WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 11

An odd dinner, new trainer, and trip to the hospital

So, a while ago I was approached at Big Station by a lady who said she was also a cleaner. We exchanged chat app info and arranged to have dinner. On Monday night, I went to meet her and had an experience that was truly bizarre.

We met at Gusto, a family restaurant with pizza, fries, and so on. They have a robot waiter, which is basically a short tower of shelves with a crude smiling animated face on the front. After you order, this thing arrives at your table and you have to remove your plate from inside it.

Anyway, the cleaner lady arrived and was weirdly child-like and hyperactive from the get-go, just kind of dysregulated and excitable. She informed me she had invited a friend to join us, emphasising that this friend was in her thirties and cute. I began to wonder if I was being set up on a date.

We sat and ordered; I got some French fries and the cleaner lady started eating them too. I didn’t care, though. Then her friend came and we all started talking. It was mundane stuff, really, about jobs and who was married and who wasn’t. Their food came and we were having a decent, but slightly odd, time, me and this random younger woman and the eccentric cleaner lady. The cleaner lady then mentioned she had something she wanted me to read during the dinner, and that it was only one page.

I ordered a pizza. As it was about to come, the cleaner lady and the younger woman began conferring quite intensely about this thing that they wanted me to read. It seemed, from what I could catch, that they were debating the best time to show it to me. My pizza came and they were still going on about it. The cleaner lady was saying that it wasn’t the best moment because my mind would be preoccupied by food so, vaguely annoyed, I told her to just hand it over, whatever it was.

The cleaner lady, who had been messing around nervously in her bag, produced a printed sheet bearing, predictably, the name of a spiritually-inclined organisation I had no intention to join.

‘I’m not listening if this is anything to do with religion,’ I said, sliding the sheet back over the table.

‘That’s prejudice,’ said the cleaner lady.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘You should just give up.’

‘I won’t give up,’ she replied, which I found a little shocking.

The sheer unashamed pushiness was remarkable, but I went on eating, staring at a space beyond the two women’s heads. The younger woman sat somewhat expectantly, waiting for the older lady to advance in her persuasions. I wondered why the younger woman was there. Perhaps it was to charm me or, maybe, it was because she spoke a little English and would be able to translate the pamphlet. Possibly, it was just to boost the numbers in their favour and make it two against one.

‘Find an easier target,’ I said, tuning out a torrent of determined spiel, ‘I won’t listen to anything to do with religion.’

‘It’s not religion.’

‘It’s not something you bring up at dinner either,’ I said.

I was three quarters of the way through my sweetcorn pizza by then, and felt it was time to bail. Counting out the exact money I would owe, I stood up to leave, detonating the cleaner lady’s stream of exhortations into a fierier tone, like I had tossed a match in a river of gasoline.

‘You’re going to run away, are you?!’ she called after me, as I made myself scarce.

I got to the elevator, half expecting them to chase after me but they didn’t. I got out, having arrived only forty-five minutes earlier, fascinated but lightly shaken. I had suspected that this would happen, but hoped it would not. I think I need to be more careful.

On Tuesday, I began training at Crazy Lunatic Paranoid Maniac Station, which turned out not to be crazy at all. Nothing happened and the people passing through were normal. It was an ordinary, pleasant Japanese train station basking in sunlight and gentle breeze, populated by well-dressed, polite people.

I expected my trainer to be Flint but he wasn’t available so I was assigned to another guy, who I will name Rosco. Rosco was much older, and had a habit of clattering into me. He was literally hands-on, sometimes taking hold of me to guide me this way or that. His Japanese was gruff and old school, devoid of the gently respectful tone I received from Flint. Predictably, I began to get agitated.

Rosco would point out the most obvious things. I would be sweeping up garbage and he would point at it with his finger, indicating fallen items I would inevitably notice anyway, one second later, by myself. I couldn’t help but feel treated like an idiot. When it came to wiping, he marched about saying ‘Wipe this. Here. Here. This too…’ while pointing over and over again.

I decided to drown his energy, moving more quickly than him, being pickier than him, and disregarding some of his instructions to do things in my own preferred order.

Eventually, things came to a subtle yet noticeable head. We were in a stock cupboard containing a steel shelf that extended out of the room above a public stairway. The side of the stock room wasn’t quite a wall, but an incomplete assembly of weird barriers with the shelf at the bottom. If you can’t visualise it, it doesn’t really matter. Rosco told me to wipe the shelf as far as I could reach and I looked along it, seeing that the surface was clean up to the extent of the average human arm, after which space there was a thick, fuzzy layer of dust and grime. I laughed, saying ‘Look at the state of it over there’.

‘Just wipe the part you can,’ said Rosco, but I went on laughing, trying to build a rapport.

‘Wipe what you can,’ Rosco insisted, pushing me from behind, which caused me to nudge him away physically and mutter something I can’t quite recall. It was along the lines of ‘Yeah, yeah, OK.’

After that, the old guy didn’t really get in my space. But we got along nicely and he praised me here and there. We spent part of lunchtime together, during which other employees came. Watching the news, some us remarked upon a stabbing crime committed by a mentally ill man. One of my coworkers told us how the other day a young woman had been found naked on the street. From what I could gather, she was outside a convenience store and the police had nothing to cover her up with so one cop stuffed her in a body bag with her head poking out the top, tossed her over his shoulder and walked away.

Rosco and I did one more toilet check at Crazy Lunatic Paranoid Maniac Station, which was not actually crazy, and left for a second, smaller station.

The second station was easier and I was proud of my work ethic. I charged around getting things done. Rosco and I had an easy rapport now, but I think he was a little pleased I would be passed to Flint the next day. It was wonderful weather and I got into the sweeping, then the wiping phase, of the day.

That’s when it happened.

We went to the concourse, where Rosco pointed downwards at a piece of steel siding near the ticket machines. He wanted me to wipe it and I wanted it over with. Wiping low-down fittings is always a nuisance so I tried to do it fast. Instead of squatting and slowly cleaning from one side to the other, I placed my cloth on the right-hand side of the steel and performed a rapid, squatting run. Unfortunately, there was a metal counter I had forgotten, and I ploughed right into it.

The top of my head hit the underside of the counter and I tumbled backwards. I may have been knocked out, because when I looked up there were more people than I remembered, some visibly surprised. I removed the cap I was wearing and touched my head, where there was a long, alarming dent. My palm came away covered in blood. I told Rosco, and the station attendant who had come out, that they might want to call an ambulance.

I went to a back area of the station, where Rosco and the station guy put plasters on my head. I was told I had a gash of three-to-four centimetres there. I waited and the police came, followed by an ambulance crew. I was carried from the station on a stretcher, back into the beautiful weather.

Inside the ambulance, a detective asked me if I had done this myself or if anyone else was involved. I told him it was all on me. The ambulance guys took my blood pressure and checked my pupils, asking if I was feeling faint and so on. Rosco came and I joked that I knew who he was.

We went to a local hospital, where I had to explain in Japanese that my health insurance was in the process of being transferred to my new employer. I had a CT scan, which was clear, and they stapled my head up after cleaning the wound.

This needed five staples, which were applied without anaesthetic. It was very painful but I was glad the experience was drawing to a close. The doctor, a good-humoured but somehow rough young man, told me there was a steady flow of injured manual labourers into his office, many of them delivery men who had had truck doors opened into their faces. You shouldn’t have to pay anything today, he told me. If this is classified as an industrial accident, you’ll be covered by the government, so tell that to the Accounts people when you go out the front.

The Accounts people, however, wanted me to pay at once. I said I didn’t have any money on me and they asked if I had a credit card. At this point, one of the managers from my company showed up. I apologised to him and said it was my own fault but he was distracted and concerned by something.

He told me to hide my name tag, which bore our company name, and not to pay a penny. He also warned me not to say anything had been my fault. Just say it ‘happened at work and leave it at that’ he advised me, face dour with a touch of shiftiness.

And then he went to a local ATM to withdraw what I think was his own cash. He paid the 26,000 yen incurred by my ambulance trip, scan and staples, and we left with a prescription, printed image of my CT scan, and a receipt for the cost.

There was a long walk to the station nearest the hospital, during which I apologised again. The manager was kind enough but sort of inexpressive in a very Japanese way, stating that he knew I hadn’t done this deliberately. I said I was sorry and wanted to stay at the company for a long time, at which point he erupted into a weird sort of dismissive camaraderie, like I was part of the family but also talking shit.

‘You needn’t worry about that!’ he said, before returning immediately to a state of blank determination to find the local station, which he seemed to have lost.

I looked it up on Google maps and we boarded a train, headed back to the dispatch office. Once we got there, though, and the manager sifted through the pages of paper from the hospital, he became discombobulated by my prescription.

‘You have a prescription!!’ he cried, ‘We must go get it now!!’
I wasn’t sure if there was some rule that the company had to pay for everything and anything associated with my injury and, for some reason, do that right away, but I went along with it. We trudged out again, searching for a local pharmacy, where I had to fill out a form because it was my first time there. They wanted my health insurance card but the manager explained the incident had happened at work and we got a small slip of paper about claiming the money back from the government and I didn’t have to hand over my personal insurance details.

When the antibiotics were ready, I was called up to get them and the manager was ready to pay until I offered, at which stage, confusingly, he told me I could pay. Past caring, I forked over some money, listened to the explanation of when to take the pills, and we went back to the dispatch office.

‘You’ll have to give me the 26, 000 back in cash,’ said the manager, ‘Then claim everything from the government yourself.’

I just said fine, too exhausted to care, then asked for the next day off. It’s only training tomorrow, I said, so why don’t I skip tomorrow and come in on Friday instead? They said they would think about Friday but would see me on Thursday in any case. So, I am at home now (Wednesday) writing this.

To be honest, I feel kind of stupid. I went insane doing an office gig and now I’ve hurt myself doing manual labour. This has made me feel incompetent and useless. I thought cleaning would be an easy job but ended up smashing my head open. I was very proud of my quick, efficient methods but ended up not paying attention. I’ve dented my confidence in addition to my head.

It was foolish to think of this job as a doddle. It isn’t. It’s physically demanding and you have to be careful. There are hygiene and safety issues to consider, along with the protocol of dealing with the public. It requires discipline, which I clearly did not have.

I am going back tomorrow and I will do my tasks slowly and with care. In a way, I think this was bound to happen, because I was blasé and a little arrogant, and I’m only glad the lesson was limited to a cut on the head.

Read Part 12 here.

Read Part 10 here.