WIT Life #146: 明けましておめでとうございます！
Japan Trends, Music, Translating/Interpreting, WIT Life, Writers 
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WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
A big akemashite omedetou gozaimasu to everyone! 今年もよろしくお願いいたします。 I hope everyone had a good end to the year and that you are feeling ready for the Year of the Rabbit that we have now entered. I spent the night of 元旦 (gantan) or New Year’s Day with co-workers from the Japanese restaurant that I used to waitress at, and we enjoyed osechi ryouri in lacquer boxes and bowls of ozouni as we watched 紅白歌合戦 (kouhaku uta gassen) or the Red and White Singing Contest. The white or men’s team won for the 6th consecutive year with a healthy margin of over 50,000 votes.
Aside from the usual vapid J-Pop and classic enka, I was really struck by singer Kana Uemura’s トイレの神様 (toire no kamisama), or The Toilet Goddess. This acoustic ballad is a whopping almost ten minutes long, and it tells the story of Uemura’s dead grandmother, whose house she lived at for a period when she was little. Uemura was not very good at cleaning toilets, so her grandmother told her that a beautiful goddess lived there and that if she cleaned it every day, the goddess would make her into a beautiful woman. The lyrics were very touching and the melody catching, so I can see why it became one of last year’s most popular ringtones. Uemura has gone on to release an autobiography and a picture book with this same theme, the former having been made into a two-hour drama to be aired this week in Japan.
In other news,
two articles from the New York Times last week highlighted disparate aspects of Japan’s current economic woes: the popularity of conveyor belt sushi and challenges regarding foreign labor. The first discusses how a completely automated conveyor belt sushi chain called Kura utilizes sushi making robots (!) and managers at remote central control centers to remain one of the few profitable restaurant businesses despite the sluggish economy. One interesting fact from the article is that during the bubble economy of the 80s Japan had 503,088 restaurants, an amount larger than those now operating in the US whose population is twice that of Japan.
The second article talks about how difficult it is for foreigners to remain in Japan despite the impending labor shortage. This need is especially acute in the medical field, where nurses must pass a standardized exam (in Japanese) before being allowed to stay in the country. A quote from the article states that it has been designed so that foreigners will fail, and indeed it is so hard that only 3 of the 600 nurses brought to Japan from Indonesia and the Philippines since 2007 have passed. The government also protects interest groups, such as associations of native workers who fear that foreigners will bring down industry salaries, which presents additional hurdles. Here’s an article from Asahi.com which talks about the dissatisfaction of Chinese at Japanese companies, who are now shunning them.
Also, for reading of a different sort check out the NY週刊生活 article (pages 4-5) profiling myself and JET colleagues (in Japanese) in their New Year’s Cool Japan issue!
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