When at a Japanese place of work it is important that you appear busy at all times. If you find yourself with nothing to do, you must not let this be discovered! Unacceptable!
If your superior finds you idle, he will ask you something like "oh, are you not doing anything?" in a rather polite tone. Do not be fooled! This is unacceptable! He has said this to convey surprise and disappointment.
At this point you are likely confused. You are trying to determine if you're in trouble and how to respond. You are probably tensing your forehead and staring into the blank, unreadable face of your superior and then saying something dumb like "uhhh, should I be?" Unacceptable! this was your second mistake! Your uninspired attempt at stalling your Japanese superior has left you vulnerable and rightfully humiliated. You have handed away your move.
Your superior will use this opportunity to passively punish you. This punishment will come, without fail, in the form of an unenviable task. This task will be unbearably menial. It will be completely and utterly pointless. It will most certainly be stuffing tissues...
I too used to be unacceptable in avoiding tissue stuffing. Then I was taught by a wise man. This is the story of how I came to know his teachings.
- - -
Since I have started working, I have almost always been given "open-ended substitute work". This means that instead of going to a school to cover for a specific teacher, I go to a school and wait for the off-chance that one of the other teachers must leave due to sudden illness. This is exceedingly rare. I have never seen a teacher leave mid-shift nor has any other teacher I've met. Japan feels the way about sickness that every Christmas movie villain feels about Santa Claus - if it can't be seen, felt, and heard, it ain't real. No one gets a day off because they have a headache or they're "feeling under the weather and had a runny nose for a week and just need a day to sleep it off".
"Sorry little buddy, but if your 'fibromyalgia' is real enough that you need to stay home today, then it's going to be imaginary birthday presents again." -Every Father in Japan
The only way a teacher could go home mid-shift would be if he were caught in a perpetual torrent of vomiting from which neither he, nor his unfortunate students, could escape. Otherwise, soldier on.
If no teachers go home sick within the first couple of hours then the rule is you can't be reassigned and you stay at your current school all day with no official classes. When this inevitably happens, you have a six-hour shift of unstructured time. It is at these moments I can see with the clarity of crystal ball - there is tissue stuffing in my future.
Tissue Stuffing 101: Remove tissue packet from box. Remove school's promotional pamphlet from stack. Insert school's promotional pamphlet into tissue packet. Place tissue packet in another box. Repeat.
Teachers stuff these promotional tissue packets under the guise that they will be handed out in public as part of an aggressive advertisement campaign. I even believed this for a time being:
One day, after stuffing tissues for several hours I had filled a large, refrigerator-sized cardboard box with stuffed tissues and unable to find an available staff member, I took the initiative to wander into the backroom where before I had seen a staff lady retrieve one of these uber-boxes of tissues. I opened the door into a dark room. I felt along the wall for the light switch. I found it and I turned it on. As light fluttered into the room I was shocked to see over a dozen boxes and bags, each filled to the brim with stuffed tissue packets, all stacked upon each other nearly reaching the ceiling. I took a step back, swiveling my head around the room only to find the same scene along every corner and wall. In total there were far more tissue boxes and bags than could be handed out in the next six months. In some areas the boxes holding these tissue packets had been deformed from the weight of the other boxes and bags. I shut the door and walked away as quickly and quietly as I could.
I had peeked behind the curtain and had seen what I was not to see, I knew what I was not to know - the promotional tissue packages aren't for potential customers with runny noses, their real function was to keep teachers from ever being idle.
I was reminded of living at home with my father and his insistence on keeping me busy every weekend by filling up our compost bin, or as it became infamously known: "the green bucket". Many hours were spent in our backyard chopping down branches and trees that seemed to me to be in acceptable health. Then I would chop the larger branches and trunks into firewood while simply scrapping the smaller branches into the green bucket. It hardly seemed to matter whether a branch needed to come down or not. Instead my father would ask: "Is the green bucket filled?" and if I answered no, then it was back to strolling through the backyard until he'd say "Ah, that branch looks like it needs to come down." At some point my mother complained that our once forested, concealing backyard had transformed into a collection of stumps and twigs which resembled the final pages of The Lorax and gave free access to our neighbors to watch her change. My father's response was to switch my chores to gardening - planting flowers and trimming the lawn and so on. While I preferred this type of work I found it somehow hard to enjoy knowing that my father paid a gardener to come every Tuesday and do the same job I was doing for free. As I mowed the lawn I imagined the gardener sipping lemonade on Tuesday afternoons in my backyard and occasionally looking up from his newspaper to chuckle at the lawn I had mowed two days before.
My father told me it was important that I be contributing. I suppose he figured that even when my chores had no real benefits for anyone else that the act of doing them helped to build and maintain work ethic and served as a reminder that there are no free rides and so on.
I had serious doubts that my company's intentions were so paternal, especially after my discovery in the backroom. The illusion was fully broken several days later when I was finally able to corner another teacher at the coat closet in the back corner of the school, just beyond ear shot of the staff. I told her all that I had seen - the fruits of our tissue-stuffing labor simply discarded into careless burial mounds so large that an entire room was devoted to their shelter. She nodded because she already knew and took a deep breath before bring me up to speed. As it was revealed to me, the promotional pamphlets we stuff into the tissue packets are time specific. I had no way of knowing as they are in Japanese, but they are only relevant for a month or two and then new pamphlets are made. When this happens, teachers are given the task of going through the hoards of tissues from the backroom and taking out each and every pamphlet, which they themselves put in there, and replacing it with a new pamphlet.
Suddenly tissue stuffing seemed to me to be a factory with an assembly line shaped as a circle that brings back the same product again and again to the factory worker for the same adjustment, never seeing finalization or production. Also, the factory worker wears a suit to work and gets paid $20.00 an hour.
I became determined to beat the tissue stuffing assembly line altogether. I continued to stuff tissues for the time being, of course, but I began to observe my environment with a critical eye while I bided my time.
What I observed was in accordance with the laws of nature: environments dictate adaptation and so it is that the veteran teachers have evolved superior tissue evasion skills.
Many of them have developed techniques to make sure they appear productive even when they are not. Some of these preventative strategies include doodling in notebooks held close to the chest and standing in groups to chit-chat while holding random teaching plans in front of the face like spies whispering through their newspapers while sitting on opposite sides of a public bench.
Other teachers exhibit finely honed escape behaviors when the tissue boxes start getting lugged out. These include, but are not limited to, suddenly remembering an urgent reason to call the Personnel Department at headquarters or running to the bathroom while holding the belly with a look that says 'This could be a while'.
For some time it seemed that I, the dodo bird of Japan, was destined to stuff tissues all alone. And then I met Jason.
At the time I was two hours deep into an afternoon of tissue stuffing when a teacher who I'd never seen before sat himself beside me. He sat there for a minute with his head back and his shoulders relaxed and smiling to himself. With no introductions he asked me how long I'd been in Japan.
"Only about three weeks," I answered. He chuckled at the confirmation of his suspicion.
"Do you know", he began to tell me, "that the Japanese won't ever give a command to their subordinates."
"Oh, ya?" I said, very unsure of what I was supposed to take away from his statement. He smiled and nodded. He waited for me to respond.
"Why is that?"
"Oh they'll make suggestions all day long," he continued, ignoring my question, "but they won't tell you to do something. And their suggestions are always very polite. Too polite really. There's no need for commands I guess, and they introduce tension into the workplace, which the Japanese really can't stand. Social harmony, you know. It's just expected that every Japanese worker acts on these suggestions."
I looked up from my tissue stuffing to indicate that he had my full attention. He launched right back into his lecture.
"Sometimes its frustrating, really. Like if you want to work some overtime and you ask the boss if there is anything that really needs to be done. Then he'll say something like 'last month's tests should be graded soon, but do not feel you need to do that now' and you'll be totally confused about whether he wants you to work overtime or not and you just wanna scream 'tell me what to do!'".
I was looking around this whole time to see if the Japanese staff, sitting no farther than fifteen feet away, were aware of the conversation which I was being dragged into. "Ya, I bet that's frustrating," I said.
"But their indirectness has it's advantages, too. My names Jason by the way."
I introduced myself and then Jason began the story of his life. I continued stuffing tissues and Jason did not. At one point he ate a peanut butter sandwich. After twenty minutes I knew that Jason had been working for our company's schools for over twelve years, that he was Canadian, that he came to Japan after college because he didn't know what he wanted to do with himself, I knew that this was apparently why most teachers came to work for the company, I knew he had a wife and two sons, that he's trying to get a Master's Degree in some form of linguistics from some correspondence course so he can teach at some university, and that he really likes peanut butter sandwiches.
Occasionally I looked up from my tissue stuffing to say "oh really" and then he would continue. I wondered how long he would go on for and if, maybe, he was a practiced Tuvan throat singer whose circular breathing allowed him to sustain a continuous air flow. My speculation was cut short when, after twenty minutes one of the staff members approached us. Her name was Sally, (not really, but all Japanese staff use stereotypical Western nicknames like Nikki, Ricky, and Ted while interacting with the Western English teachers. Except for Lucius).
Sally meekly approached Jason. "Etto... are you doing anything right now?" asked Sally. 'Etto' is what Japanese people say to fill time during a conversation while they think of what to say or how to say it. It's the Japanese version of "uhhhhhh". It meant Sally was uncomfortable.
Jason replied that he's "just having a seat".
Sally pursed her lips and calculated in her head for a moment. "Perhaps .... etto, you might like to stuff these tissues with Daniel.
Now Jason pursed his lips. Then he raised his eyebrow and gazed up at the cieling while making a 'tic tic tic' with his tongue. "Well thanks Sally, but I'm okay. I think I'll sit here so I can mentor Daniel through his tissue stuffing." He said this with such amazing fake-sincerity that he really sounded as though he believed Sally had made an offer that was simply too generous for him to accept.
Sally tried again. "Etto ... I think you should try to stuff some tissues now," with just a hint of assertiveness on the 'now'.
Jason played dumb. "Yea ... no, I've tried that before. I think it'd be best if I coached Daniel through this. He needs my help."
Sally and Jason both watched for my reaction. I was now uncomfortably stuck in the middle of the world's most indirect argument. I kept my eyes on the tissue stuffing that had suddenly engrossed me, but silently nodded in affirmation of Jason. Western solidarity has a strange, but powerful draw.
"Jason, please help." Sally used the Japanese 'four-finger point' and, surprisingly, no 'etto' to indicate her authority. It felt strained though, like an untrained muscle.
Pictured (left): An aggressive Japanese point
"I'm just gonna coach him, Sally." Jason did not even try to hide his self-amused smile. "Honestly, its the best way for me to contribute to the company."
Sally looked perplexed. She had no idea how to interpret Jason's defiance as it was, masked in tongue-in-cheek humor and playful ignorance. Sally said something to Jason about remembering his next class, but it was only to save face. Then she walked back to her desk and picked up a phone.
Jason, on the other hand, just looked smug. He had beaten Sally in a battle of wills to see who could endure the escalating tension the longest. It was never a fair fight. If Jason had been affected by the tension then he hid it well.
"Definitely certain advantages," Jason remarked to me a while after Sally had left.
That Jason sure has a lot of gall. Certainly more than me. But that's okay. I've only been In Japan for six weeks. I've still got a lot of adapting to do.
