashes of insight, while the others, inevitably, spend the next four years taking classes where the one key assessment factor is attendance. Bums on seats rules!

Last day of freedom

Today is the last day of freedom. I'm looking forward to starting the new school year – there's nothing like the interaction of teaching and, on the whole, the students here are pretty keen as Japanese students go. In the year in Tokyo, I've found that keen-ness doesn't necessarily live up to ambition. Many of the students are far less ambitious and have much narrower, more constricted hopes and dreams than at my old, 'less prestigious' school, but at least a large proportion of the current ones pay attention.

Every year is different, and I've no idea what this year will bring, so I'm also a little nervous. One new resolution: I am taking photos of the students this year and damn the rules. The rule about no photos is because of a fear of privacy being invaded – yeah right! It's really because the Uni doesn't want to be able to be traced back from outside websites. There's a big department for sexual harassment and discrimination, but, as ever, stopped such problems is far from its mind. In reality it's all about fire fighting potential scandals, no matter how small. By having such a department, the hope is it will find out about problems before the press do. For me though, not having photos makes remembering 40 names in 7 days all that more difficult. So, sod it, I'm taking them.

BA corpse: Best Fly Singapore Airlines

Amazing story: BA sat corpse in first class. We really need a ranking of which airlines record the highest body count every year. 10 people out of 36 million isn't so bad for BA I suppose, unless you're one of the the 10 of course, and, as the story fails to cover properly, it must be a terrible time for the accompanying family.

The conclusion must be that BA needs to look at its procedures a little more carefully. If such incidents are so common then they need to have some kind of action in place – there are places on airliners to put bodies I'm sure and Singapore Airlines introduction of 'corpse cupboards' shows it. But as for the other passengers, while distressing, surely it's just a case of common courtosy to quietly inform them of the situation.

MM

MM is a pretty common abbreviation. The Acronym Finder has 200 definitions and Wikipedia has thirty-nine. It can mean everything from Millimetre to small American sweets that are rumoured to cure impotence if you eat the green ones. It also means Minister Mentor in Singapore – the title now given to Lee Kuan Yew. LKY is founder of modern Singapore and the man responsible for a quality of life, standard of living, and freedom of speech way, way above anything Japan has to offer – despite a lot of criticism here and there, Singapore has a lot to be grateful for I think.

I now have a new meaning: Meaningless Meeting. It doesn't take 20 years to realise that the MM is a key aspect of working and even living in Japan. Most MM take place not for goals or actions, but generally for information dispersion, consensus building (although 'consensus enforcement' is probably more accurate as there's few organisations here that aren't squarely run from the top down despite much hype to the contrary), and peer pressure. The only reason to go that I can work out is that everyone else does – probably the most common reason that anything happens in Japan. At a typical MM, only about 1 in 10 of the participants will actually speak. Time allotted varies, but is never less than 90 minutes and often much longer, with the time required unrelated to the time allotted. If the meeting is 90 minutes, it will damn well last 90 minutes even if there's only one item on the vague, equally meaningless agenda.

The agenda is a dangerous and problematic thing. Once an item is on there, it has to be completed. After the usual 60+ minutes it takes to review contents of other meetings (the information dispersion part that assumes other participants can't simply read the notes themselves but need them to be read out), there are usually a small number of discussion items. In every single case, the item for discussion is pre-decided and the sole aim is to put participants in the position of being unable to disagree later, "because you were there when it was decided". Objections are either quashed or ignored – although, as diagreeing would be 'anti-consensus' such comments are few and far between.

So why attend? Because it's one of the few tasks that are actually part of the job description. Even teaching duties come secondary to such MMs. It is our duty to attend these meetings. I knew one American professor who, after 20 years in Japan, had learned just one phrase, "Boku ha iken nashi" or 'I have no opinion'. Even this he wasn't required to practice very much in the meetings themselves and he spent his time, usually in blissful ignorance of what was happening around him, writing really quite good short stories. In the past 17 years, I have attended on average two two-hour meetings of this kind per week. That's 1,700 hours of meetings during which time I've probably been called upon to actually speak about twice. 1,700 hours is a whole year of work – much more in some countries.

Did I mention I might have been here too long?

The Damned Utd

The Damned Utd is a semi-fictional story of Brian Clough's 43 days as manager of Leeds United, back in 1974. I really enjoyed this book. It's a very easy read and quickly finished. Of course, at my age, I knew the story already, roughly speaking. When I was 12 years old, my best friend was a Leeds Utd supporter. Of course, very soon after that he was an Everton supporter, and then a West Ham supporter, but it's amazing how, at the time, I never cottoned on to the fact that he was just picking the best team of the period. As Andy Hamilton once said in Old Harry's Game, a special hell is reserved for football supporters who change the alliances with team results. (He actually said there's a special hell for Manchester Utd supporters who come from Surrey, Singapore, or anywhere except Manchester. You get the idea.)

Clough was controversial, big headed, and big mouthed. He was also brilliant. Even those who hated him, including the pompous dillies at the FA, could hardly deny that his achievements are unprecedented and still to be rivalled. He took both Derby County and Nottingham Forest, two clubs from lower divisions, to league championships and, in Forest's case, European Cups. Now he's gone and, of course, neither of these clubs are well known and, outside their local towns, probably unheard of for the most part.

Author David Peace captures the atmosphere of the era brilliantly. If you lived through it then, you'll live through it again in the book. His football commentary style writing is a bit easy to skip over (unfortunately), but it doesn't really detract from the story. His thesis, based it seems on a lot of background reading, is that Clough took the Leeds job simply because it was the biggest club in England at the time, but that he hated the club from the outset and really did little but try to break-up the team that had won the championship the year before. Leeds supporters will find much to upset them in the story – for supporters of other teams, especially ones like Tottenham which had one of its worst seasons ever (but still didn't even then lose this supporter) or Manchester United, who had dropped to the second division that season (but who also still didn't lose true supporters) it's all like a trip down memory lane. I suspect, though, that anyone who didn't live through the time will find it hard to follow exactly what is going on and why.

I remember looking forward to seeing Clough on the telly because he always had something to say and wasn't afraid to give an opinion. It would have been wonderful to get his views on the way Eriksson picked a squad to lose the World Cup last year, but unfortunately Cloughie's no longer around to point out the truth for us. He is the one clear proof that the English FA put politics and image above the national team's performance as Clough was clearly the best manager in his era, desperately wanted the England job, and was snubbed for the post several times, just as he was when he was the best striker in England, he only won two caps for his country – because his face didn't fit. He had what England lack – professionalism, or, as he put it, true heart. RIP Brian Howard Clough.

Don't you hate the lies in those anti-piracy commercials?

It seems to me that it took far less time for DVDs to become obsolete than it did for VHS tapes, but worse, Hollywood's disgusting and totally corrupt insistence that pirating stops it making profit has led to a ridiculous level of DRM that, frankly, is tantamount to fraud in itself. Hollywood not making a profit? Give us all a break. I do not condone piracy. As a writer myself I know the value of copyright, but the scare tactics, equating copying with terrorism for example or, in the case of Japan's anti-piracy campaign, with death, is pure propaganda. I buy all my DVDs – quite a lot of them actually, but I'm forced to buy outside the country where I live because prices are so high here. DVD regions were also a simple means of both DRM and to force up prices in some countries. I don't want the extra expense of paying the artificially inflated local prices. Japanese distributors put such a premium on having local subtitles that it is cheaper to buy from Amazon UK anyway even after shipping.

Japan, of course, used to be the same system as the US for VHS tapes (NTSC), but realising that they could charge more if the US and Japan were different systems, the DVD regions are different. I am surprised that Japan is not a region unto itself, but as most Japanese DVD players are fixed to play only NTSC and won't play UK region 2 disks anyway, I guess that was the original plan.

I will never buy the new HD disks and I will enjoy my DVDs for as long as I have a DVD player that works. I feel ripped off by movie distributors in recent years and I'm confident that such anti-consumer practices will destroy their industry. We will soon have on-demand downloads of movies and all forms of disk will become obsolete. Buying what is basically an interim solution between the current DVD and full-blown instant downloads of HD content at very low prices, is simply not worth the money.

Going to the cinema in Japan costs a uniform ¥1,800 almost everywhere at any time. Recently, Japanese cinemas have been playing more Japanese films, and Hollywood movies have been appearing later and later, often six months to a year later. Even our local Warner theatre only has Western movies on about half its screens now. With most movies available on DVD for about ¥1,000 only a month or two after their overseas release, we can see the movie cheaper and quicker by buying the DVD than we can at the cinema. We miss seeing some things on the big screen, but it just isn't worthwhile doing it anymore.

Of course, the vast majority of movies are only worth watching once and a lot of the DVDs I buy only get one showing. Just think if I could download these movies. For the price of renting a DVD, about ¥400-¥500, I'd be more than happy to download a limited time use movie and I'd buy even more. I'd want to watch it on my own terms though and, for some special movies, I'd want a copy I could keep and watch over and over again. The trend right now is to stop me doing just that. It's anti-consumer and, really, it's plain stupid.

Management defined

There are times, although not many of them, when it's clear a meeting is required. Naturally, 99.9% of all meetings are lectures whereby the participants are told what has been decided by other, and then the decision is 'rubber stamped'. It happens this way purely because individuals will do anything at all to defuse responsibility to as many other people as possible. In many ways, the main role of professors here is to add to the numbers who take on responsibility for decisions.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Bad, often terrible decisions are still made, and countless hours are spent in rubber stamping simple decisions that would take any competent individual a few seconds to confirm.

Today was one such example. After 40 minutes of confirming pass/fail decisions on a whopping six candidates, with zero discussion except a rehash of what was on the notes in front of us, an extra item was added to the agenda: should we allow the school to increase the number of professors and how should it be paid for. An hour later, 20 people had sat and listened to just three who had any opinion at all. And then, of course, the original proposal, which most people were clearly against, was rubber stamped anyway and the poor foresight of the very top leaders has been justified by the rank and file who are unwilling and incapable of putting up any kind of opposition. 20 man hours were wasted agreeing with a proposal that wouldn't have been rejected anyway.

Why do we bother?

Days are getting shorter

The days are getting shorter now. It's a quarter to ten and I'm still up, but this has become a rare occasion. Most of the time I'm in bed, hoping to get four or five hours sleep before the first baby wake up of the night. He is in the habit of sleeping four to five hours, then three, then two, and finally one before becoming so awake that I just have to get up, leaving her to sleep just an hour or two more as she had to wake up each time to give the feed. All in all it takes about 11 hours, but I'm usually up at 6am or 7am, trying to keep him cheerful and then help him sleep. It's impossible to work, you just have to look after baby.

People say it'll end soon and things will begin to get back to normal. I hope so. I need to sleep. I also need my work day to be just a little longer. Sometimes.