When I think of Valentine’s Day I’ll tell you what I don’t think of: work. But in Japan, it’s becoming increasingly common for young women to buy “giri choco,” or “obligation chocolate,” for their (usually male) bosses and coworkers on Valentine’s Day. It’s more common for women to buy chocolate for their officemates than for their boyfriends or husbands, according to a new study, and the fact that Valentine’s was on a weekday this year only upped sales figures more.
If it feels weird to buy candy for your boss on a day about love (I’m guessing Japanese regulations about what constitutes workplace harassment are not as stringent as the ones here), you can purchase “sewa choco” (chocolate given to a man you respect) or “tomo choco” (chocolate given to female friends) instead. Lest it sound like women are buying a bunch of candy for ungrateful people, there’s a Japanese holiday called White Day exactly one month after Valentine’s where men buy sweets for women.
The next time I complain about the dress code at work, I’ll keep this tidbit in mind: the Japanese town of Isesaki has banned civil employees from having facial hair. Beards and mustaches were deemed “unpleasant.” But here’s my favorite part of the article:
It was announced as part of annual casual office dress rules, which allow male staff to work without jackets and ties in summer in order to cut down on air-conditioning and reduce global warming.
The next time my boss gives me shit for wearing something low-cut I’ll just say that I’m doing my part to prevent global warming. Everybody wins!
In my many office experiences, I’ve done everything from group yoga classes to company-wide ropes courses, all in the name of “bonding” or “boosting morale.” As lame as both those things were, they were the company’s idea and not something mandated by the government. Now, though, there is a new law in Japan regulating how much people can weigh and how big their waists can be. Additionally, companies are expected to keep their employees slim – and fire the ones who don’t make the cut.
Under Japan’s health care coverage, companies administer check-ups to employees once a year. Those who fail to meet the waistline requirement must undergo counseling. If companies do not reduce the number of overweight employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015, they could be required to pay more money into a health care program for the elderly. An estimated 56 million Japanese will have their waists measured this year.
Perhaps more astounding, even before Japanese lawmakers set the waistline limits last year, the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) amended its recommended guidelines for the Japanese. The new IDF standard is 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for men and 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) for women. But the Japanese government has yet to modify its limits.
If they tried to pull this shit in America, I feel like people would riot. My obsession with sour straws should be no one’s issue but mine.
One of my hugest pet peeves is people telling me, apropos of nothing, to smile more. Usually, it’s some dude on the street who just cat-called me and doesn’t understand why I don’t appreciate his sexytime advances, but I’ve definitely heard it from bosses as well. I don’t think that forcing someone to put on a happy face actually makes them any happier, but it seems that the Japanese railway company Keihin Electric has installed a new software into workers’ computers in order to monitor the facial happiness of their employees. The software will periodically scan the employee’s face and note eye movements, mouth wrinkles, and other factors to determine how happy their face looks.
For those with low scores, advice like “You still look too serious,” or “Lift up your mouth corners,” will be displayed on the screen.
Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.
I can only imagine this making me even more angry, but perhaps it goes over better for others? Tell me what you think.
It’s really too bad that A-list stars have to go to Japan to make TV commercials. In an ad for Softbank, Brad Pitt himself plays the assistant to a sumo wrestler, even going so far as to carry his boss on his back. I’d be happy to show you the video, except that YouTube has totally been scrubbed clean of the advertisement. (If anyone can send me a working link, I’d love to embed the video here.)
That said… Brad, do you know what happens to sumo wrestlers’ assistants? You might want to be a little bit more careful next time.
Imagine if your company hired you from another country just to do a job. You ended up staying in the country for a long time, marrying, having kids, buying a home, and then one day the country fell on hard financial times and told you to get out.
That’s exactly what happened to many workers from countries like Brazil and Peru who emigrated to Japan to take blue-collar jobs that Japanese workers couldn’t fill. As industry boomed, more and more foreigners got jobs in Japan. But now that the global economy is on a downswing, Japan is offering these workers a deal – they’ll pay for them to go back to their home countries, if they promise never to come back and seek a job in Japan ever again. For people who have spent much of their lives living and working in Japan, often because of a lack of opportunities in their native country, it’s a heartbreaking decision.
The New York Times has a more in-depth article about what’s going on in Japan.
