Racehorses

Hideo is a businessman; he, along with his partners own three purebred racehorses. He charges to let these horses be used in races, and apparently makes enough money to make a business out of it. he owns four cars, most of which are company cars (all Toyotas). His favorite is his blue Vitz, a subcompact car which displaces just one thousand cubic centimeters amongst four fuel-injected cylinders. He likes it because the GPS system tells him good morning when he gets in for his commute to the office.

I don’t have the figures, but in our client files, there’s always a page listing students’ interests, previous travel experiences, reasons for learning English, school experience and occupation, among other things, I have gathered from these that a good many Japanese men have a predilection for gambling in many forms. Pachinko is the most obvious manifestation of it. Salarymen and office ladies (“oeru”, as they are known, it being the Japanese pronounciation of O.L.) spend hours in Pachinko parlors, watching ball bearings fall, hitting buzzers, bonus buttons and spewing a caterwauling noise which, when multiplied between several dozen, or hundred machines, is a caucophony that defies my ability to draw analogy. If I had any religious sensibilites, I might imagine that the sound the emits from these places and vomits into the street when the automatic doors open briefly to admit a new patron or as another one leaves, is the soundtrack to hell. The noise hits you like the stench of a porta-potty long-overdue for cleaning in a wave that lasts for a few seconds, then is muffled by the glass doors as they return, and becomes background noise along with all the cars, scooters, rumbling trains, station announcements, and conversations that characterize the sound of the biggest city in the world. Amazing, what they do with glass these days.

Pachinko parlors aside, the Japanese love them some gambling, if the number of files listing “gambling” or “horse racing” as an interest is any idication.
The lesson for Hideo that I chose today was on the topic of status symbols. At the end of the lesson, there is always a section that allows the students to make use of the vocabulary and phrases they learned in a conversational situation (as opposed to the majority of the lesson, which is comprised of drills). For this lesson, part of that section was reading and discussing phrases that related to status symbols. The first was “bigger is better”. He disagreed, for the most part. His Vitz was very small, but it had a keyless entry and ignition system.
The second was “you have to pay for quality”. Again, he mostly disagreed, his argument being that Toyotas are very well-made cars, and he only paid 1.5 million yen for his Vitz, shiny and new straight from the factory with GPS and keyless ignition included.
“Appearance is eveything”, I said. “What do you think? Do you agree?”.
“Ehto... Well, no. I don’t think so. It is important to have balance. Many Japanese wear nice clothes, and drive nice cars; cars are very important to the Japanese; but they neglect their houses. Because they spend all that money on appearance, they are left to rent small apartments with what remains”.
“Do you think that appearance is irrelevant?”
“No... It is important. In business, it can be very important. When I go to a Honda dealership, they don’t have very comfortable chairs. And their desks are not very nice. But at the Toyota dealers, they have very comfortable chairs” - He leaned back and mimed stretching out in one of the fold up padded black metal chairs to illustrate his point - “And very nice desks, with plants. It makes me feel more comfortable, and makes me feel better about buying their products”.
The Japanese love their packaging. No matter how small the item you buy at any supaa (supermarket) or konbini (convenience store), it will come in a bag unless you specifically ask them not to. At a bento shop (little boxes with your choice of a variety of different foods) one stop north of Abiko, you first choose what foods you want to buy, and place them in a clear plastic container, and placing two rubber bands over it to keep it shut. When you take it to the counter, that plastic container is then placed into a small semi-translucent plastic bag about the size of the plastic box. That bag is then secured with tape, and placed inside another, larger bag. That too, is secured with tape.

Packaging is a good example of the care the Japanese pay to appearance. It’s not done in a superficial way; they don’t use it to cover up shortcomings of the product contained within, but rather where westerners are primarily concerned with the end result, or the product, the Japanese see the all parts of the process as important, and would no sooner sacrifice presentation as they would the parts that led to it. It seems that, to them, the packaging and the product are part of the same thing. So, for Hideo, the “packaging”, in this case, the sales offices of his favorite Toyota dealership, with all its comfy chairs and nice desks, is evidence of a better product, or process, as it may be. But I still refuse to let them put a single, individually wrapped mochi ball that I’m going to eat right after setting foot on the pavement outside, in a bag at the konbini