Nothing But Words

Here’s another guest post from Maria, describing her work.

Michael asked me to post something about what I’m doing at JBIC (the Japan Bank for International Cooperation). Probably the best way is for me to do this is to let you know what my typical day is like. I chose to come to JBIC because I’m interested in looking at the ways in which financial globalization is affecting foreign aid. Since JBIC focuses on soft or concessional loans ( i.e., with heavily discounted interest rates for the poorest countries), and because it is about to undergo a major reorganization next year, I thought it would be a great vantage point to look at both the politics and economics of foreign aid in Japan.

My day at the office begins as I step through the sliding glass doors of the JBIC building in Takebashi (part of the Otemachi financial district). Everyone gets a snappy salute and ‘good morning’ by the security guards and receptionists in the lobby. Then up to the 8th floor where the project development section is located. I sit in the project evaluation department (hyoukasitsu) right across from the director. It’s a typical Japanese office, where everyone sits together in rows. There are short dividers between our desks. Ordinarily, my spot wouldn’t be considered that desirable. Too close to the director, and right next to the window, which signifies that you are being frozen out in the hopes that you might quit. But I really like my spot (and the director is great: from time to time he’ll hand me some interesting stuff to look at).

I’m furnished with a computer and the office has provided me a pile of materials to go through to familiarize me with the ongoing projects and the methodologies for evaluation. Most of the materials are in Japanese, aside from some contractual forms in English. I just got a new Canon wordtank (G55) so my reading of the Japanese materials is going a bit faster. The conversation here is mainly Japanese, though almost everyone here speaks excellent English: kind of a prerequisite for doing international development work, and nearly everyone here has spent substantial time abroad. I don’t mind since it really helps with my language skills. There are also a couple of JBIC libraries where I also get materials. So, I’m happily going through this stuff.

The really interesting tasks are just emerging. Aside from my own research, there is a chance for me to get an up-close experience with a JBIC ODA (official direct assistance) project. The director and deputy director met with me and suggested I visit power generation projects in Vietnam and financial projects in the Philippines. Very exciting stuff, and this might happen sometime in March. I’ve been given more materials to go through to familiarize myself with these areas, plus I collected some other papers to get some foundation on the main themes.

My office-mates are extremely collegial and inclusive. Many foreigners complain that it takes them forever to become integrated in the work environment and even then, they never feel included completely. I have lunch with a few coworkers everyday, unless I’m meeting someone else. I’m automatically included in all office communication and I can attend all the group meetings.

I’m usually among the first out the door around 5:30 pm. Most of the staffers here stay late despite the bells at 5:15 that tell you the day is done (don’t really know how late, since the latest I ever stayed was till 7:00pm). More than half are women, and yes, they are professional-track. (It’s not surprising that Japan has a demographic problem: who has any time for kids?) Almost every day there is some seminar or talk to attend either here or hosted at a university or think tank nearby. There’s just no way to attend all the ones I’d want to hear. But I try to go to one a week, or perhaps 2 if they are located here and the hour isn’t too late, and Michael isn’t feeling too crushed with kid-minding duties.

I’m having a great, stimulating time which I appreciate even more after a somewhat mind-numbing past year. Suburbia is definitely an easier place to raise kids, but spending 2 hours+ a day in the car and chasing Baby Godzilla (aka Eidan) around for most of the day (it’s a good thing for him he’s cute and lovable) didn’t do wonders for my research. Thanks to Michael, who is taking over these responsibilities for the next half year, I’m getting a chance to jumpstart my work.

View at Picasa Maria in Mike in front of Rodin’s Gates of Hell in Ueno Park, Tokyo02-Jan-2007 23:47, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.006 sec

Sharing a similar sense of humor, Maria and I decided to have our formal wedding photos taken in front of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, near the Stanford Memorial Church, where we were married in 1999.

We stumbled across another copy of the Gates in Ueno Park, a few days after we got here. Kai was kind enough to take the picture for us. This prompted me to look up the Gates online, and it turns out the one in Ueno Park is one of the three original bronze casts, made in 1917 (the Stanford one is a later copy). The other two originals are in Philadelphia and Paris. So, we plan to visit the Philly one for a photo when we get back home, and Maria has a conference in Paris in 2009. Assuming the boys and I can arrange our schedules to go with her, we can get our picture taken with that one too .

We only made a brief stop at Ueno Park that day, we plan to return to check out its zoo and many museums.

Conversations I’ve been having with friends, family, and coworkers trying to explain the time difference between the US and Tokyo – especially when it comes to arranging travel – have reminded me of a very funny exchange in an episode of the West Wing from several years ago. With help from “The Google,” I found the transcript. This is the President’s staff in Washington trying to figure out what time the President will leave Tokyo, and what time he will arrive in Washington:

JOSH
I’m sorry… 11 in the morning, 11 in the afternoon?

C.J.
It’s 11 A.M.

….

JOSH
So if it’s not a story until tomorrow morning then they’re not gonna have it until tomorrow night. We bought it!

C.J.
We bought two days.

TOBY
How?

SAM
Plane ride.

JOSH
When does he leave?

C.J.
Seven P.M. Thursday.

JOSH
Tomorrow?

C.J.
Yes.

JOSH
Local time?

C.J.
Which local – theirs or ours?

TOBY
It will be 7 P.M. Thursday in Japan when he leaves.

JOSH
And he lands here when?

Everyone gives each other an annoyed look.

SAM
Okay, the flight is 13 hours long.

C.J.
[covers her face] This isn’t happening.

SAM
He’s going to travel Eastward from Tokyo, leaving at seven pm, so when he crosses the international dateline

TOBY
He will have traveled back in time to what?

SAM
Three A.M.

C.J.
Which puts him down in Washington at 6 P.M. Thursday.

JOSH
He’s gonna land in Washington an hour before he took off?

SAM
Yeah.

JOSH
And that’s not a story that beats the Surgeon General?

…

JOSH
This clock should be in military time.

SAM
Yeah, ’cause that’s less confusing.

JOSH
The man’s gone a hundred and fifty hours. How can it be Thursday the whole time?

SAM
Listen. Japan is nine hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time…

JOSH
Don’t.

Before we came to Tokyo, Maria and I would spend our weekdays working, taking care of the boys, and keeping up with chores. It was on the weekends that we’d all go out. That’s what most families do. Who would have thought that life would follow the same pattern in Tokyo? The time I gained by switching to part-time work has been more than reclaimed by my taking care of the boys while Maria’s working (she’s out the door at 8 and usually home between 6 and 7). It turns out my idea of taking Eidan with me to see the sights in the city on weekdays while Kai’s in school is unworkable, at least during the winter months. He’s at that age where’s he fully mobile but has no impulse control (“I think I’ll go run in the street now, or maybe go up and down the escalators 500 times!”). So he either needs to be in a completely kid friendly environment, or he has to stay strapped in his stroller, which is no fun for him. Throw in feeding him lunch, the cold weather, the half hour walk each way to Kai’s school, and his 2 hour nap, and the day is divided into chunks that make it unrealistic for daily outings.

Our days were fairly frantic for the first couple of weeks, as getting the household set up, establishing routines, and getting Eidan on a decent sleep schedule again all took some doing. It didn’t help that the apartment was dirty when we moved in and not as well stocked as we expected (e.g. most of the silverware was sticky – gross! – there was exactly one drinking glass, and hardly any cooking utensils). But I think that’s all behind us now, as the past few days have felt normal, which is actually quite nice.

I’ve settled into a schedule of working mostly at night, as it allows me to overlap with the morning of my coworkers in Philly, and it’s the best part of the day to get some uninterrupted time to concentrate. The downside is I don’t get to spend much time with Maria But now that Eidan is starting to nap on a consistent schedule, I can work some then too, which is freeing up a little time in the evenings.

I’m looking forward to April, when Kai starts first grade, as the elementary school is across the street from our apartment (not having to hike back and forth to his kindergarten school will free up almost 2 hours of the day). The weather will be warmer then too, which means I can take Eidan to parks to run around, and then he can nap in his stroller. While he’s napping I can take him on some walks around the city (I have a guide book with some nice walking tours of different sections of Tokyo).

So, just like in the States, the weekdays are all about work and taking care of the boys, and the fun is on the weekends. Last weekend we all really enjoyed the amazing Edo-Tokyo Museum (I’ll post pictures soon), and this weekend we’re going to hit some of the shopping districts. Unlike the States, mom and pop stores still thrive here, so you can find all kinds of unique and interesting shops, as opposed to the unending sameness of Pottery Barn and the Gap.

I’m pleased to present to you the first ever guest post on toppa.com, by Maria. A major area of Maria’s research is Japan’s Postal Savings system. In Japan, you can use the post office just like a bank, and most Japanese do. The money in the Postal Savings system is, in effect, a huge pot of money used by the government almost like a second budget. Over the past several years there’s been a great deal of political debate about to what extent this system should be privatized or dismantled in favor of private banks. One of Maria’s papers on this topic is non-technical and is quite interesting – you can download the PDF here.

How the Post Office here compares to private banks confounds what you’d expect from an American perspective. You can not only take care of mail and banking at the post office, but you can also pay your bills there – from utility bills to paying for an Amazon order. If you have a package that requires a signature for delivery, you can call anytime before 9pm and they’ll bring the package to your door within two hours. Post Office ATMs are also the only place you can withdraw money from a foreign bank account.

With that lengthy introduction aside, Maria’s post describes her experience trying to get money from the account where her paychecks are deposited, which, unfortunately for us, is at a private bank.

This is purely anecdotal. Today’s experience making a simple withdrawal from a private Japanese bank reinforces the commonly-cited reasons for why Postal Savings (PS) and postal banking remain a major threat to Japan’s private banks, and even more so as JPost slowly wends its way through privatization.

We got our Japanese bank account through Hitachi’s connections with the Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ bank (Hitachi is the sponsor of my fellowship). Today, I went to withdraw about $1000 to get through the next few weeks. I had to go in person because the ATM card has still not arrived after 2 weeks (score +1 for PS). Fortunately, I work near the main branch, so I walked over to take care of the transaction in person. If I had a postal savings account, I could have instead wandered into just about any post office (+2 PS). I walked into the enormous Italian granite-sheathed transactions hall, and was immediately welcomed by 3 smartly-uniformed employees whose sole purpose as far as I could tell was to bow, say “welcome” and push the button that would dispense the ticket with my number that would be called: I could have done that myself (+4 PS, 1 for the overhead of the furnishings and fixtures; 1 for employee redundancy). I didn’t need the ticket after all because my number was called as soon as I got the ticket.

I explained to the teller that the account was established for a foreign address and that my ID was a driver’s license. I had already filled out in advance a transactions slip to make the withdrawal. I had to make out a new one because they require foreigners to write their slips out in English, not Katakana like I did. Then I signed it. Then waited. I was called up to make out yet another slip because my signature did not exactly match the one on file. They showed me my filed signature and I was asked to reproduce it, which I did to the best of my ability (+5 PS). I was asked to wait again while the teller consulted with at least 4 others (+6 PS). Then I was called up again to show my ID. I gave her my license, my JBIC ID card and my Villanova ID, which she made copies of.

After she made a few more phone calls, the teller finally handed me the money in a crisp envelope, another employee came up to the counter and they both apologized profusely for the time it took (about 15 minutes). They gave me a complimentary Winnie the Pooh notepad for my troubles. One more thing: UFJ’s ATMs, like other private Japanese banks’, don’t take foreign ATM cards. But the post office ATMs do (this one gets bonus points, +10 PS).

So the upshot is, while UFJ’s tellers were exceedingly polite, the surroundings lush, and the personal service attentive, if not obsequious, I would always opt for the convenience and speed of a utilitarian post office, where one gets equally polite service, and can easily get through transactions that private institutions here find difficult.

Kai and his classmates waiting for the mochi pounding to begin View at Picasa Kai and his classmates waiting for the mochi pounding to begin15-Jan-2007 19:36, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 4.0, 10.8125mm, 0.006 sec

Rice for Mochitsuki View at Picasa Rice for Mochitsuki15-Jan-2007 19:37, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.013 sec

Video – Mochi pounding at Kai’s school View at Picasa Video – Mochi pounding at Kai’s school15-Jan-2007 19:43

Mike tries mochi pounding View at Picasa Mike tries mochi pounding15-Jan-2007 19:50, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 4.0, 10.8125mm, 0.01 sec

Kai tries mochi pounding View at Picasa Kai tries mochi pounding15-Jan-2007 19:58, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.003 sec

And Eidan tries mochi pounding View at Picasa And Eidan tries mochi pounding15-Jan-2007 21:21, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.005 sec

Tuesday of last week was Mochitsuki (もちつき) at Kai’s School:

…the pounding of mochi or rice cakes, which is essential to the “Oshogatsu” or New Year’s celebration. Mochitsuki is an all-day event which requires many hands, long hours, and physical labor, but is also a time of fellowship and socializing with friends and family…After the rice is cooked, it is dumped into the usu, or mortar, made from a wood stump, stone or concrete form. The hot cooked rice in the usu is pounded with a kine or wooden mallet. With enthusiasm and force, the mochi is pounded until the mass of rice is smooth and shiny, with no discernible individual grains of rice. An essential participant in the pounding is the person assisting who quickly darts his or her hand into the usu and turns the rice before the next rhythmic pound.

If you’re curious about how the tradition originated, there’s a good account on the page Mochitsuki – A Japanese Custom.

I’m the only dad who comes to the school on a regular basis to drop off and pick up his kid. Apparently tending to the kids during the day is still the exclusive realm of moms, at least in this corner of Tokyo. In the days leading up to Mochitsuki, I was asked repeatedly by the half dozen or so of the moms who speak some English for my reassurance that I would be there. The kine mallet is just as hefty as a sledgehammer, so they were trying to find as many men as they could to swing it (I have no problem at all with women doing this, but they simply did not see it as something for them to do). Fortunately for me a few other dads showed up as well, so we were able to take turns through about 2 hours of mochi pounding.

Once we got started I was very glad I already knew how to swing a sledgehammer, as the same technique applied here (with the right swing, gravity does most of the work, not your arms). Once I got into a rhythm with my assistant (she would reach in and turn the rice quickly between swings of the hammer), it was fun.

The kids mostly watched and shouted various encouragements, but they all got a short turn swinging a smaller mallet.

When we were done, a small army of moms went into the school’s kitchen and prepared a wide assortment of mochi dishes, and then we had a mochi feast for lunch. I love Japanese food, but I have to say I’m not too crazy about the glutenous texture of mochi. I did like the isobe maki though (grilled mochi wrapped in nori, with soy sauce).

I’ve had to tell Maria that I would leave her for the woman who does the recorded English announcements on the JR Yamanote Line…if I only knew who she was . Her voice is soo nice. I always look forward to passing through Tokyo station, as there are a number of connecting subway lines there, so the announcement is particularly long.

Adding to my many previous examples which prove that you can find absolutely anything on the Internet, someone posted a sound file of one of her announcements (scroll about halfway down the page for it). For some reason her voice sounds a little more nasally in that recording than it actually is, but you’ll get the idea.

The Yamanote line also has TV screens above the doors (I posted a picture in 2004, from our last trip). Currently, Berlitz is running a regular series on the screens – 1-minute “trainglish” lessons, for Japanese salarymen to learn snappy English phrases like “wrap up” – e.g. “I’m wrapping up the report now.” The woman providing the lessons is awfully cute too…

It would have been much more difficult for me to figure out how to setup my Japanese keyboard without the help of the articles, blog posts, and forum posts that others wrote describing their experiences. I figured out a few things that no one else has written about, so the purpose of this post is to give something back to the community of folks who have also struggled with using Japanese in Windows.

I decided to try my luck using a 109 key Japanese keyboard with my English Windows laptop. I thought it might help my Japanese writing if I learned to use the direct Hiragana and Katakana input, instead of typing in Romaji and relying on MS Word to do the conversions for me. I succeeded in getting everything working, but it took some doing.

The place to start is the excellent article Windows XP Japanese Input. As thorough as that article is, it wasn’t quite enough to get my keyboard working correctly. So the next step is Cameron Beccario’s instructions for installing a Japanese keyboard. My keyboard is USB, but the only driver option available for a Japanese keyboard is PS/2. I picked that anyway and it’s working fine. But that only gets the driver in place – you still need to do some configuration work:

• Under Control Panel / Regional and Language Settings / Language Settings / Details, I added “English (United States) – Japanese” as the default input language. You do this by going into the “Installed Services” box, and in the “English” section under “Keyboards” click “Add.” Then in the next window, select English as the input language and Japanese as the keyboard layout. After you click “OK”, this should make “Japanese” appear in bold under “Keyboards” in the “Installed Services” box, meaning it’s the default keyboard layout. You need this setting in order for the keys on the Japanese keyboard to map correctly. If you don’t do this, the Japanese keyboard will still work, but the keys will be mapped to a US keyboard layout (which means, for example, you’ll get an @ symbol when you try to enter a ").

  View at Picasa Windows XP language settings for a Japanese keyboard

• With the foregoing setup, if you use the language bar to – for example, switch Microsoft Word to Japanese – you can make the appropriate selections in the Language Bar, type Romaji, and Word will convert it to Hiragana just as it would with a US keyboard. If you want to set it up so that you can simply type the Hiragana as it appears on the Japanese keyboard, then in the Language Bar, select Input Style / Properties, and in the General tab change the input method to Kana.

Some other things worth noting:

• Under Control Panel / Regional and Language Settings / Advanced, I left English as the language for non-Unicode programs. As explained in the article, setting it to Japanese will cause the \ character to appear as ¥ (the yen symbol) and this setting can cause some programs to automatically install themselves in Japanese. And personally, even though there’s no harm in it, seeing yen symbols where backslashes should be in file paths would drive me crazy.
• At least with my keyboard and MS Word, the ¥ will give you a ¥ only if you’re in Romaji input mode (and if you hit it twice, it’ll give you a double backslash). If you switch to Kana input mode, then you can’t get a ¥ from it all – it instead gives you the Katakana vowel extender character (which looks like a stylized em dash).
• In the Kana input mode, you can make use of the 4 special Japanese language keys on the keyboard. A found a nice description of them on this Keyboard scancodes page:
  

  To the left of the spacebar, (Shift-JIS) 無変換 (muhenkan) means no conversion from kana to kanji. To the right of the spacebar, 変換 (henkan) means conversion from kana to kanji. In Microsoft systems it converts the most recently input sequence of kana to the system’s first guess at a string of kanji/kana/etc. with the correct pronunciation and a guess at the meaning. Repeated keypresses change it to other possible guesses which are either less common or less recently used, depending on the situation. The shifted version of this key is 前侯補 (zenkouho) which means “previous candidate” — “zen” means “previous”, while “kouho” means “candidate” (explanation courtesy of NIIBE Yutaka) — it rotates back to earlier guesses for kanji conversion. The alt version of this key is 全侯補 also pronounced (zenkouho), which means “all candidates” — here, “zen” means “all” — it displays a menu of all known guesses. I never use the latter two functions of the key, because after pushing the henkan key about three times and not getting the desired guess, it displays a menu of all known guesses anyway.

  Next on the right, ひらがな (hiragana) means that phonetic input uses one conventional Japanese phonetic alphabet, which of course can be converted to kanji by pressing the henkan key later. The shifted version is カタカナ (katakana) which means the other Japanese phonetic alphabet, and the alt version is ローマ字 (ro-maji) which means the Roman alphabet.

  Near the upper left, 半/全 (han/zen) means switch between hankaku (half-size, the same size as an ASCII character) and zenkaku (full-size, since the amount of space occupied by a kanji is approximately a square, twice as fat as an ASCII character). It only affects katakana and a few other characters (for example there’s a full-width copy of each ASCII character in addition to the single-byte half-width encodings). The alt version of this is 漢字 (kanji) which actually causes typed Roman phonetic keys to be displayed as Japanese phonetic kana (either hiragana or katakana depending on one of the other keys described above) and doesn’t cause conversion to kanji.

• It took me a while to figure out the diacritical marks when in Kana input mode, but I finally got it. For example, to make a た (ta) into a だ (da), you hit the た key, and then the ゛ key (the @ key when in English mode), and then Word will merge them into a single character.
• I have the keyboard hooked up to a laptop which has its own regular US keyboard. There is no way that I know of to have dual keyboard configurations. So this means the laptop keyboard defaults to behaving like a Japanese keyboard, resulting in a a number of keys not mapping correctly. I found this isn’t so bad, as you can toggle between the keyboard layouts in the Language Bar (but you just need to remember the Language Bar settings are per program, so you need to toggle each program; and, of course, you can always change the default keyboard layout back to US English).
• I also discovered that all the Regional and Language Bar settings are per user. So you need to go through all of these steps (except for the driver installation) for each account used on your PC (I imagine this can be dealt with at the Administrator level, but I haven’t checked).

I’m a fairly fast typist, and it’s taken about a week to retrain my fingers for some of the different key positions. The hardest thing to get used to is the teeny tiny space bar (it’s only about twice the width of a regular key). Some of the layout reminds me of my old Commodore 64 – double quote is Shift-2, @ has its own key, etc.

A traditional Japanese wedding at Togo Shrine View at Picasa A traditional Japanese wedding at Togo Shrine06-Jan-2007 22:48, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 3.2, 6.71875mm, 0.01 sec

I’m falling behind on my blog updates, but I will try to catch up… The weekend before last we took a stroll through Yoyogi park (Yoyogi koen in Japanese), which is located in Harajuku, and it’s one of the largest parks in Tokyo. We came across all kinds of interesting people and events. We started at the flea market near Togo Shrine (which is just outside the park), and saw the beginning of a traditional Japanese wedding taking place at the Shrine (video below). On the way to the park we had to get through the teeming hordes of weekend Harajuku shoppers. Once in the park we listened to drummers practicing near one of the fountains, watched an excellent tap dancer practicing, and then we happened to catch the Tokyo Rockabilly Club doing its thing. They must be seen to be believed (video below – they were just warming up when I shot this, so I didn’t get some of their best moves. If you want more, a Google search for them will bring up more videos and pictures). Now I know where the Leningrad Cowboys got their look.

Video – A traditional Japanese wedding at Togo Shrine View at Picasa Video – A traditional Japanese wedding at Togo Shrine06-Jan-2007 22:48	The Flea Market Near Togo Shrine View at Picasa The Flea Market Near Togo Shrine06-Jan-2007 22:50, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.004 sec
Near Harajuku Station on the Weekend View at Picasa Near Harajuku Station on the Weekend06-Jan-2007 23:15, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.002 sec	Dogs in Yoyogi Park View at Picasa Dogs in Yoyogi Park07-Jan-2007 00:04, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 4.0, 10.8125mm, 0.006 sec
Yoyogi Park View at Picasa Yoyogi Park07-Jan-2007 00:04, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 4.0, 10.8125mm, 0.003 sec	The Tokyo Rockabilly Club View at Picasa The Tokyo Rockabilly Club07-Jan-2007 00:13, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 4.0, 10.8125mm, 0.008 sec
Video – The Tokyo Rockabilly Club View at Picasa Video – The Tokyo Rockabilly Club07-Jan-2007 00:13

A special promotional edition of Toppo chocolates, using the name Toppa instead View at Picasa A special promotional edition of Toppo chocolates, using the name Toppa instead08-Jan-2007 03:24, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.125 sec

…with a name that may seem familiar. The usual name for these is Toppo, and I’ve seen them before in Japanese markets in the US, but they’ve decided to at least temporarily give them the far superior name, Toppa.

Also note the “School of Lock” ad on the box. There are sounds in Japanese that are hard for me to distinguish, and many Japanese have the same problem with certain sounds in English. In this case, it’s a not a mistake, it’s a self-conscious joke – there’s a small image of a lock next to the text. From what I can tell, School of Lock is a radio program marketed to students.

And for my fellow CGS Japanese students, note the Katakana across the top of the “T”, which still says Toppo. The “po” (ポ) is stylized. In the US we see English letters stylized in all kinds of ways, and it’s the same in Japan with Katakana and Hiragana. Since I’m surrounded by Japanese signs everywhere I go, my reading is getting much faster (not that I always know the meaning, however), and I’m catching on to the various stylizations.