Excitement in the Work Place

Last night was one of those nights I was glad to turn up for work.  Of late the job has been a little bit hard to take, mostly due to management issues, which are a little bit complex, but I shall try to give a concise yet comprehensive rundown of what we’re dealing with.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times, the bar is owned by my landlady, an 81 year old woman, who has been running it for the past 53 years (which is impressive in itself).  She still comes to the bar almost every night, and sits, smiles and talks to the customers, showing them a photo copy of a newspaper article on the bar from a few years ago.

Effectively, the bar is now actually run by a 50 year old Chinese woman (although she looks a lot younger and first time customers are unlikely to escape the "guess how old I am" game - guesses are usually around the 30 mark, but I always hope someone will say 55), who has been there for the past 6 years.  She makes out the customers bills, tells the old woman how much to pay staff, and prepares the vast majority of the drinks.

The pair of them come together to make a team that is quite adept at ripping customers off, the Chinese one usually adding a few drinks on to the tab.  Unless of course the customers are Chinese, in which case they only pay for one drink, even though they’ve been at the bar all night.

Employment of staff is an interesting process to say the least.  I might have told you that I got the work when I went to look at the old woman’s apartments for rent, where she nabbed me and told me I had a job in the bar, starting that evening.  The old woman is always on the lookout for foreigners or attractive Japanese girls to work in the bar, as they go down well with customers (a hot favourite is Russian girls).  She very regularly grabs them off the street and tries to get them to come up to the bar to sign up part time, adding their names and numbers to a thick notebook that stays behind the bar.  The result, very often more staff than customers, as the bar can really only fit about twenty people on the customer’s side, and it’s rare to get that many.  It’s a farce.

When there are no customers in the bar we have to go out on the street and try to get customers to come in to the bar.   Targets are usually groups of businessmen, although I’m told my mission is to find cute girls and/or foreigners.  I don’t really have a high success rate, particularly now, as I don’t really try very hard any more, as I’m not prepared to lie to people to get them into the bar in order to get ripped off.  I do say that it is an interesting place, which it is, and that we have Karaoke – on Laserdisc; a technology that had completely passed me by.

When I started out I was told that I’d be earning about 600yen per hour (just under 6€ and quite a bit below minimum wage).  I wouldn’t have minded too much if they’d told me it was because I was new, or because I didn’t speak Japanese, but what annoyed me was the fact that they tried telling me it was because there was a problem with my visa.  In other words – codswallop.  There are other words, but we’ll leave them to your imagination.   I stuck with it, though, as the work wasn’t exactly taxing, I wasn’t looking to get rich and I saw it as a good way to pick up some Japanese.

The other staff that work there regularly earn perhaps twice my wages, and the girls that she drags in off the road are offered a much better starting rate of about 1000yen per hour.  That is also irritating. 

The Chinese woman, however, pockets 10,000 yen at the end of the night, for about 4-5 hours work.  If we don’t get many customers, our wages get postponed or withheld.  In a way I am lucky that I earn so little, as I usually get paid what I’m owed, whereas the others might never get it.

Right.  Not exactly concise, but a picture has been painted nonetheless.  In short, they rip off both staff and customers on a regular basis.

So, last night, I came in from my rounds on the street to find an Aussie guy in his forties sitting at the bar looking through the photos from years back.  He was looking to see if he was in any, as he’d worked there for a year and a half when he first came to Japan, 16 years ago (another one to have come on a Working Holiday and ended up staying, I’ve been meeting a few).  It was while he was reminiscing that my next-door neighbour stormed up the stairs and had a big barney with the old woman.  Apparently she had used her spare key to his apartment when he was out to go in and take one of his gallon drums of heating paraffin, which presumably at that moment was keeping us nice and toasty in the bar.  The police were called, by my neighbour, I think, and so they all went downstairs and spent well over an hour outside. 

I assumed that the matter had been sorted when the old woman came back up to the bar at about midnight, just as we prepared to leave, but I was surprised to find the guards were still sitting outside the front door in their car.  So I took the opportunity to take a few cheeky pics (with the camera that I finally got repaired after four practically pictureless months).  I’m not sure, but they may have been waiting for everyone to leave before they took her away, or maybe the Chinese manager was going to drive her to the station.  Either way, it was a long time before I heard her arrive at her apartment upstairs.

Overall it was immensely satisfying to see the events unfold first hand.

Approaching Winter.

As I mentioned in the last lengthy post, the first snow fell in Niseko last week.  On the evening of the same day, it also fell here in the city, and so I got a little taste of what the place will be like during the winter.  Bloody cold, that’s what.

I also got an idea of how the snow effects city life.

First of all, on the main streets the snow is cleared away from the footpaths, but in the smaller areas, like where I live, it builds up.  Added to this, the snow ploughs heap snow from the road up against the pavements. 

This all has the effect of making cycling pretty dicey, especially when one has no intention of investing in snow tyres.

Obviously, I no longer cycled on the road, as this would have invited quite serious injury or death, and, to tell the truth, I’m fairly certain that I can injure myself quite sufficiently on the footpaths that haven’t been cleared.  The two outings that I made when the snow was prevalent, were both undertaken with plenty of time to spare, and were more for research on the effect of the snow on one’s ability to stay upright on the bicycle than to get to work in a huge hurry.  The intelligence gathered from these expeditions will hopefully have given me enough knowledge of the white menace to avoid any mishaps in the event of another fall.

So far this is what I’ve learned:

• Do not try cycling through snow while negotiating a turn
• Dismount in areas where the pavement slopes from left to right, or visa versa, i.e. in any other direction than the direction you are cycling.
• High speeds should be avoided, as should sudden changes in direction.  Ramming snowdrifts is also ill-advised, though it may seem fun.
• Do not attempt to pedal from a standstill when the back tire is in snow – especially at pedestrian crossings and ESPECIALLY when there is a man in a suit standing behind you – to avoid wheel spin and resulting back spray.
• Brake in plenty of time.
• Cycling slowly is still faster than walking.

As for the apartment, it has, unsurprisingly, become increasingly cold along with the weather.  The stove still heats the living room nicely, although I’m running low on paraffin for it now, and I don’t know where to get more yet.  The bedroom, however, is generally freezing.  It had been the case that with several layers of blankets heaped up on top of me I was quite cosy, and changing at bedtime and getting into bed were the only issues.  However when the snow fell even the bed was no haven of warmth against the chill.  Last night I completed my migration into the living room, and from now on I only make brief polar forays into the other part of the house for clothes and such.

It’s not so bad though, as I have less than a month to go before I move to the ski resort, where I’ll be on proper wages (with a meal or two per shift), living in a warm house (albeit shared) with an internet connection, and snowboarding to my heart’s content (that is if I ever get around to buying a board).

Also, decided to try the internet in park outside my house again, and it's back working!  My luck is still in!

What a week!

Last week was, without doubt, a tremendous one.

Things started going well on Tuesday morning when I received a message saying that I had been one of three winners in an online competition to predict the date and time of the first snow in Niseko, the ski resort I’m heading to in December.  I now have a free meal for two in a fancy restaurant (well…I presume it’s fancy…although it IS called The Barn) when I arrive.  Boom.  Now all I have to do is find someone to go with me.  Although I have been considering the possibility of going alone and getting two meals, but there’s a limit to even my sadness.

So that put me in a good mood for most of the morning, or indeed, the entire day (although most will tell you that I’m a generally cheery sort anyway), and gave me something to talk about in the conversation café.

In my abundance of free time, I also set about completing my Halloween costume, which I had been doing on and off for the best part of two weeks.  I was planning on going as ‘Kaonashi’ or ‘No-Face’, a character from a popular Japanese animated film, Spirited Away, that I really like.  The idea was to do it on the cheap, which I managed, the most expensive thing being the material from which I was going to make the costume.  I started papier maché-ing the mask a few weeks earlier, so all I needed to do was paint that and boom.  All of the measurements were more or less done through guess work and by eye, and I spent more than 15 hours sitting or kneeling on the floor beside the low Japanese-style table in my living room sewing the thing together.  To be honest, I think the fact that the end result looked vaguely similar to what I’d set out to make was largely a happy coincidence.  While I worked I alternated between listening to my Learning Japanese programme on the computer and a variety of music.

Eventually on Friday I got it finished with less than 30cm left to sew before I had to go to work at the bar.   It was THEN that one of the girls I work with asked if I needed to use her sewing machine.  She was very lucky she wasn’t standing at the top of the stairs at the time.

Anyway, the conversation café Halloween party was on Saturday evening, and seeing as I had to cycle there, I brought the costume with me and changed in the bathroom.  Everyone seemed impressed with it, and I chose to believe that they were, and not just trying to spare my feelings.  The main flaw that was evident to me was the fact that at certain angles I looked like the silhouette of an enormous penis.  But nobody seemed to notice that until I mentioned it.

Another downside was the heat, as to give myself a bit of extra height I had a folded pillow sitting on top of my head (with a bowl on top of that, because otherwise the resemblance to a phallus was even more striking), which you can imagine made my head and ears quite toasty.

The work party finished up at around ten, not very long after the prizes for best male and female costume were announced.  I hadn’t even considered myself a competitor, as I thought that staff were exempt, added to the fact that there were other impressive costumes floating around, so I was shocked and stunned to hear my name called out, and to receive a bottle of wine.

I had had plans of heading to a bar in the centre where they were going to be giving a 10,000Yen (100€ give or take) bar tab for best costume, and chancing my arm there, but a crowd from the work party were heading for karaoke, so I thought I’d go with them for a bit, because everyone was having a good time, I’d already won something, and plus we figured the regulars would be the most likely to win anyway.  So off we went for perhaps two hours, where I chose my songs poorly, and afterwards I went to the club to see if I could find some of the gang from my other job.

Outside the club, I wavered, wondering if I could really be bothered putting the costume back on again to head inside.  But, just as I decided to go home, out came two of the girls from work, dressed as a dead maid and an equally dead nurse, who caught me and convinced me to go in.

After a quick change I went in and hit the dance floor.  Now, you may be surprised to hear this, but usually when I walk into a club, people don’t actually stop and stare, which is what happened this time.  People in close proximity (who I could make out through my peep-hole) stepped back to take the whole thing in (it could have been the pillow on the head which gave me and extra foot and a half in height which necessitated that extra distance) and it was invariably followed by compliments.  People made their way over to me to shake hands, and perhaps most strangely, girls were coming up to dance with me.

There is a raised platform (I suppose you’d almost call it a rather narrow stage, complete with a pole) which I was ushered onto by my friends, and we grooved around on that for a while.  And girls were still coming over and dancing in front of the stage, waving at me, etc.  I gave out some 'gold' (balls of tinfoil painted yellow), like the character does in the film, but I stopped that pretty sharpish after one girl tried eating it. 

After a while, the pillow was getting a little bit hot again, so I made for the door to get some air.  I was stopped on the way by one of the staff, who wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving, because I was after winning the prize for best costume!!!  I didn’t even know they were holding a competition.  And the prize?  10,000Yen bar tab, baby!!!

As I’ve already indicated, chicks here seem to dig cartoon characters, and this became all the more evident when after a few hours I decided to leave the suit in the cloakroom.  I went back to the dance floor, and tried dancing with ladies I’d been doing pretty ok with less than fifteen minutes earlier and was met with a ‘who the hell are you?’ look.  The natural order of things, it would seem, had come back into effect.

The following day, Sunday, I met with a woman for a language exchange for the first time, as she’d responded to a notice I’d put on the board in the International Plaza in town.  She’d spent two months studying in Galway last summer.  I went to meet her for coffee in the station, and was told that she’d be outside Mr. Donut carrying a Penney’s bag.   Of course I was looking for a brown paper one, and not fabric with the floral pattern that she had, but she spotted me, so it was alright. 

After coffee (or juice in my case), and discussion about Fr. Ted, pubs, music etc, I asked her if she’d come with me while I wore my Halloween costume on the subway. 

This strange request deserves an explanation.  In the animation from whence the character I modelled my costume on originated, there is a scene in which both they and the main character take a train to visit a witch (you should really just watch the film), which I wanted to replicate, and seeing that it was Halloween, I thought it was my best opportunity.  I know many people who would have politely declined an offer to embark on such a venture, particularly on the first meeting, but this legend simply said, ‘OK’.

So off we went, and perhaps because it’s not the kind of thing I’d usually do, I really enjoyed it.  We bought a ticket for one stop, and then went all the way to the end of the line before taking the train back agan and getting off at the stop we’d paid for.  Along the way, we got a lot of laughs out of a lot of people, and many asked for photos with me.  In fact I thought we’d never get away from the last station when the beginning of a crowd started forming.  But it dissipated after a while and I removed the costume for the last time, its purpose now fulfilled.

Overall it was the close to a fairly amazing week, having gone from never winning anything (apart from that three-legged race with my cousin in the Banner Rose festival, Kildysart, when we were 11 or so – the trophy for which still holds pride of place on the windowsill in my bedroom), to three wins over the space of five days.  Let’s hope it lasts.