The Kanemat Zoo

Japanese companies are a paradox.

As individuals the Japanese are friendly, well-mannered, cheerful and have a quick sense of humour (even if we don't always immediately understand it). They're also very proud of their heritage and some people interpret that as racism, but it isn't always the case.

As businessmen, on the other hand, they can be avaricious and implacable.

I worked for two of the sogo sosha, the giant trading firms, in Sydney for about twelve years (communications manager for Kanematsu until 1988 and EDP Co-Ordinator for the Tomen Corporation until 1992).

Communications manager meant that I operated the telex, looked after the telephone system, and generally maintained the Pacific hub of a computerised telecommunications network.

EDP co-ordinator at Tomen was a case of being a one-eyed man in the land of the blind: I knew more than they did but not much more and once again the main part of my work was telecommunications. At that time PCs were just starting to impact on the office world and, since Microsoft were still squabbling with Macintosh about who owned the rights to Windows, anybody who knew DOS was in demand.

Consequently I was often like the invisible man—an observer on the sidelines.

When I was retrenched from Kanematsu I wanted to make a statement so I wrote the Kanemat Zoo and gave it to my friend Robyn McClung to edit. Whenever she thought I'd gone over the top I deleted that section. I was trying to be funny, not nasty.

Most of the references in what follows relate to people who worked for Kanematsu during the 1980s, though I've incorporated a few thoughts from my years at Tomen.

Urgent
Everything is urgent to a Japanese. This is not necessarily caused, as some people claim, by their work ethic of procrastinate and panic! Habitually they hurry about the office, but should they they start out walking toward the telex room, the copier or the toilet, it isn't long before they break into a trot. They're not in a hurry—at least not to get to the telex room or the copier. They're just doing what's expected.

When you have to cope with their telexes you soon realise they come in various grades. I compiled the following list to help my successor.

Which brings us to the following conversation between our part-timer, Clive, and a Japanese we'll call Yoshi.   Clive: What do you mean by "urgent"? Yoshi: You must send it straight away. Clive: Then what is "top urgent"? Yoshi: Send it even faster.

I understand these blokes are all university graduates.

Japanese English
You expect people moving from one language to another to make some mistakes, especially when they also move from pictograms to the western alphabet. Some of the errors are funny, just the same.

The expected mixing of Ls and Rs is understandable but isn't the greatest problem Japanese face with English; they simply can't understand grammatical number and hardly ever manage a complete telex without stuffing their verbs. On the other hand, there are plenty of other mistakes.

And two longer examples, the first by our esteemed Mikado, himself. The cost should be borne by the assaulter. No, nobody was mugged. The assaulter was a motorist who collided with one of our cars.

The final effort comes from Yoshi Mori (of whom more later) when he wrote, This will be quite beneficial price-wise, quality-wise, otherwise-wise. I kid you not!

Australian English
Mind you, not all the errors come from the Japanese. The next few blunders are from our Australian—well, Kiwi—staff. This guy is not alone, but he dropped a lot of clangers.

Irradicate for eradicate was fairly typical but his best was to bigger risk for too big a risk. Well, it sounded like that, didn't it? He also wrote that in the passed sausage makers have been too leanient! Maybe they made thinner sausages. I once asked him about his spelling and he said, "In New Zealand we learn the Queens English; here you only learn the King's." It's a great theory, mate!

Australian Japanese

New staff wanting to learn the language of their masters can get away with three words. "Konichiwa" will pass for "G'day", "Sayonara" will do for "See you later," but the most important word of all is "Choto-bloody-mate" or "Wait a bloody minute".

Sometimes that isn't enough, of course, and I ran into trouble one Friday afternoon:

Japanese Australian
I think I can claim to have done my level best to improve the standard of colloquial Australian spoken at Kanematsu. Our accountant, Ted Fukuoka, liked to pick up unusual expressions and I was happy to oblige. He now knows lots of useful phrases like, "roger dodger", "whacko", "she'll be apples" and "okey dokey". Even so, if you want to spend a pointless fifteen minutes try explaining "curl a mo" to a Japanese. There's a bit of a culture gap.

Harry Takeuchi was fascinated by acronyms and he got right on to POETS Day. That's Friday of course (Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday). One Friday afternoon when I caught him leaving early he laughed and said, "Today is poet's day. I poets now." Well, you got the right idea, Harry-san, even if you missed the finer grammatical point.

Carpet
Harry got the better of me one day. A very smooth-skinned race, the Japanese probably think we hairy-skinned Australians are some kind of throw-back – maybe even an antipodean missing link. I was waiting for the lift one day and I saw Harry (one of our wool-buyers) looking at my arms. After a while he reached out, plucked a hair, and held it up to the light while he examined it. Then he looked at me, shook his head and said, "Thirty-four micron – only good for carpet."

You old flatterer, Harry!

Face Saving
Face saving is important to the Japanese (at least, in this company) and if they don't know what you're talking about their immediate response will be, "I understand." That's your cue to stop bugging them about something they haven't been programmed to assimilate and go and talk to somebody else. Sometimes it works in reverse and one afternoon when Yoshi gave me some instructions. I said, "I understand." So he told me again, and stupidly I repeated, "I understand." So he explained it a third time and I said, "Wakari mashite." His eyes opened up like dinner plates and he said, "You understand?" He wouldn't believe me till I had said it in Japanese.

Overcoats?
Sometimes it's hard to get the Japanese used to routines if they don't see the need for them. Getting enough information to write customs declarations was a continuing problem and led to this typical (well, almost typical) conversation:

Treasure Trove
To Kanematsu goes the honour of transforming the company store room into an Aladdin's Cave. No longer can the staff walk carefree to the Compactus and get a new pencil – now they must queue at the store room door and plead for their staples. (Ouch!) Oliver Twist would have hated it.

But this company has at least one genuine claim to greatness.

Throughout the middle ages alchemists searched for the philosopher's stone which would transmute base metals into gold. It was never found and modern science scoffs at the idea but Kanematsu, with cauldron bubbling behind locked doors, has proved it exists and in doing so has raised the humble paper clip to the level of precious metal. It has become company scrip. Kanemoney!

A bit far fetched? Well, try this conversation.

Mr Big
It's fairly common practice for Japanese companies operating in Australia employ a local man of modest talent and promote him to a level he could not reach elsewhere—outside the public service, perhaps.

From that point they own him.

Whenever a dodgy deal goes through (it might contravene customs regulations—a kind of sophisticated, white-collar form of smuggling) he's the man who signs the documents.

If anything unfortunate hits the fan he carries the responsibility. He gets whatever penalty might be meted out and, if necessary, the company employs another bunny to take his place.

In one of these companies I asked the Superbunny a question about my working conditions but he took a couple of seconds too long to answer.

"This morning," I said, "my son asked how you can tell if a politician is lying.

"I told him that if a question can be answered yes or no, if he says anything else, it's an evasion."

Superbunny left but later as I passed his desk he said softly, "First time I've ever been called a politician."

He won in the long run, of course. He was the guy who had the pleasure of retrenching me.

Coffee Break
Our tea lady, Peg Brown, was an early casualty in Kanematsu's cost-cutting pogrom. Peg was everybody's favourite person and never forgot anyone's preference for tea, coffee, or biscuits, no matter how long they were away from the office. She was a jewel among women; but she was a human being too, and if she treated us all like old friends she expected to be treated the same way by us.

It worked pretty well till the day she ran afoul of Yoshi Mori.

Yoshi was a quiet little bloke, very arrogant, and a cut above the local riff-raff. He had a right to his coffee every morning and it was Peg's duty to give it to him. The trouble was that nobody told Peg and she got stroppier by the day.

One morning she put his coffee and biscuits on the table and said pointedly, "There's your coffee, Mr. Mori."

That was when he made his big mistake. He ignored her.

Peg stepped back a pace and announced in a voice we could hear at the far end of the building, "If this man doesn't say, Thank you, Mrs. Brown then tomorrow morning I'm going to pour his coffee all over him."

His reaction was immediate. "Thank you, Mrs. Brown." He physically cowered away from her.

Pity. I wanted to see if she'd actually have done it.

Monday-itis
Did you ever have one of those mornings?

I overslept and missed breakfast so I had to run a kilometre to the railway station. There wasn't time to cut my sandwiches either so I was going to have to buy lunch on the way to work.

The train was on time for a change but lost forty-five minutes at Strathfield. That wasn't too bad because it meant the sandwich shop would be open by the time I got there. "Sorry, we're running late this morning," they said. Could I please come back later?

I eventually arrived at the office, rushed through the stack of work that had built up overnight and then, finally, I found time to brew my first coffee of the day.

I put it on my desk, opened one of the drawers (the Emperor provides them to be used as foot rests) placed my feet in it, threw back my elbows, and stretched.

Then, just as I was beginning to relax, my friend Kay walked over and said, "Your fly is undone."