Econ & Business – Page 21 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Shimamoto v. United and Japan’s legal attitudes toward alcohol

One of the odder legal stories of 2008 may have been a certain lawsuit against United Airlines by a certain Yoichi Shimamoto and his wife Ayisha. FlyerTalk had a big thread on it. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:

The Shimamotos were on a United flight from Japan to the US in business class, where alcohol is free and generally quite readily dispensed. Mr. Shimamoto became thoroughly trashed on the flight, and apparently a little belligerent. After deplaning at their first stop in San Francisco, while the couple was waiting in the immigration line, they got into an altercation of some sort and Mr. Shimamoto started beating his wife in public. He was arrested for assault, tried and convicted, and sentenced to probation in California followed by deportation to Japan.

Then it gets really weird. First, Mrs. Shimamoto successfully petitioned to have Mr. Shimamoto’s probation transferred to Florida, where Mrs. Shimamoto had a house. Then, with Mr. Shimamoto safely parked somewhere around Orlando, the couple sued United in Florida for Mrs. Shimamoto’s physical injuries and Mr. Shimamoto’s legal expenses, claiming that United should not have served more alcohol to Mr. Shimamoto while he was obviously wasted out of his mind. After a couple of weeks of spirited online discussion between armchair pundits, the Shimamotos withdrew their case. Perhaps United offered a settlement of some kind–the news reports do not say.

* * *

Although the gut reaction of most is to say “Ah-ha! Frivolous American litigiousness strikes again!” it’s actually quite easy for a booze server to incur tort liability because of their drunken patrons’ malfeasance. Every US state has some sort of “dram shop act” which imposes this sort of liability. Sales to minors are pretty much universally a basis for seller liability, and sales to the visibly intoxicated can lead to liability in many states.

Extending this general concept to an airline is not that illogical, although perhaps inconsistent with the fact that airplanes don’t really fall under a particular state’s jurisdiction while in flight (although the airlines themselves, which are tied firmly to the ground, might). Another hurdle is that most international flights fall under the Warsaw Convention, which caps the carrier’s liability for physical or property damage to passengers.

Of course, the real oddity in the Shimamotos’ case is that it wasn’t just the battered wife who sued–it was also her husband, who wasn’t really hurt except to the extent that he got himself in legal trouble. Still, the question of making airlines responsible for cutting off their patrons is an interesting one, and it may someday be solved in court by a more credible group of litigants.

* * *

A few posters at FlyerTalk have raised the question of whether Japanese law (and, by extension, society) condones or even encourages the practice of passing blame to the liquor or its server.

To some extent, this idea is actually getting traction in Japanese law, at least as far as The State is concerned. Anyone who eats out regularly in Japan has probably noticed the growing number of establishments that proudly state they will not serve alcohol to customers who come by car–this is largely because Japan’s revised Road Traffic Law of 2007 makes it a criminal offense for a restaurant or bar to provide alcohol to a person “at risk of” drunk driving. Another example is serving booze to minors, a crime under the “Fuzoku Eigyo” Act (which governs the nightlife industry generally) which can land the proprietor in jail.

Civil liability between private parties is a different story, though. It’s pretty well known that Japan is not a very litigious society–depending on which expert you ask, this is either because of cultural reasons (aversion to argument) or economic reasons (filing fees in Japanese courts are based on claim amount, so big lawsuits on a marginal basis are uneconomical to file, whereas the US system of charging flat filing fees encourages outlandish claims that can be whittled down through negotiation). So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that suing the bar for the drunkard’s acts has been less of a question in the Land of the Rising Nama.

It does come up, though. The scariest case for the bartender must be a 2001 case in Tokyo (noted in the Japanese Wikipedia article on drunk driving) where a group of friends drank for seven hours straight, got in a car and ran over a 19-year-old girl. The driver got seven years in prison, but his friends were found civilly liable to the tune of 58 million yen for having the guy drink while they knew he was getting behind the wheel. But in a more distant commercial context, there seems to be some reluctance to extend liability like this. Take one case in Saitama last year where families of victims of a drunk driving spree demanded that the barkeep’s criminal responsibility was as great as the driver’s. The judge handed down a suspended sentence for the alcohol providers, claiming that “there is no evidence that [they] expected the driver to act so recklessly (運転者の常軌を逸した暴走行為まで予見していた証拠はない).”

What’s the conclusion? Japan has a looser attitude toward alcohol in many ways (when’s the last time you’ve been carded here?) but its system can be pretty harsh on people who completely ignore its dangers. Thankfully, Mr. Shimamoto wouldn’t have much legal support under either system: the only tangible difference between the two countries in his case is that he can actually afford to waste the court’s time in the US.

Is the dual employment system an asset for Japan?

The Economist has its latest update on the economic situation in Japan. After outlining the dire situation of plunging exports and domestic consumer sentiment, the writer drops this bombshell:

There is cause to temper the pessimism. Households still have their savings. And bank lending to companies is on the rise, though a good chunk of this is taking over from credit once supplied by capital markets, which have dried up.

Crucially, adjustments are happening swiftly in areas that beleaguered companies tackled only slowly during the last slump, such as bloated workforces and excessive capacity. Bankruptcies of “zombie” companies long kept alive on cheap credit and an undervalued currency have soared now that credit is harder to get and the yen has risen to a fairer valuation on a trade-weighted basis. And at the end of a decade in which much more use was made of contract and temporary workers, companies are now laying these off fast. In order to reduce inventories, production is also being slashed. This marks a new flexibility in Japan’s economy.

Unemployment, now 3.9%, may head back towards the post-bubble high of 5.5%. At the same time, the structure of the labour force may lessen the pain. As the economy recovered, many companies asked workers from Japan’s huge generation of baby-boomers to stay on past retirement age. Plenty of these will now simply retire with their pensions. Swift adjustments to workforces and inventories mean that Japan may recover sooner than other rich economies.

Really? Is keeping a third of the population in employment limbo really that much of a boost? Surely, I don’t deny that unpleasant realities can prove positive for economic growth and stability, but I just have never senn anyone actually defend the dual employment system.

Among many including myself, it is almost taken for granted that Japan’s dual employment system is unfair and exploitative. And even among those who disagree, I have seen near universal dissatisfaction with the status quo.

In the postwar era, one of the defining aspects of Japan’s economy was lifetime employment, in which most employees at the core companies were given job security in exchange for loyalty and limited input into their career destinies. This system was instrumental in Japan’s development as it provided a highly motivated, highly skilled workforce and contributed to developing Japan’s broad middle class. While never the sole driver of Japanese development, it did form a core component of the “full mobilization” of Japanese society to achieve growth and development.

But the devastation of Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s meant that companies could no longer afford to fund generous seniority-based pay scales. In response, the Japanese government began instituting a series of reforms that expanded employers’ options to employ workers under different schemes, including fixed-term contracts (keiyaku shain) and temporary employment (haken shain). Today, today non-regular employees make up around a third of Japan’s workforce. For example, a employé de ménage intérimaire roumain may work under a fixed-term contract, allowing her to fill labor shortages in the hospitality sector.

With 2/3 of workers given vastly better treatment for often the same work and experience, many have long called for reforms that would equalize the situation. The dual system persists, however, due to resistance from the big labor unions who instead claim that the temp and contract workers should be brought into the regular employee system.

As I mentioned, many such as the OECD and writer Masafumi Tsujihiro see this system as highly problematic in terms of basic fairness. But unlike the labor unions, they call for the elimination of the excessive protection of regular employees, which is backed up by court decisions that make the hurdles for firing employees quite high.

Just off the top of my head, I would think that the US, with its reputation for having an enormous capacity to make “swift adjustments to workforces and inventories,” would beat Japan out of recession, all things equal. So readers, help me out here — are haken really a blessing in disguise?

Making a future for corporate aircraft in Japan – maybe using airports you didn’t know existed

Japan has long had an aviation policy which favors airplanes as a mode of mass transit, and favors big carriers like ANA and JAL. You can view this as populist or pro-corporate, or perhaps both. But one thing is for certain: private aviation has never been able to take off here, despite all the wealth and business available to support it.

As late as the mid-90s, long-haul private jet flights had their pick of five daily slots at Narita which were shared with charter flights, making it impossible to fly in and out of Tokyo without a couple months’ notice — enough to make US biz-jet industry representatives complain to Congress. Even for domestic flights today, the flight plan must be filed with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport a week or so before the flight, making it impossible to just jet around the country at short notice.

Another key problem is the lack of available facilities. Most huge cities around the world have airports with little or no scheduled service which can serve private planes almost exclusively: New York (Teterboro and Westchester), London (Luton and Farnborough), Paris (Le Bourget), Los Angeles (Van Nuys), Miami (Kendall) and Atlanta (DeKalb) have all gotten it right. The closest thing in Tokyo is the tiny airport in Chofu, which isn’t big enough to handle business jets and can’t be expanded due to the surrounding city area. (The situation is easier in Japan’s secondary cities, though–Osaka has the giant Yao Airport and the new Kobe Airport, and Nagoya’s old Komaki Airport offers many slots for private flights now.)

It isn’t even practical to keep a business aircraft on the ground in most parts of Japan because of high landing and parking costs. The Japanese business jet charter industry, inasmuch as it exists, largely relies on planes and crews based in Guam or other cheaper locales which are close enough to be halfway practical.

Still, Japan has an active Business Aviation Association which has been lobbying to make the government’s policies more friendly to small planes. Just last month, JBAA sent MLIT’s aviation bureau a request to upgrade Tokyo’s airports for easier use by private aircraft–mainly focusing on better facilities at Haneda and more slots at Narita.

The most interesting component of JBAA’s efforts is their proposal to upgrade of a third Tokyo airport for use by business aircraft. There has been much-publicized talk over setting up a big third airport to serve commercial traffic as well, but if the third airport’s role is downscaled a bit, more options become available. One thing you might not know about Tokyo is that it already has a ton of airports–at least ten within a couple hours’ drive of the city center. A good handful are enormous and can theoretically accommodate planes of all sizes. The only problem is that most of them are used for military/defense purposes. Here’s a Google Maps mashup I threw together to illustrate the options available.

View Larger Map

The JBAA has centered its lobbying efforts around the four largest military bases: Yokota, Kisarazu, Shimousa and Atsugi. Each is about as far from Tokyo as Narita (in the 50-90 minute range) and fairly well-situated for access by road (assuming someone who can afford a jet will at least spring for a limo to the airport).

Of course, there are problems inherent to any such proposal. These fields would have to be vacated or at least significantly ceded by defense units which seem to like their digs, and which might do more for the neighborhood economy than a collection of Learjets and Cessnas would. There’s also the ongoing presence of community protesters to consider–the same folks who forced Itami Airport to stop accepting 747s could easily derail plans to keep a vacated defense facility alive. And, of course, we live in a time when private jets often seem like an unacceptable luxury for many of the businesses which used them with reckless abandon just a couple of years ago.

Chinese economy now #3

China has edged above Germany to become the world’s third largest economy, based on newly revised GDP data:

China’s economy leapfrogs Germany

The Chinese government has increased its estimate of how much the economy grew during 2007.

The revision means China’s economy overtook Germany’s to become the world’s third largest in 2007.

Gross domestic product expanded 13%, up from an earlier estimate of 11.9%, to 25.7 trillion yuan ($3.5 trillion).

The BBC tries to play this down (“Many Chinese people have not benefited from the boom”), but let’s use some simple algebra with vaguely realistic numbers pulled out of thin air to take a look at some rough growth scenarios:

China vs. Japan

Scenario 1: Given zero growth in Japan’s economy vs. 8% annually for China, China will overtake Japan in 2011.
Scenario 2: 2% growth in Japan vs. 6% for China = China overtakes Japan in 2014.
Scenario 3: 2% growth in Japan vs. 4% for China = China overtakes Japan in 2021.

China vs. US

Scenario 1: Given 2% growth in the US economy vs. 8% annually for China, China will overtake the US in 2034.
Scenario 2: 3% growth in the US vs. 6% for China = China is top economy in 2057
Scenario 3: 2% growth in the US vs. 4% for China = China rules us all in 2080.

So barring some major calamity or re-Maoization, China will overtake Japan as the #2 economy in a few years. The US seems a little safer but numbers like this make you sit up and pay attention to the Business section!

My illegal post about the image rights campaign

Here is the copy of an ad promoting the “STOP! Image Rights Violations” campaign that currently stares at me during my morning commute (emphasis added):

The names and likenesses of entertainment talent and athletes are important business property. They are shared property created through the tireless efforts of the talent and athletes and the business efforts of the production companies. The rights protecting this property against unauthorized use by others are called “publicity rights.” In Japan, there have been many court cases acknowledging the importance of these rights, but since there is no clear stipulation of these rights in the law, in reality there is no end to cases of infringement.

I don’t have a ton to say about this now, except (a) you could make the case that the absence of laws explicitly protecting consumers’ rights to reuse commercial material to express themselves leads to patently pathetic violations as I have noted before (here’s hoping the Fair Use initiative passes this year); and (b) interestingly, Johnny’s Entertainment does not appear to be a member of this industry association.

As usual, Wikipedia provides concise and interesting background reading on the topic!

Chocolate low-malt beer makes me sad

As a beer drinker (though I am really liking wine these days), this announcement was truly shocking:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — what a sad state of affairs! If I saw this at the store I might be forced to buy it for the novelty value, but apparently it’s only being offered online. Oh well.

This new chocolate low-malt beer (happoshu in Japanese) makes me sad, mostly because of the implications of the company’s decision to make chocolate happoshu instead of chocolate real beer.

What started as a clever way to get around a tax hike in 1994 has today resulted in low-malt happoshu and no-malt “third beer” gaining recognition among the Japanese public as cheaper, viable alternatives to the real thing. In my own life, it is typical to see housewives at the local Ito Yokado buying dinner with a cheaper beer alternative, either for the husband or to drink together (I do a lot of the grocery shopping). How did things come to this?

According to the National Tax Agency, beer has long been Japan’s drink of choice. As far back as 1970, twice as much beer was consumed as Japanese sake. But for a long time, Japan has had a 40% tax on beer sales, higher than other advanced nations (UPDATE: in 2006 it was lowered slightly but remains high). This was never a problem when Japan’s economy was growing, but a tax change in the post-bubble year 1994 triggered events that would transform the local convenience store beer cooler:

Japan’s alcohol tax system divides beer-like malt beverages into four categories based on malt content: 67% or higher, 50 to 67%, 25 to 50%, and less than 25%. An alcoholic beverage based on malt is classified as beer if the weight of malt extract exceeds 67% of the fermentable ingredients. Since Suntory‘s introduction in 1994 of Hop’s Draft, containing 65% malt, a market has emerged for low-malt, and recently, non-malt beer substitutes.

With alcohol tax revenues decreasing as a result of happoshu’s popularity, the Japanese government eventually raised the nation’s tax on low malt beers. In 1996, the tax for products containing 50 to 67% malt was raised to that of beer. Brewers followed suit by lowering the malt content of their products. Today, most happoshu contains less than 25% malt, putting it in the lowest tax category of low-malt beer. In recent years, Japanese brewers have released dozens of brands in attempt to increase their market share. Many of these are marketed as more healthy products, with reduced carbohydrates and purines. Another trend is to use unmalted barley, such as in Sapporo’s Mugi 100% Nama-shibori.

Beer-flavored beverages collectively dubbed “the third beer“(第三のビール, dai-san no bīru) by the mass media have been developed to compete with happoshu. These alcoholic products fall under categories not yet as highly taxed. The third beer beverages either use malt alternatives, or they are a mix of happoshu and another type of alcohol. When comparing 350 ml cans, the third beer brands can be 10 to 25 yen cheaper than happoshu.

Effect on total consumption

These new, less tasty types of beer have grown in importance over the years. Third beer sales overtook happoshu for the first time in 2008, amid a record bad sales year for the beer and beer equivalent industry as a whole. Together, happoshu and third beer sold almost 90% as many cases as real beer (226 million vs. 256 million). In a matter of years, Japan may be drinking more loophole beer than the real thing. The bad sales were attributed to to price hikes (due to high commodity prices in the first half of 2008) and a general shift among consumers away from beer to other options or no drinking at all (due to being too old or a part of the supposedly vice-free younger generation).

Over a longer term, consumption of beer peaked in 1994 at 7 million kiloliters and fell 53% by 2006. The combined beer + happoshu + “other alcohol” numbers went from 7.09 million kL in 1994 to 5.9 million in 2006, a dip of around 18%. from the peak.

However, according to the tax authorities, overall alcohol consumption peaked in 1996 and fell 9.2% by 2006. It is clear that the decline of beer etc. was the biggest drag on the total, as no segment of the industry stepped up to take beer’s place. Beer’s share of total alcohol consumption declined from 73% in 1994 to just 66% in 2006. While shochu and liqueur (mostly chuhai aka shochu “alcopop”) and wine grew over that period (and sake, whisky, and brandy actually declined significantly), there is still nothing approaching beer.

Effects on drinking behavior, conclusion

The rise of happoshu came amid a major recession for the Japanese economy and the first instance of deflation for a developed economy in the postwar era. Just as the 1990s saw the rise of 100 yen stores and Uniqlo discount apparel, these near-beers are the product of downward price pressure and a relative impoverization of a wide swath of Japanese consumers.

This dual taxation appears to have created a similar dual structure in how people drink their beer. According to What Japan Thinks, while around three quarters of those surveyed drink at home, the overwhelming drink of choice was Happoshu: “over one in six of the total population drink happoshu almost every day!” So while a minority will drink beer or other alcohol, it’s clear that my observations of housewives at Ito Yokado aren’t just coincidence — as far as I can tell, the justification for drinking happoshu is that it’s cheap and tastes just good enough to be had with dinner.

The existence of these choices isn’t by itself a bad thing. I am not aware of the tax scheme in the US, but liquor stores are filled with nasty alternatives to good beer (some happoshu brands are much better than Schlitz, just to name one example). The only thing that angers me is that the tax policy has pushed the beer companies to pursue a decidedly low-quality product line in order to avoid their tax bills, to the point that it dominates their marketing such that even their novelty products are happoshu. Could it have been possible to negotiate an overall lower tax on beer that would maximize both quality and tax revenue?

Ultimately, the tax wars over beer ended up hurting everyone involved, concludes a helpful summer 2008 report by Shigeki Morinobu, a former tax regulator who was personally involved in the process between 1993-97. Annual tax revenues from beer and derivatives fell from more than 1.6 trillion yen in 1994 to 1.1 trillion yen in 2007, an enormous drop of 32%. The beer market has shrunk significantly, as detailed above.

Morinobu, in translation and with my full-throttled agreement:

And what about the consumers? The tax debate resulted in low-malt beers overflowing the store shelves. The flavor of beer-type drinks grew worse and worse, which constitutes perhaps the biggest factor behind the trend away from beer drinking, especially prominent among young people. Seen this way, it is clear there are no winners in this war over beer taxation.

In Germany, anything with less than 100% malt cannot be considered beer. Japan, too, should return to the root of the problem and recognize that creating good beer will increase beer’s overall consumption volume and in the end boost national tax revenues. This summer, I prefer to drink 100% malt, real beer.

Going out in style

This guy might be a despicable investment fraud, but you can’t deny the guts it takes to try the “fake your own death” way out in this day and age:

Pilot Is Missing, and So Is His Motorcycle

Published: January 13, 2009

The authorities on Tuesday said that a missing financial adviser whose private plane crashed in Florida on Sunday had stored a motorcycle on the ground to aid his getaway.

The investigators say that Marcus Schrenker, 38, a financial adviser and experienced pilot from Indiana, parachuted from the small plane after faking a distress call as he flew over Alabama. The plane eventually went down in Florida, about 200 miles away, but Mr. Schrenker turned up in Childersburg, Ala., telling local officers he had been in a boating accident. He then disappeared again.

…

Court records show that Mr. Schrenker’s wife filed for divorce on Dec. 30. A Maryland court recently issued a judgment of more than $500,000 against one of three Indiana companies registered in his name — and all three are being investigated for securities fraud by the Indiana Secretary of State’s Office, a spokesman, Jim Gavin, said.

UPDATE: They got him.

Cause and effect in the Japanese office

Nice argument from Noah Smith, guest contributor at Observing Japan, which I would like to forward for our esteemed readers’ comment.

I am in a position to know that Japanese white-collar labor productivity is substantially lower than most other rich nations (including Asian nations such as Taiwan and Singapore). That means that whatever is getting done in all those long hours Japanese people spend in the office, it’s not as much as it could be. Any physics student will tell you that work equals force times distance*; Japanese workers put in a lot of force without getting enough distance.

Japan’s leaders should recognize this distinction. We all know the story of how government protection of Japan’s domestic service sector has left it inefficient, but it’s important to realize the real impact this has on the lives of Japanese people – parents who can’t go home to be with their children, salaries that are lower than they could be, exhausting hours of work put in with not enough to show for it at the end of the day. Maybe Aso should take a clue from King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 4:14, and help the Japanese people to work smarter, not harder.

MY COUNTERARGUMENT: Much to the contrary, the “inefficient” 18-hour day is probably based more on being the easiest way for husband and wife to survive many of the bizarrely fractured marriages that prevail in Japanese society. If husbands had to come home earlier in the evening, for whatever reason, there would be a lot more chopstick-throwing and perhaps some instances of “hot ochazuke”. (Note that I’m generalizing here — there are many women in the workforce these days and more than a few “stay at home dads” — but the traditional structure still prevails.)

THE QUESTION: Even though I think the insane Japanese workday is self-imposed for the sake of the mismatched couple’s sanity, there’s almost certainly a long-term benefit in giving more Japanese boys a regularly-present and halfway-conscious father. What’s the appropriate policy response to move Japan closer to this outcome?

Hiroshima’s airport syndrome

E-mail from a friend:

I look at the map and there’s a great airport right by the bay of Hiroshima. Great I think. Just like Fukuoka, an airport right in city center, nice and convenient.

But no, that’s the “Hiroshima West Flying strip.” The actual airport is, of course, up in the f***ing mountains, 50km and an hour bus ride away from Hiroshima.

How the f*** did this country get trains so right, and yet planes so wrong?

Check it out on Google Maps. You have to zoom into Hiroshima City to see the smaller airport.

View Larger Map

Hiroshima West was Hiroshima’s only airport from 1961 until 1992, when the new Hiroshima Airport opened outside the city. For a while Hiroshima West stayed alive as a hub for small regional prop plane flights, sort of like Sapporo’s Okadama Airport, but nowadays its operations are limited to a couple of podunk destinations, and everyone else has to either take the Shinkansen or subject themselves to the hour-long bus ride from the new airport.

Japan’s trains lucked out — they were set up (for the most part) before 1920, back when it was easy to find and expropriate land for lines and stations. Japan’s airports are much more recent creations. There are only two significant Japanese airports which predate World War II: Tokyo Haneda and Sapporo Chitose. Most of the major airports of the early postwar era were built as military bases during the war (Itami, Komaki, Fukuoka, Okinawa) and didn’t get civilian operations until the 1950s, by which point they were starting to be strangled by their neighboring cities, right when runway and terminal extensions were needed to handle the new generation of jets. This is how we ended up with inconvenient monstrosities like Narita and the new Hiroshima airport.

(The biggest postwar rail development, the Shinkansen network, is not coincidentally also an inconvenient one in places like Yokohama and Osaka, where they had to stick the terminal in the middle of nowhere for lack of better options.)

To Japan’s credit, most of the big-city airports here are now multimodal, with direct rail connections into the city. There are two rail lines that pass right by Hiroshima Airport — the Sanyo Shinkansen and Sanyo Main Line — and there have been a multitude of plans to connect one or both of these lines to the airport by a spur line, monorail, maglev, ropeway or any number of other mass-transit means. So why hasn’t this happened?

Both of those lines are JR lines, and Hiroshima is one city where JR has an ironclad grip on domestic travel. Tokyo-Hiroshima is 4 hours by Shinkansen: by plane it’s 90 minutes, but the transfer from Hiroshima Airport to the city takes 60-90 minutes depending on how long it takes for the bus to show up, and another 45-60 minutes to get to Haneda and check in makes flying a bigger hassle than it’s worth on this heavily-traveled route. The airlines can stay competitive in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka thanks to relatively convenient airports, but the inconvenience of Hiroshima Airport works in favor of the one company that has the power to make it more convenient.

Some more thoughts on eikaiwa, this time less bile-fueled

I am looking back at some of my writing on eikaiwa and it is pretty cold-hearted, Internet Toughguy stuff (calling them pathetic and useless only to halfheartedly apologize later). I guess as someone the same age as many of these eikaiwa teachers I had trouble seeing the forest for the trees, but forgive me for only just appreciating that:

(a) for a lot of these eikaiwa teachers it is their first time in the work force, so it isnt really fair to lay their industry’s shortcomings at their feet; and

(b) the service offered by eikaiwa schools isnt that much different from the borderline-deceptive practices of a lot of businesses, but you don’t see me calling moisturizer salesladies a bunch of charlatans for peddling dubious claims, or insurance salespeople scheisters for convincing salarymen to gamble their life savings on risky annuities.

Part of the reason eikaiwa can come off so ugly from the Westerner perspective is because, often for the first time, we are only looking at the dark underbelly of the business instead of the neat and polished exterior. Usually we are happy to be fooled into thinking we need cold soda and DVD recorders, but when Westernness and dreams of a better life are being so clearly deceptively sold, it turns our stomachs.

Imagine if our first experience with the circus was to see a clown with his wig off, makeup smeared, and sipping from a flask? I think we might have a hard time enjoying the show after that.

Even without deception, the fundamental principle of selling something is to create demand where it might not otherwise be. That may be hard for me to appreciate as someone who sits at a desk and translates all day. My job seems to have limitless demand that almost literally falls in my lap, and more importantly I have never had to convince someone to have something translated. But were I to lose my job I’d be back in the business of marketing myself as the right person to turn your Japanese documents into proper English.