Mt. Bandai

Aizu-
Wakamatsu

Matsuri
(Festivals)

Contact

Note: This text was written three years ago. In some ways that makes it out-dated, because a lot of things have happened since then. Most importantly I don't live in Japan any longer, I actually left the country three years ago and then some. So, everything refering to my life in Japan should be in past tense now. In general I still go along with what I said then, even though my view and opinion has softened since then. But that might be just another case of old age sentimentalismn.

It was the summer of '96 and I had been looking for a job as a brewmaster for quite a long time. At that point I got a telephone call on a Friday afternoon from a German brewhouse manufacturer that was looking for a brewmaster for one of their Japanese customers. Being asked if I was willing to work in Japan for a year I agreed and was told to come to an interview in Bamberg on Monday morning. That gave me plenty of time for preparation and I went as ignorant as usual. Surprisingly, the interview went quite well, I guess, but nothing was decided. There was one more candidate. I didn't hear anything for two weeks or so, when I received another telephone call and was offered the job. I signed the contract two days later, went two weeks after that to Japan for six weeks to be there for the installation of the brewpub and after a little brake of five weeks back in Germany moved finally to Nippon in November of '96.

Being there

My new home was located in a small town named Inawashiro in Fukushima Ken(province), roughly 300 km north of Tokyo. The town in itself is not a beauty, but the area around it is fantastic. Mountains, lakes, woods, rice paddies... really beautiful. Just north of it begins the Bandai-Asahi-National-Park. It suits me very well, because I love hill walking, cycling and stuff like that. Last winter I even started to go snowboarding on a regular basis. The next ski resort is only a couple of minutes from my apartment. If this is a smart thing for me to do I doubt, after all I'm pretty clumsy in some ways and at my age broken bones take a long time to heal. But it is a lot of fun.
I also was lucky concerning my social life. The company I work for has all kinds of businesses. Right next to the brewpub they had a glass shop where Dean worked as a glass blower. He introduced me to the foreign community of that area. Most of them are/where living in the next bigger city called Aizu-Wakamatsu and work as English teachers. They're a pretty merry lot and hanging out there is usually quite fun. It's a bit like I imagine how life in the colonies must have been, all the foreigners hanging out together in their circles. But that doesn't mean that we have no Japanese among us. There're actually quite a few. I have to admit though, that I personally don't have thaaatmany Japanese friends, but this is largely due to my inability of speaking Japanese. I just "master" the absolute basics and that makes social conversation rather tedious. I'm the only one to blame. To speak Japanese is not so difficult (reading and writing are a different matter), but my well known laziness got in the way again.
Anyway, I enjoyed my stay here immensely and when the company asked me if I would sign on for another two years I did. I'm glad I did, even though some things later on where not quite as jolly as I wished. The main reason for that is the opening of the second brewpub for the same company in the summer of '98. From the professional point of view it's of course fantastic to operate two breweries at the same time and to have another chance to start up a plant. Unfortunately, the two breweries are about 500 km apart and I found myself more on the highway traveling between the two places (almost 40,000 km by car in '98 alone) than anything else. The new brewery is located in a town called Kaga on the west coast of Japan. That area is by far not as nice as Inawashiro and the adjacent National Park. Additionally, it took more than a year before my social life got going here, most of the evenings I spend at the hotel room (I kept my base in Inawashiro, lucky me). But, of course, that won't kill me and over all it was very well worth it to stay. A great experience.

The Japanese

As Alan Booth in his book "The Roads To Sata" points out, there is no such thing as theJapanese. The Japanese are a people of 120 million, living on a chain of islands more than 3000 km long. The climate, the history and traditions differ widely and so do the people. The following are only some general characteristics, which I found fairly strong developed here.
Not surprisingly, when coming to Japan the first time, one has the impression that they all look more or less the same ( How do they chase criminals here? A suspect description like " dark hair, kind of Asian type" can't be very helpful.). After a while one starts to notice quite a lot of differences though and even later begins to see similarities to a friend back home or a famous person, who is not Asian. But when you think you see a Robert Redford look alike in a Japanese you know that you've been too long in this country.
The next thing one notices is, that Japanese are in general very friendly. Some is only because of custom, but a lot of it is genuine. That is a big reason, why staying for a while is so much fun. Being friendly from their side doesn't mean necessarily that you always get your way with things, actually quite often you might not, but they will tell you this as friendly as possible. Hospitality is also a big part, at least here in the country side. I don't know how developed the hospitality is in Tokyo (a place that I rather avoid), but especially during festivals or when hiking I was more than once invited by total strangers to sit down and have some of their food (Japanese are big in packed lunches!) and to chat with them. Some Japanese, though, don't want to deal with foreigners at all. Either because they are scared of them for what ever reason or because they think they are something superior.
Finally two Japanese characteristics, that I'm not particularly fond of. First of all, daily life and the dealing with it is based on rules, which have to be followed, if it makes sense or not. It makes things really complicated, inflexible and inefficient. Instead of making a decision, that is based on the actual case, rules determine what has to be done, in which order etc. There whole educational system is based on that. A concrete example. At the brewery exists a rule (a government regulation), that you're not allowed to enter the rooms where the beer is stored in tanks with your street shoes, you have to wear special boots. There can't be really any harm done by wearing your street shoes, but so far so OK. The same rule doesn't apply to the room where the bottled beer is stored, though. And nothing will stop you from walking with those special boots outside the tank rooms where you are also allowed to wear your street shoes. Doesn't make sense, does it? But a rule is a rule, so we have to wear those boots. I got pretty efficient in changing shoes by now. And there are a lot of things like that. I don't say that this way of life has only disadvantages. Besides the obvious relief of having to make your own decisions, the society lives in relative harmony. Goals and standards are more commonly shared. One of the nice side effects is a low criminality rate, which must be among the lowest in the world. But still, this rule thingy is just not my cup of tea. Actually, the Japanese government also realized that this way of dealing with things is not so grand. They decided that beginning within the next few years problem solving and independent thinking should be major parts of the school education. That's good. I'm just wondering who is to teach this to the students. After all, the teachers themselves were brought up in the old system of rules.
The other characteristic I don't like is the hierarchic structure of the Japanese society. This is especially bad for a woman, which I'm not, but the consequences coming out of that are still bad enough to annoy me. In Japan a boss is still a boss. I personally have real problems to accept a bad decision just because it comes from guy (in Japan it's always a guy) with the title manager. There should be at least a discussion, but that is not the way things are handled here. I know hat this can happen to you everywhere, but I found in Japan this tendency to handle things this way stronger developed than anywhere else.
Over all I do get along with Japanese people well. (Sometimes I wonder if they get with me along that well, me being not always the "softest" person when it comes to behavior) and the length of the section where I describe the, from my point of view, "negative" aspects is longer than their relevance would justify. But I needed the space to make clear what I meant. Actually, the whole "The Japanese" part grew longer than I originally planned. What the heck, if you don't like it you can throw your criticism at me here.

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This page is part of the Colorful Fish
by Ralph Wittkopp