RiC#Code

I decided to talk about weird things in Japan, some are not so weird, but I haven’t seen or noticed them elsewhere.

Probably not the weirdest thing, today’s topic, is the Yakult lady!

Yakult ladies in Japan will visit your office and ask you if you would like to buy a bottle to stay healthy.

They are given bicycles or motorbikes to drive around town to do their daily rounds, its both weird and enchanting to see them, and you can bet your life they will always have a smile and a wonderful attitude whenever they see you.

Japan is a country of extremes, sometimes contradictive, this is one of them, where the sexism is so strong that we have a job description with lady on it.

Having lived here for almost three years, I have slowly and painfully finally understood how hard it can be for women to pursue a career, with the hopes of progressing upwards within a company to say a managerial position or an executive post.

Usually women are seen as wives, either as in effect or prospective, which means they either don’t get promoted much or they are given jobs where they will not hold much responsibility (not officially, but in practice they actually will inherit the responsibility of quite serious tasks, just not awarded or recognized for it).

The excuse to refuse women in responsible, high grade jobs is so that they can go home early and look after their families. Its funny because having said that, women are in fact given the choice of pursuing a career in an office or a responsible managerial position in Japanese society, but the chances are, they will give up with utter frustration because what tends to happen is that their male counterparts will give them all the work to do while they slack off and perform complicated political dances and dinner parties.

These drinking parties, where the use of hostesses are the norm, are usually compulsory, paid by the company and will help men promote themselves without doing any “real” work. Here is a very good link to Salaryman  night out.

Another reason women avoid the office work is because most male co-workers (salaryman) will tend to look like this

Yep, this is a typical young male office worker in Japan (maybe I will be like this if I stay here too long), now add body odor and air-sucking noises and you can sense the full experience of office work here.

The older male co-workers will look more like this:

I am talking from my personal experience, and from listening to anecdotal evidence from friends, but the stories are quite usually the same, where women will have to constantly be proving themselves working until late, and crying themselves to tears to family and friends and most men, here in Japan that go up the career ladder, do so through nepotism and unrelated reasons like (real example) becoming the Head Manager of the Weapons Importing Department because of having been the captain of the baseball team in high school.

Then to close it off, there are the frequent news reports of women feeling incredibly happy when they surrender to the status quo, like this one from the Japan times.

No summary here, I went off on a tangent about political repression on women in Japanese society, but all I wanted to say is that I think the image of the Yakult lady is cute and nice!

Something I have only seen in Japan and was surprised by it when I first saw it.

Hope to post some more on oddities I find here and there later.