歓送迎会 Welcome And Farewell Party

This Wednesday we had yet another company party. I never told you about them and thought you might be interested about a typical party in a Japanese company.

Firstly we got a company mail, which told us to reply in case we intend to attend. This is because having many employees even within one team, it is often hard to find a place to host them all.

The most common reason for making a party in our company is both to welcome new employees and say farewell to leaving ones. In this case this meant the welcoming of three new interns: Juan from Colombia, Marco from Italy and Mathieu from France and one new regular employee Wang from China (Ph.D. at Tokyo University). But also a farewell to Alex from Quebec and Bert from Peru. This time there was a third reason with some middle bosses wanting to apologize for a very boring work, everybody had to do for one week.

Middle Bosses yeah, even within our small team the company structure is quite hierarchical. There is the big boss Shozakai-san (社長), two team/department bosses Owa-san and Miyazaki-san (課長) a couple of middle bosses, mini bosses and the employees and interns. The Mini-Bosses are usually in charge of one or several interns and the development of their corresponding languages. The middle bosses are supposed to coordinate between them and decide on language wide projects. Our 課長, Owa-san (尾和さん) finally is in charge of the language modeling team and 社長 Shozakai-san of the Pattern Recognition branch of Asahi Kasei.

The parties are usually held 1 hour after the common end of work hour (18:00 o'clock). This means by no means that on a common day everybody would stop working at 6 pm, regular employees will continue far longer from time to time, some people, especially new employees everyday. New employees sometimes feel bad because of their lack of experience and thus want to compensate with extra unpaid over hours. So over hours are unpaid? No, this is a common misconception, over hours can be entered on your pay check and you will be compensated for them. However! not everyone enters her/his over hours, even when having worked overtime several times. Again especially new employee s don't feel right about postulating compensation. Some of the longer employees however do work over hours and do enter them in their pay checks.
Like this there is never on no day a time, where more than 3-4 people would leave the office. Everybody leaves at some point after her regular working hours.

In case of such a party, people will usually come directly to the party, with a bit delay of the Shachou (社長), because of being more important and workers who really have to work longer, because of important projects. In our case we gathered this time in a Bar&Dining place. Common is always Tabehoudai (食べ放題) and Nomihoudai (飲み放題). Eat&Drink as much as you can. This is actually very cheap in Japan. Each had to pay 2000 Yen (15 Euro, 18 Dollars) in spite of the fact that the welcomed and farewelled people do not have to pay.

So we had a merry dinner and thanks to the kind help of some of our Japanese employees the kitchen agreed to make me a salad, so I could also eat something ^_^ (Oh and there was a vegetarian pizza, I could also eat). At dinner we would talk about all kind of stuff, work related or unrelated, often about language and culture, since our team is very special with people from so many cultural backgrounds (With every intern being responsible for a different language, she or he comes from a different country).





people leaving the company will be given a little farewell present (usually a little fan), from left to right: Owa-san (our team's boss), Alex (Quebec), Bert (Peru) the two guys leaving

After the merry meal, some decided to go home, while most went on to the almost culturally obligatory Karaoke. Japanese Karaoke means going to a Karaoke place, where you will be given a soundproof chamber with television sets (for the lyrics) a mixer with several thousand saved songs, wirless computer terminals to choose songs from and two micros. Soft drinks and Ice Cream is free for alcoholic drinks you can again get a Nomihoudai 飲み放題. So everybody would sit in this little room and passing the terminals around, they would decide about songs to sing. It is good to choose songs everybody knows, which however is a bit difficult in our special case ^=^.
Our big boss Shozakai-san sang three songs, and even our a bit shy and introverted Teamboss Owa-san would sing a song. Everybody laughs a lot, drinks a lot (or eats a lot of ice cream in my case) talks a lot and usually has a lot of fun. Usually everyone is encouraged to sing at least once. However this is not as easy as you might think. For my case at least, while I love singing very much, I never tried it in accord with a song being played. So my Karaoke singing actually sounds horrible and I was asked to please stop the first time I tried it (another party). I guess I have to practice a bit till next time.

Usually the Karaoke part is open end and in this case would go as late as 3 am with everyone including the Big Boss showing up at work the next day, completely sober as if nothing had happened. Crazy!
For me I left at 1:30 am, since I was awake for 22 hours at this point, standing up early to be able to call my parents in Germany (time lapse).
In the end Shozakai-big_boss would generously pay the horrible amount of money (you don't even wanna know how expensive this Karaoke is) for everyone and the party people would slowly try to find their way home to their beds.

Yeah and that's it for our company, who considers itself traditional Japanese. However while for our company such parties happen every now and so often, when new people arrive or old ones leave (which is more often than on other companies, because of the 1 year internship program), other companies will do similar parties more frequently.


taking the incredible hardships of going to a party to report for you
mika



here you can see half of the Karaoke room and people



big boss Shozakai-san sinning with a wig



even our team's boss Owa-san allowed us to place a wig on his head and posed for pictures :)



Most Karaoke bars provide a room with costumes, as you can see we made good use of that









that's me spiderman



I looked like a fat sack of potatoes in this costume :/

版画展と原宿 Art Exhibition And Harajuku

Still suffering under too much JLPT, I headed out again the next day after the hiking for Tokyo. Having seen wonderful natural landscapes, it is time for artificial ones and for seeing humans and their works.

So I joined my dear companion Hong Lun (Singapore) to Tokyo.
Arriving in 新宿 (Shinjuku), we had a little lunch in the 小田急 (Odakyuu) basement floor, where you can find all kinds of food (but next to none vegetearian cuisine, of course...) and then continued for the 6th floor of the 小田急 shopping complex.

小田急デパート Odakyu Shopping Mall

On this floor at the rear end of the building artists can exhibit their pictures and visitors of the mall can enjoy them. While both Hong Lun and me were disgusted by the shopping mall and it's products (you know these expensive ugly cloths and stuff), the art exhibition was quite nice. There were two rooms, displaying the works of two different artists.
We mainly came for the works of Ikuo Hirayama (平山 郁夫), a still living 77 year old traditional Japanese artist, whose art reflect his deep wish for peace. The exhibition was named: 祈りの旅路 (The journey of prayer). I was lucky to have my dear friend Hong Lun to my side, since he could explain to me how the artist tried to display all the similarities between China and Japan and traveled back to the roots of both Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, which are found in India. The message of the pictures is thus very simple and still fundamentally true and important: We should not constantly look at what differences we can find between us, but should look at the similarities. Since the first leads to conflict and war and second to harmony and peace.

Hirayama-sama seems to be very fond of camels, which make a big part of his pictures. Being placed between the pictures displaying mosques, temples, cathedrals, pagoda, shrines they give the exhibition the impression of actual movement, you can see the journey by traveling on camel backs from one pictures to the other :).

In the other room we found paintings of modern Versailles (France) in an traditional European way of painting. I think it is called impressionism. The painter however was also Japanese, but he lived in Versailles for over 20 years of his live. We were lucky, because the painter himself was present and would explain his pictures and talk to us. It was quite a language experience talking to the painter in French helping out with Japanese, where my French ended.

新宿 Shinjuku

We had some more language experience, when we left the 小田急 Odakyu building for 新宿 Shinjuku. There was a guy asking for pictures of cell phone ornaments. Hong Lun, curious and courageous and I asked him for the purpose and where he was from. He was an art student from Berlin making a photo series about Japanese cell phone ornaments, which are incredibly popular here. Sometimes, he would tell us, you can find tiny cellphones with ornaments three times as large hanging from them. The language experience was, since Hong Lun is perfectly fluent in German (he is studying in Darmstadt), we could talk in German to this guy from Berlin.

autumn expression right in front of Tokyo's biggest station (Shinjuku)

We went on to explore 新宿 Shinjuku without having any specific aim. We found a vast number of young girls, all dressed in a nice fancy way, something between pop-punk and pop-goth waiting in a huge line to get signatures from their favorite boy group band, releasing their new album in some store (see impressions below).

there were many girls waiting



the boy group band, they were all standing in line for





Some had quite cool outfits

原宿 Harajuku

And on we went with the infamous 山の手 Yamanote line (the circular railway in the center of Tokyo) to 原宿 Harajuku. While Shinjuku is the center of young adult culture in Tokyo, Harajuku is the same for the youth and for young fashion. Hong Lun would relate that sellers would come from as far as Hong Kong to see the newest fashion articles and buy the newest stuff here, to resell it in Hong Kong. So it was not surprising to see many foreigners here.

As soon as we left 原宿 Harajuku station, we saw that autumn colors also invaded Tokyo. They give some interesting contrast to the all too grey concrete structures and streets. Here are some of my impressions:

impressions of Harajuku

竹下通り Takeshita Doori

The most interesting hot spot in Harajuku is the 竹下通り (Takeshita street). You can find many cool little gothic lolita stores, punk stores, record stores, hip hop stores and many other kinds of crazy shops. We went one time to end and back, looking in interesting stores. Here's some of the stuff we saw.

Gothic Lolita

A Japanese interpretation of Goth culture becoming more and more popular. The Japanese interpretation is to appear incredibly baby cute, while using known Gothic symbols and mainly black colors. For example we saw some cloths having vampire bunny bats on them. While visually pleasing, I didn't like that the store would also sell Hakenkreuze and different symbols of Nazi-Germany. So we left the store.

Tricksters

We saw some street sellers selling unexplainable wildly jumping little wire clowns for 1000 yen each. Hong Lun warned me, that he and Youngki (Korea) fell for such people already. And explained me that there is a trick to make them jump like this. Indeed when looking reeeeaaaally carefully, you could see tiny strings leading to a person having one hand in his trousers while insignificantly operating a cell phone. I wanted to warn the people, but Hong Lun said, he is afraid of getting beaten up, so I succumbed and we left the people to their fate of being tricked :/.

Costumes

I made some pictures of a costume store, showing incredible clothing.

Hip-Hop Superheroes

In yet another store, which appeared to be a Hip Hop store, we found kapu-sweaters, which you could transform into super heroes costumes and become Venom (from Spiderman), an X-Man or a kind of power-ranger robot. In ordinary sweater mode, nobody would expect them top be costumes! While being a nice idea, I feel reluctant to pay 16.800 Yen for a sweater (100 Euro, 150 Us-Dollar).

Crepes

There are some Crepe shops in the middle of 竹下通り selling some really delicious crepes for a little bit overpriced 500 ￥en. Hong Lun and I could not resist and we made a break eating crepes here :)

Punk Store

Weee I thought, finding a real punk store! It is called Tokyo Punker and looked cool at the first glance. However when I wanted to take a picture, a lady got really angry, screamed at me and made me leave the store...
However there were enough cloths outside to illustrate why I would never enter this store, except out protest, criticism or mere disgust. As you can see on the t-shirt, the Tokyo Punker, seems to like to combine punk hair and outfit with Nazi ideology... How very disgusting. I am really angry that such a shop can call itself Tokyo Punker, and that apparently many Japanese punks buy such crap. :/

the shop obviously sells both to Nazis and Punks...

Daisou 100 ￥en Store

Finally we entered the biggest 100 ￥en store in central Tokyo area. We made perciculars (small colorful pictures, where you make all kind of weird poses) and bought some stuff for a small amount of money. In contrast to 1 Dollar / 1 Euro stores, 100 ￥en stores have almost every article a super market has, from food to gardening and the quality is not as bad, as you might think.

After that the sun already started to set and we made for our long way home to Atsugi. We saw a lot of interesting things and made some nice and some bad experiences this day, it was really a round day.

mika



Hong Lun trying on some new shoes, but they were too slippery and thus he didn't buy them

大山ハイキング Ooyama Hiking

With the JLPT behind me, I have realized that I have spent much time indoors lately, so I needed to go out. And what better place than one of the mountains nearby, a splendid opportunity to awe the wonderful colors of autumn. Yes indeed, even in December, here in Japan it is still like early autumn weather in central Europe.

So Randy (Holland), Loic (France), Junko (Japan) and me (Planet Rubikon) prepared for a nice hiking trip and headed out for 伊勢原 (Isehara), from where you can reach 大山 (Ooyama) easily by bus. We were equipped with jackets, gloves and bonnets, but soon had to realize that the weather is so nice and warm, that we won't need them :)

There is a little cable car, going half way up to the 1252 meters of the big mountain (大 = big, 山 = mountain). We were in the mood for cheating, and I haven't entered a cable car in over 10 years, so we boarded the ride to half the height and continued with our feet from there.



the red cable car



and the old one

We were indeed lucky, the autumn colors called 紅葉 (kouyou) or (o momiji) in Japanese were in full "bloom". The landscape was wonderfully filled with tones of yellow, red, orange, brown and trees that remain green. Like a sea of colors. I tried to capture some impressions of it on pictures, but it is never the same as standing there, looking up the surrounding mountains. Japan is especially fond of 紅葉 and people often make trips to marvel about the wonderful colors. I wonder if I never realized the wonders about autumn in Germany, or if autumn is indeed different here. That is the nice effect of traveling different cultures, you always can broaden your horizon and suddenly realize and learn about new wonderful things, that existed since you were born.





amazing isn't it? like painted





autumn colors

The path to the top of the mountain is quite nice, it is not too difficult, so you have plenty opportunity for exchanging interesting stories with your fellow hikers and develop interesting subjects in conversation. But it is just not easy enough to become boring. For example, as you can see below on the picture, sometimes, we found obstacles in our way and wondered if this really would be the right way, finally climbing over those fallen trees.






obstacles in our way





the trees reach until the top

The top of the mountain is not especially special ^_^. There is a little ラーメン Ramen shop some places to sit, a toilet and of course some opportunities to look around the landscape surrounding 大山. We could see our workplace with it's 117 meters being a small mountain amongst its fellow buildings as well. We could see all the cities around us from birds view and all the other smaller mountains. Only threatening 富士山 Mt. Fuji was still higher than we were, looking down on his smaller sister over here.





the top



the view from the top, you can see all the other mountains and cities around



and with Randy's high end camera, you even can see our work place (the tower)

After eating our お弁当 (Lunchbox), I brought Spaghetti with tomato sauce :), we slowly started to climb down again. After resting for a while it has become a bit chilly, and the sun also was shun by clouds, so we were glad now bringing our coats away. By the way, you remember my coat being taking from Mt. Fuji goblins? So I had to get a new one. Luckily I found this. Jamaica/Reggae Second Hand Fair Trade clothing store on the way from Youth Heim to the station. So I was able to find a nice cheap second hand coat for the coming winter.

Equipped like this, we made for the way down, for which you can take an alternate route and different it was. Were we walked between autumn colors our way up, we walked in Mordor our way down. The trees were already bereft of all their leaves and the lands looked barren. The way down is a bit tiresome, because of thousands of stairs, which are hard to take and weary your legs.





the way down was painted in colorless grey

But eventually we made it back half way down and after some democratic vote took the cable car once again down to the 麓 Fumoto the foot of the mountain. After a nice dinner back in Atsugi, we headed home and rested our weary legs :)

Still marveling about autumn colors dancing in his head
mika


More impressions from Ooyama, the big mountain