Rudeness by Oblivion

I blame my recent annoyance with what I consider unintentional rudeness in combination with excessive patience and politeness around my office on my anticipation of going home. Three examples:

The copy machine / printer is capable of making copies, printing, and receiving faxes at the same time. However if someone is waiting for copies or a scanning job to finish they don’t budge an inch from the machine causing a line of people waiting to retrieve completed print jobs to build up. People waiting to grab a document out of the tray will wait silently rather than fishing their arm past to reach the tray.

The sidewalks are just wide enough for a single lane of pedestrian traffic in each direction but people walk two abreast at any speed they please preventing those is a hurry to get past. If someone approaches from the opposite direction one person will drop back to single file letting them pass, but immediately resume their position blocking anyone behind from passing. The common way to deal with this is to tailgate until an intersection then quickly jet past.

There are signs on the stairwell doors that suggest knocking before opening a door given that they swing into the stairway. I put the percentage of people who actually knock at 50. Doors are never held open and many people open doors just wide enough to barley pass through so any person close behind is forced to open the door from scratch.

Blood Types

On the application for access to Toyota one of the questions is the applicants blood type. None of the other questions stood out to me as unusual and the application inst that long, it requests things like address, company, license plate number, and the reason for requesting access.

Wikipedia has an extensive article on the history of why blood types because important in Japanese culture. Personally I don't know my blood type, I have attempted and failed to donate blood twice, but the Red Cross still cant tell me my type. The Japan Times also has an article with more information about the cultural importance of blood types.

Japanese Can Collecting

This is how the serious returnable can collectors in Japan go about it.

Body Size, Japanese vs U.S.

I expressed some of my annoyance at the difference between my size and that of the Japanese people I am surrounded by in a post about Nagashima Outlet Mall; I have since come across some data that supports the disparity that I deal with. In terms of height my height is nearly identical to the average Japanese male.

Country	Average male height	>Average female height
Japan	5' 7.5	5' 2.2>
U.S.*	5' 10.4	5' 4.9

For BMI, again, I align almost exactly with the average Japanese male in my age group.

Country	Average male BMI	Average female BMI
Japan	Just over 22 kg/m^2	Just over 20 kg/m^2
U.S.*		26.8 kg/m^2

*These values represent only my demographic and not the entire U.S. population

According to The WHO the cutoff for healthy weight is a BMI of 25, however in certain Asian populations the risk for health related medical conditions increases at BMIs lower than 25, and 23 is considered a more conservative upper limit. Despite the fact that I am the size of an average Japanese male, I do feel better knowing that people of my ethnicity evolved to be heavier than the people I am currently surrounded by.

Expensive Week

I have two work parties coming up in the next seven days. Despite the mysterious food, awkward communication and often pure confusion of attending a party with my co-workers, they usually turn out to be enjoyable. The first upcoming party is a wedding reception for my ICT advisor. W is marrying an OL from another department in the company and they are having a party, which they are calling a wedding reception, for coworkers. They wont actually be getting married until the following day which makes the title of the party is a bit strange. Guests pay the equivalent of $60USD for women and $65 for men to attend the reception with gifts being extra on top of that. A, who is a friend of the bride invited me to go in with her and 3 others on an electronic photo frame to which she will upload photos from the party. So I am expecting my total cost for attending this event to be around $80. I initially tried to sneak out of going but W caught me off guard when he approached me to ensure I had RSVPd since the invitation was e-mailed in Japanese.

The second party is a going away and Thank You party for Y-san who was in charge at the company in America before returning to Japan last Summer. Y-san will be moving to a different company in the group. Of course I would like to thank him, but the cost of the party in his honor is $70USD and the menu is Shabu Shabu which doesn't have a place in my diet. I felt obligated to attend and T convinced me when he was able to contact the restaurant about preparing me a veggie meal. It is usually against my principle to have food adjusted to fit my dietary preferences, but this adjustment supposedly also comes with a price adjustment.

I can tell myself that life is about experiences, but that is hard when I think about how I was holding off on buying a new bathing suit yesterday that I could have bought in multiple colors for less than the total of these two parties.

Japan Stimulus

The Japanese government is in the process of delivering stimulus payments and lucky for me they are available to Foreigners with long term visa status, so I quality. They payment amount is equivalent to approximately $120USD for me, but young people, old people, and people with children get more. Nagoya was reportedly one of the slowest cities to send the applications out, but I returned mine quickly so I am hoping the money gets deposited into my account before I have to close it for departure.

Hang Out Your Car Window Day

On my way to work this morning along Sanage Green road I spotted what I thought was a dog hanging out a car window.As I got closer I realized that it was actually a person hanging out of the car.
For the entire 8km stretch of the curvy high speed road the man hung out the window for what appeared to be a photo shoot of the red car. When a line of cars waiting to pass accumulated the photographer's car would pull over and let them pass.
On my way home I was horrified to see this child also hanging out of a car window and started to wonder what was going on.

Noh Drama

This afternoon A, M and I went to a Noh traditional theater performance in Toyota city. I had anticipated that it might not be easy to get through, and I was correct by the end of the second act a large portion of the audience was nodding off. Rather than straight across the stage and audience were arranged in an L shape.I am certain that I was the youngest member of the audience and that the sum of A, M and my ages was equal to the average age of the other members of the crowd. All in all it was a great experience that I don't need to repeat.