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.