Author: Roy Berman

Temp workers

Yesterday it was reported that Japan is considering a revision of the regulations governing temp workers, including the following section that might be rather difficult for most people to really understand.

The revised law will also tighten regulations on the industry practice of sending workers exclusively to certain clients or setting up a company for that purpose.

The practice allows client companies to use workers as nonpermanent employees because they are dispatched from a temp staff agency, thus cutting labor expenses.

To explain what this means, let me briefly discuss the labor situation at the private university in Japan where I worked for one year, from 2006-2007. In general, workers were divided into three categories: regular employees, contract employees, and part timers.

Regular employees were for the most part those hired through Japan’s so-called “shushoku” system of formalized job hunting that allocates the majority of good corporate jobs to fresh university graduates. In this university, almost every regular employee was hired through the shushoku system, and every regular employee I knew under the age of perhaps 30 or 35 was also a graduate of the same university. Some of the elder employees, such as the middle aged manager of my office, had been mid-career hires, but only after a couple of decades of work elsewhere. Regular employees are, in typical Japanese office style, expected to work long and pointless hours of overtime, and while they are contractually allowed to request overtime pay and use vacation days freely, unwritten social expectations prevent most from doing so. Many of these regular employees will spend their entire career in the same job, being gradually promoted based on a combination of seniority and merit. Merit probably factors in more than in the past but still less than would be desirable, and far more of them will also leave for another job at some point than in decades past. I would estimate that regular employees constituted about 25% of the office staff.

Contract employees are hired on what is effectively a three year contract, but is actually a one year contract with two renewal options. The contract stipulates a modest raise in the second and third year, but after the third year it is over and it is impossible for the employee to continue working there, no matter how much they want to or how good they are at their job. Since contract employeed were approximately half of the staff (at least in my office) this leads to an enormous waste of know-how and causes great inefficiency, as staff turnover is kept artificially high, and forces a lot of wasteful training. I am told that the reason for this system is that the labor regulations would require those modest annual raises to continue year after year, and so the university has taken the route of hiring employees with an expiration date, and then replacing them with fresh employees at the base salary. Contract employees leave exactly when the official shift is over, and if they actually have to due overtime due to excess work, will always request overtime pay for it. They have no long-term prospects, and it is impossible to move from being a contract worker to being a regular worker, no matter how competent or essential the person is. It is in fact possible for a former contract worker to start again on a fresh three year contract-at base salary level-but only after an insulting 6 month cooling off period, during which one is presumably and collecting unemployment insurance (which in Japan covers 3 months of payments after a contract concludes).

Part timers, who are almost all married woman who have young children in school and would have been housewives a generation ago, do essentially the same work as contract employees, but at significantly less pay and without benefits. I have no idea if they are theoretically limited in their employment duration, but without even the contract employee’s meager raises, why would they want to?

Now here is where the above quote comes in. There was a woman working in a different office from mine whose three year contract had expired. She liked her job and her co-workers, and her boss very much wanted her to stay, but under the rigid and bizarre employment system they had, it seemed that there was no way for her to stay. But she was offered an alternative, which involves a bizarre legal three card monty trick.

The university is a private, non profit, educational corporation. But they also “outsource” certain functions to a “joint stock company” (K.K. in Japanese terms) of which all shares are in fact held by the university. Various services such as cleaning, stocking, and certain other things I am not specifically clear about are sub-contracted to this company which is separate on paper, but has an office within the university, and whose board members are in fact staff of the university.

This woman, whose contract was expiring, was told that she could keep her same job, same desk, same duties, continue to work with her friends-but she would in fact be technically hired on a fresh contract by this shady subsidiary corporation and then dispatched as a temp to the university. Of course, being hired as a temp through a “third party” she would be taking a pay cut. Intelligently interpreting this as an insulting and demeaning offer, she declined the “new” position.

This, in short, is one of the types of hiring practice that the proposed new regulations are hoping to address.

PLA’s performance in earthquake good sign for Taiwan?

With enough time having passed since the massive earthquake disaster in China to being to look at it analytically, a number of military experts are saying that the People’s Liberation Army response was, for the most part, enthusiastic but not very competent.

Mr. Blasko and other experts said that because the military did not have heavy-lift helicopters, vital equipment like excavators and cranes had to be brought in on roads obstructed by landslides, slowing the pace of the rescue operations.

Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the military’s response did not reflect well on the military’s preparedness for a potential war with, say, Taiwan, the independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory. China’s air force deployed 6,500 paratroopers to Sichuan, but only 15 ended up dropping into the disaster zone, military officials said, because of bad weather and forbidding mountain terrain. Mr. Shen called the effort too little and too late.

“The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours,” he said, referring to a county near the quake’s epicenter. “It took 44 hours. If it took them 10 hours, that’s understandable. But 44 hours is shameful.”

(NYT)

I’m certainly no military expert, but if the Chinese air force achieved a nearly 100% failure rate on air drops in domestic territory with no enemy fire, and took 20 times as long as they should have to actually get their people in, I would think that Taiwan’s chances of fending off an attack might be a lot better than had been assumed over the past few years. I am actually rather surprised to read about how poorly equipped the PLA is, considering how much ink has been spilled recently on China’s rapid military investment. Is all of the money going into Navy, missiles, and attack aircraft or something? While the 1000 or so missiles pointed at Taiwan might cause some damage to the island, I would also imagine that a “lack of heavy-lift helicopters and transport aircraft” would make an actual invasion more than a little impractical.

With the unrealstic promise by the KMT to reinvade China long abandoned, Taiwan can be perfectly secure without the ability to send ground forces into China, as long as they have the ability to fend off air and sea attacks-particulary if their medium/long range missiles that could allegedly blow the Three Gorges Dam are as effective as they claim. But China isn’t worried about attacks from Taiwan-their military planning is largely aimed at preparing for an invasion of the island-and if they can’t even bring a few thousand rescue workers into a domestic disaster area faster than 44 hours, they would have very little hope indeed of delivering the numbers of troops needed to occupy Taiwan before US aircraft carriers arrived.

Mr. Chang – Mr. Oyama

After having my aching knee MRI-ed and examined by a sports medicine specialist at Kyoto University Hospital last week and been told that the problem wasn’t particularly serious and that riding a bicycle should be safe, I decided to finally go and buy one. I asked a Japanese girl I know who is a bit of a bicycle otaku to accompany me on the shopping trip so I would be decently advised in buying something a few times the price of the crappy mama-chari I rode during my previous two periods of residence in Kyoto, and she took me to a shop she likes inside the Sanjo Shotengai. After picking out the bike I wanted and the accessories that needed to be attached, I went out to the east exit of the shotengai to withdraw some cash at the 7-11 and grab something to drink.

With a cold drink in hand (Thursday was a bloody hot afternoon in Kyoto), I sat down on the bench just outside the convenience store next to a middle aged man smoking a cigarette, in the typical fashion of a 50-ish Japanese guy who would be hanging out with a cigarette in front of a 7-11 in the middle of the afternoon, and looking over his envelope of documents. I had my headphones on, listening to some podcast or other, but the man said hello, and having an hour to kill before my bike was ready I took off the headphones and talked to him for a bit.

When I asked his name, instead of just telling me, he reached into his wallet and pulled out, to my mild surprise, an Alien Registration card very much like mine. I say very much, because there were a few important differences. The first being that, as the card of a Korean national permanent resident, the fields for such information as “Landing date” and “Passport number” were filled with asterisks instead of numbers, and the name field contained both his legal Korean family name of Chang (I will leave the personal name out) as well as a Japanese family name of Oyama, in parenthesis and with the same personal name for both.

Mr. Chang was born and raised in the south part of Kyoto, where the so-called Zainichi Koreans are clustered, and described himself as “basically half-Japanese” despite having Korean citizenship and speaking Korean. He is the oldest of three children, at 55, with a younger brother practically half his age at 29 who is currently in graduate school at Kyoto University and a younger sister in the middle, around 40 years old. He mentioned that when he was younger his Korean was good enough to do simultaneous translation, for which he would practice by reading the Japanese newspapers aloud to himself in Korean, but these days he has gotten a bit rusty. Although he was actually born with North Korean (DPRK) citizenship, he changed it to South Korean (ROK) years ago, as traveling abroad is extremely difficult for DPRK citizens. He mentioned having visited New York, which I presume would have been virtually impossible as a North Korean. He also spoke more English long ago, when for a time he lived with an English woman who had no interest in learning to speak Japanese (or, presumably, Korean, although he did not even mention that possibility) but says that these days he would not even be able to string a sentence together.

Now essentially retired, aside from having to take care of certain kinds of corporation registration and tax documents such as the envelope he was holding, he is the owner of three different companies, which include several drinking and eating establishments in Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya. He started with one izakaya 30 years ago out in the “sticks” of southern Kyoto, then opened another in Nagoya, and now at the end of his career has reached a high level of success as owner of a highly priced Gion hostess bar.

He was quite keen to talk about how the hostess club is an important part of Japanese culture, the high pricing of and lack of sexual availibility therein often baffles and angers foreigners. He mentioned that on a few occasions foreigners came to the club, and were then outraged at the final tab, not understanding that this was not the sort of place one goes for a drink if one is the sort of person who worries about the tab. There was a specific anecdote about a Turkish man who, while not outraged about the price per-se, was quite angry that such a sum of money did not allow him to bring one of girls home with him. The problem, Mr. Chang explained, was that in the West there is not such a clear distinction between businesses which provide girls for “fun” (i.e. hostesses) and those which provide girls for sex. In his own country, the Turkish gentleman would be able to take the girl home for a night of what he might consider “fun” but in Japan, there are entirely separate businesses which cater to the physical. This is, he said, the modern version of the Geisha system, which in the past also separated the working girls into those for higher and lower pleasures.

But Mr. Chang does not actually spend time in any of his bars or clubs anymore-not even the hostess bar in Gion. He has cancer, and it has metastized beyond the realm of surgical efficacy, not leaving him long for this world. As owner he takes care of the paperwork, but no longer does anything one might actually call work. The pain of the cancer is often intense, and he has trouble sleeping at night. He is close with a singer in Tokyo, who sings to him over the phone when the cancer pain keeps him up at night, until the gentle voice lulls him to sleep, with the reciever falling off to the side.

He never had any children, but he wanted to do something positive for the world, to “make up for [his] sins.” To that end, he has become the official sponsor of an AIDS hospice in Chiang Mai, Thailand, whose several-dozen residents are all, as he says, his children. Although he is the active sponsor, he was not the sole fundor. To gather funds for the community, building their bungalows, providing their education and health care, he went around to all of the “shady characters” he knew from his business dealings over the years- the fellow bar owners, the real estate people, the local yakuza-and strongarmed donations out of them. “Think about what you did to get that money,” he says he told them, “surely you can spare a few yen for this.” It turned out that they could. Tragically, every time he visists there are “those who are no longer there.” He can afford to make them comfortable and provide some level of treatment, but the drugs cocktail that keeps wealthy first-world AIDS patients alive indefinitely is still too expensive in mass quantities.

And so it was time for Mr. Chang to pick up his laundry and drop his papers off at city hall, and for me to pick up my new bicycle. He asked if I would be willing to give him some English refresher lessons, so he could have some simple exchanges with the foreigners that came into his establishment, despite having said that he no longer spent any time there. While I do not normally have any interest in English conversation tutoring, I gave him my phone number.

Ma administration already beginning “rectification of names”?

Over a year ago I wrote two posts on pro-independence President Chen Shui Bian’s　(陳水扁) campaign of “rectification of names (正名)”, in which various agencies, school texts, and other labels were renamed to suggest an affiliation with Taiwan rather than China.

Taiwan rectifies names in new history textbook: January 31, 2007

More on rectification of names in Taiwan: February 7, 2007

Where the now former president Chen is a member of the pro-localization Democratic Progressive Party (DPP-民進黨 ) and himself of the more radical localization/independence faction, the new president Ma Ying-jiu (馬英九) is a member of the Chinese Kuomintang　(KMT-國民黨), and may make Chinese appeasement an aspect of his administration’s policy. This could easily include reversals of DPP iniatives such as the renaming of national corporations (post, oil, etc.) and the removal of former dictator Chaing Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) name from both the Taipei area airport which formerly bore his name, and to the grand Ming imperial tomb-inspired complex now currently knows as Democracy Memorial Hall (臺灣民主紀念館), but originally constructed as the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall　(蔣介石紀念館) following his death. While one can understand why Taiwanese democrats (small ‘d’) might object to the former dictator being memorialized in the style of the Ming Emperor’s (although his body is not buried there), it is also easy to see why some members of the KMT-Chiang’s political party-objected to the alteration, and why there is bound to be at least some amount of lobbying for a new executive order to change it back, now that their party has retaken the presidency.

One of the most notable of these renamings was the change of the national postal system from Chunghwa Post- which means China Post (中華郵政) to Taiwan Post (臺灣郵政). While this change has not (yet?) been reversed, it is possible that Taiwan may be in for a round of doubly confusing name flip-flops and reversals. As the Taipei Times reported on the day of Ma’s inauguration (yesterday, May 21)

Forty-year-old Mr Chen waited for two hours before he could put his hands on the sets he had ordered. He said he had purchased the stamps not only because Ma was president, but also because the Chinese characters for “Republic of China” were once again on the stamps.

Last year, the stamps issued by Taiwan Post Co only bore the name Taiwan.

Is this merely an example of the Taiwan Post Co honoring the new chief executive by printing his portrait next to the official name of the country he now leads, or a foreshadowing of a larger restoration of China -oriented names by the new administration? How deeply has Chen’s rectification of names really penetrated in Taiwan? Do most people prefer the localized names to the ones matching the country’s official name of Republic of China? How much has the necessity for campaigning in competitive elections with an electorate made up mostly of ethnic Taiwanese really changed the formerly mainlander-dominated KMT? And where does technically-mainlander but Taiwan-raised pragmatic Ma fit into this? Unfortunately, I have not been in Taiwan for over two years now and I really do not have a very solid sense of how most people have been reacting to these issues recently. It may be safe to predict that Ma will not be renaming any more “China” such-and-such to “Taiwan” such-and-such, but whether he will let all of the recent changes stand is another question entirely.

Taiwan’s Kung-fu politician

No, this isn’t a reference to some pathetic cheesy metaphor, but a quote from new Premiere Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄).

After the ceremony, Liu escorted Chang on his way out of the Executive Yuan.

Liu tripped while walking down the stairs in the lobby of the Executive Yuan hall, nearly falling.

“I am fine. My kung fu is very good,” Liu, a martial arts fiction fan and author of more than 10 martial arts novels, joked in response to reporters’ questions. (Taipei Times)

I just hope that Liu hires this guy as his legislative assistant.

DSL in Japan, update

I mentioned the other day how it takes an entire month of waiting to get DSL installed in Japan, due to control of the local loop remaining entirely with the former government monopoly telecom NTT, while service can be provided by a variety of competitors. One of the interesting side effects of this is that no matter who your provider is, the physical line installation at the home is still performed by NTT. And because installation will be performed not by my service provider KDDI, instead of having the installer bring along the modem and accessories, they mail it in advance. I am not sure if this is because NTT refuses to cooperate and deliver the modem for another company’s service, despite being legally obligated to perform the local loop installation required for service connection, or if KDDI (I think Softbank does the same thing, but I forget) has merely decided that it is logistically simpler to send modems through the package delivery infrastructure.

And speaking of the package delivery infrastructure, I was very impressed by Kuroneko Takkyubin’s service. When I got home last night at around 8:30 there was one of those failed delivery notification notices in my mailbox. Oddly, the time written on it was 10 o’clock, which makes not sense at all, since I was at home until around 11am, and it was still well before 10pm. Regardless, the notice had the standard information on how to contact either the automated phone system, the internet website, or a live switchboard operator to schedule redelivery- but also had a somewhat astonishing fourth option: the cell phone number of the delivery truck driver who had attempted delivery that day. Since it said he was reachable until 9pm, I called up, the call was answered instantly, and once I told him my name and address, he said to stay and wait for him. I assumed I would be waiting for several minute, but there was a knock on my door, literally, at most two minutes later!

And thus is customer service in Japan-a melange of impenetrable bureaucracy and inflexible, pointless rules for some things, but in other areas some of the most helpful and convenient services found anywhere.

George Takei’s comments on gay marriage ruling in California

This isn’t normally the sort of thing we discuss on this blog, but in announcing his upcoming marriage with his partner of 21 years, the sci-fi actor makes an interesting comparison between discrimination involving his sexual orientation and Japanese descent. Here is Takei’s entire letter, with italics added for emphasis.

Our California dream is reality. Brad Altman and I can now marry. We are overjoyed! At long last, the barrier to full marriage rights for same-sex couples has been torn down. We are equal with all citizens of our state!

The California Supreme Court has ruled that all Californians have a fundamental right to marry the person he or she loves. Brad and I have shared our lives together for over 21 years. We’ve worked in partnership; he manages the business side of my career and I do the performing. We’ve traveled the world together from Europe to Asia to Australia. We’ve shared the good times as well as struggled through the bad. He helped me care for my ailing mother who lived with us for the last years of her life. He is my love and I can’t imagine life without him. Now, we can have the dignity, as well as all the responsibilities, of marriage. We embrace it all heartily.

The California Supreme Court further ruled that our Constitution provides for equal protection for all and that it cannot have marriage for one group and another form – domestic partnership – for another group. No more “separate but equal.” No more second-class citizenship. Brad and I are going to be married as full citizens of our state.

As a Japanese American, I am keenly mindful of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that the law can impose. During World War II, I grew up imprisoned behind the barbed wire fences of U.S. internment camps. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Fear and war hysteria swept the nation. A Presidential Executive Order directed the internment of Japanese Americans as a matter of national security. Now, with the passage of time, we look back and see it as a shameful chapter of American history. President Gerald Ford rescinded the Executive Order that imprisoned us. President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the unjust imprisonment. President George H.W. Bush signed the redress payment checks to the survivors. It was a tragic and dark taint on American history.

With time, I know the opposition to same sex marriage, too, will be seen as an antique and discreditable part of our history. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked on same sex marriage, “Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper, in fact, serve only to oppress.”

For now, Brad and I are enjoying the delicious dilemma of deciding where, when, and how we will be married. Marriage equality took a long time, but, like fine wine, its bouquet is simply exquisite.

Much of the debate over the legitimacy of this court decision, and gay marriage in general, is based upon the question of whether sexual orientation as a basis for discrimination is on the same level as gender and race. Since the general scientific and societal consensus seems to be that sexuality is primarily an inherent characteristic (whether due to genetic or prenatal factors), rather than a matter of “choice” or “lifestyle” I personally cannot buy the argument that it is not a similarly invalid basis for discrimination. I imagine that the best route for success on the part of gay marriage equality advocates is to continue to press comparisons with the earlier generations’ fight for racial and gender equality, continue to conflate racial discrimination with homophobia, and remind people that “separate but equal” is a vicious lie. Most people will likely balk at highly technical debates of constitutionality and jurisprudence, but perhaps more of them will listen when an elderly Japanese-American homosexual tells them that being barred from marrying his fiance is equivalent to being locked in an internment camp in the 1940s.

Incidentally, my favorite potential remedy to the entire issue is the somewhat radical proposal to remove the term “marriage” from the law entirely, make the state responsible only for two-party “civil unions” to which gender is irrelevant, leaving marriage as a religious sacrament or label of self-identification.

DSL in Japan

To quote from Arstechnica’s article comparing various national broadband policies:

The government requires local loop unbundling so that new ISPs can emerge without having to rewire the last mile every time. The government also has a 34 percent stake in NTT, one of the major telecoms, and has ordered it to deploy fiber whether or not it shows a profit; broadband is considered a key piece of infrastructure that can’t simply be deployed only where it is profitable. The government also subsidizes a third of the cost of all fiber-to-the-home deployments in rural areas, where rolling out new lines can prove terribly expensive. The result is one of the fastest broadband networks in the world at one of the lowest price-per-megabit points anywhere.

I ordered DSL at a KDDI/AU retail shop just after I moved into my apartment, around the 2nd of the month. Last night I finally got the letter confirming my request, and notifying me of the installation date: May 29th. Why does it take so long? Well, as you may realize from the above paragraph, despite a plethora of service providers, the local loop is still owned by the quasi-government monopoly telecom company of NTT, and regardless of who you subscribe with, only NTT is allowed to actually hook up your line. While the freedom of provider choice-which has all but vanished in the US, except for competition between entirely different categories of service such as a having one cable and one dsl provider in the same city-is nice, I feel as if they could futher streamline the NTT-reliant installation procedure.

Visa experts?

A friend of mine emailed me the following question, and since I don’t actually have a clue I thought I would toss it out here, for people who actually know to take a stab at it.

A friend of mine in Tokyo (hes there until may, but may be going back later this year) may have the opportunity to work at a friends bar starting from next April but neither he nor his friend knows anything about getting a working visa, and to top it all off he’s always worked in insurance so there’s no way of demonstrating any bar experience, unless of course he can make it up.

So, what kind of visa might he apply for, and what sort of documentation/qualifications might he need? And what IS the deal with all those European guys working in bars? Are they all just married to Japanese ladies and residing on spouse visas?

Brief update.

So I haven’t posted anything here in well over a month, in fact since before I left home to come once again to Kyoto. In short, here is what has been going on:

Came to Kyoto University as an auditing “research student” on Japanese government scholarship in the History of Education division of the Faculty of Education, with Prof. Komagome Takeshi, who specializes in Japanese colonialism, as advisor. In theory, I should be going into a MA course next year. As an auditing student I participate in a couple of seminars (“zemi”) and am taking one language class for foreign students, on how to read Meiji era Japanese (“bungobun”) but so far nothing else, although I will probably start sitting in on a couple of undergraduate courses just to get better background.

I spent the entire month of April staying in a friend’s spare room at his apartment down in Fushimi, which is about a 20 minute train ride on the Keihan line to Demachiyanagi Station, and then a 10 minute walk to campus before I moved to a place about a 15 minute walk from school. I dislike living in the super-cramped Japanese style one room single person apartment so I am considering trying to share a house with a friend of mine from the Ritsumeikan study abroad days who should be coming back to Kyoto in 3-4 months to do some sort of program at Doshisha, but for the time being I’ve found a very good temporary place, which is somewhat small and decrepit, but very cheap and very close to campus, and has no reikin or anything else to prevent me from moving immediately should I find something better. More about the apartment another day, once I have a way to upload photos again.

Both my friend’s place I stayed at in April and the place I’m staying have no internet, and so I’ve been online very sparingly. I’m the sort who prefers his main computer to be a desktop, so my plan was to just take with me the hard drives and video card from my computer at home and build a new one when I have a place to live and a Net connection, but since a: I still only have the first of those and b: moved in so recently I don’t even have a fridge or desk yet, it’s going to have to wait. I did bring my venerable 7-year old slow, heavy and gigantic Dell laptop, which I bought before my very first stay in Japan, but unfortunately it has now completely died, and so I am reduced to using the public computers at school, which means I have no way whatsoever of doing things like uploading photos, and really can’t be motivated to do much more than the occassional email, much less blogging, until I get a better setup. I did order DSL, but (I think because of NTT’s monopoly over the physical circuits) in Japan it takes an entire month wait from time of order to installation, I won’t get a hookup until the end of May/beginning of June.

And basically, that’s it. Living in Fushimi for a brief period was not particularly interesting, as the region seems to have fairly little of interest aside from the famous Fushimi Inari Shrine and the very attractive Chushojima historical district, which includes some very nice Meiji era architecture, such as the Gekkeikan brewery (Fushimi actually has Nihonshu (sake) breweries everywhere, but most of them are merely ugly modern industrial structures). Now that I’ve moved from down there back into Kyoto proper I feel a little better, but lack of such things as furniture, a computer, a bicycle (which I maybe shouldn’t get until I have my increasingly painful right knee examined) still needs to be remedied before I can really say I’m settled.