Seen in a contract between two large-ish companies which shall remain nameless:
“If [list of conditions omitted], then Company shall have a presumptive right to extend the contract.”
Discussion questions:
Unless you follow the business media in Japan, you probably haven’t heard about the upcoming overhaul in Japanese corporate law. It’s pretty intense, and it illustrates my personal favorite theory of Japanese legal policy: the What The Hell Theory. Basically, the theory states that:
Case in point: this new institution called the godo kaisha (GDK). Up until now, there have been two basic kinds of corporations in Japan: the kabushiki kaisha (KK) and yugen kaisha (YK). The YK structure is for small companies, and the KK structure is for large companies (or, more often, small companies that want to seem large). As of April, the YK will cease to exist and its place in the system will be filled by the GDK. Continue reading The “what the hell” theory of Japanese law
I’m taking an overnight trip out of town in a couple of weeks, and I decided to book a room in a “business hotel” online. Some of these places are surprisingly cheap: you can stay in the middle of a big city for as little as $40 a night or even less.
Then, I got this email:
Thank you for your reservation at ____ Hotel. We are contacting you because of a matter of importance for our customers from overseas.
At ____ Hotel, our rooms are secured at night with an automatic lock system and PIN pads. While the PIN pad system is very convenient, it is also complicated, and among our customers who are not particularly proficient in Japanese or have difficulty understanding Japanese, many have been unable to use the system, or have been locked out of their rooms at night.
Because of this, we ask all customers who do not speak Japanese to provide a translator at check-in when possible. After one stay the system is fairly easy to use, but as we cannot verify that you, Mr. Joe [sic], have stayed with us before, we are sending this message to you. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Yet another reason I need to naturalize and change my name to Joichi Koizumi.
Update: I was thinking about this over a slow afternoon in the office, and I started wondering: “What would Debito do?” (Somehow he works his way into all of my blog posts.) So I wrote back to the hotel:
Thank you for your e-mail. I live in Japan and work as a translator, so I don’t think there will be any problem. One thing I do wonder about, though, is whether you have had instructions written in English? Many hotels and weekly mansions in Tokyo have similar systems, and they provide instructions in English so that foreign customers do not have to worry about misunderstanding. Maybe something similar would save you from having to send out these warnings (and also be more convenient for your guests who don’t speak Japanese).
The hotel manager wrote me back within ten minutes.
Thank you for your reply. We do indeed have an English version of the instruction sheet you suggested in your e-mail, so please don’t worry about that. Our customers are not generally from the English-speaking world, thus the e-mail you received. Thank you again for your comment, and we hope you have a safe trip.
Sooo, that’s that. I guess the interpreter is only necessary if you can’t read.
And here’s the proof: Black man loses lawsuit against exclusionary store; not deemed a discriminatory statement. But take a look at why the claim was kicked out of court:
The man who brought the suit is 41-year-old Steve MacGowan. On September 4, 2004, MacGowan and another black friend were looking at eyeglasses in the window of an optician in Osaka. The store owner came to the front, said “Get out! We don’t like black people here!” and kept the two out of the store. The suit was filed in October of that year.
The decision, following MacGowan’s allegations of violations of constitutional equal protection provisions, focused upon the existence of a discriminatory statement. The judgment: “The plaintiff’s ability in Japanese creates a substantial problem. We cannot overlook the chance that the statement made on that day was almost completely miscomprehended.”
So the bottom line is, unless your Japanese is absolutely perfect, you’d better have some native witnesses around if you want to win in court. Or better yet, carry a tape recorder.
(Thanks to Debito for the tip.)
One of the shows on NHK this morning was talking about earthquake preparedness. Recently there’s been something of a boom in literature about what to do in the event Tokyo spontaneously falls down. If you go to bookstores around here, you see competing lines of evacuation maps, survival guides and the like.
The blurb I caught on my way to work was about evacuation. After a major earthquake, the trains stop running and the elevated expressways are likely to have fallen down in places (think Kobe, 1995), so the only way to get out of the city is on foot, taking surface routes.
This doesn’t sound too bad until you realize how many people are in the city, how narrow many of these surface routes are, and how likely they are to be blocked in places by falling power poles and other debris. One think-tank wonk made a computer simulation of an evacuation of downtown Tokyo, and figured that the streets in shitamachi (i.e. the area around Tokyo Station and Ginza) would be crowded to the extent of about 11 people per square meter. That’s about the maximum number of people you can squeeze into a square meter; imagine the worst Tokyo subway cars at rush hour, expanded to the size of an arterial street.
Yet another reason why we need flying cars NOW.
Good morning, Frogheads! I got back to Tokyo earlier this week, but thanks to my school’s very poor taste in temporary housing, I haven’t been able to get online. Fortunately there are Hotspots all over the place, so all hope for blogging hasn’t been totally lost. I’m currently reporting to you live from a Mos Burger overlooking the Yamanote Line, or “the ringworm of Tokyo” as Adamu calls it.
I had a different experience arriving at Narita this time, because I did it without a visa. It’s not that I was too stupid or lazy to get one; there were circumstances. Continue reading Entering Japan, refugee-style
Random cool link of the day: Imperial Japanese money used in Southeast Asia during World War II. My favorites are the Indonesian notes.
Just a few days away from returning to Japan. While visiting a war museum in Charleston yesterday, I spotted these names painted on a WWII-era dive bomber:
Obviously, it’s a list of islands that the plane bombed. But I can’t help but think… if you put it in Book Antiqua with some nice photos, it could just as easily come from a cruise line brochure. Stick Honolulu on top and Yokohama on the bottom and you’ve got a nice little Hawaii-Japan trip.
(More profound blog posts coming soon, I promise. Still a little fried from cramming for my tax exam…)
We’ve had some comments disappear on our most recent posts. Adamu and I are currently trying to figure out what happened, but for the record, we are not trying to censor anyone. No matter how pissed off, abusive, or ridiculous your comment is, we will approve and post it, so long as it isn’t spam. And we do not delete comments once posted. If your comment has gone missing, it’s not us. We don’t want you to shut up.
We apologize for this problem and hope to have it fixed soon. In the meantime, keep the arguments, discussions, and rants coming: we appreciate every one. We’ll let everyone know once we’ve diagnosed the problem: for now, I’m blaming the gremlins.
When I was packing up to leave Japan at the end of the summer, I checked the forward rates to see if it would be worth it to change my leftover yen (a pretty big chunk of money) back into dollars. The 6-month forward was pretty stable back then, so I took my Japanese cash home with me and stashed it away.
Well, that was one hell of a mistake. The yen is now down from 110 to 120 to the dollar, with not much sign of coming back up, and Finance Minister Tanigaki and BoJ President Fukui don’t seem to have a problem with the situation. Bastards.
