WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 12

Post-injury return to the grind

Today, Thursday, I went back to work. Before getting in the shower, I removed the dressing from the top of my head, relieved to see that the wound was a normal colour. The skin around the five staples looked healthy and uninfected, and seemed to be healing nicely. I cleaned the area with soap, careful in case it hurt, cut away the stained portion of the dressing, and re-taped the white fabric to the cut.

Soon I was at the dispatch office, where management and the other cleaning staff gave me a warm welcome. I reimbursed the manager (the one who looks like the one I call Skeletor, but isn’t him) who had paid for my ambulance to the hospital, scan and staples the princely sum of 26,000 yen and change. At some point soon I will write out a claims form to get the money back, as well as what I paid for antibiotics, given that this was an industrial accident.

Anyhow, today was my second day of training at Crazy Lunatic Paranoid Maniac Station, followed again by Injury Station (which is what I shall call the little place where I got hurt), and I was reunited with Flint, a mellower trainer than Rosco. I was glad to see him again, and we pottered through the sunshine, cooperating harmoniously.

Many Japanese people don’t seem to like chatting at work. I think a lot of them view it as evidence of a bad attitude or lack of seriousness, some abdication of duties that counts even when no one is looking. Flint was quiet, too, at the start of the day, but, as time went on, we bantered some.

I didn’t want to tell management about Rosco’s steering hands (see Part 11), which would make me a childish snitch, so I contented myself with bitching to Flint.

‘That guy was kind of nudging me around physically and it wound me up after a few hours,’ I said.

‘Yeah… Not everyone is like that.’

‘Is that common in Japan? To physically guide trainees with one’s hands?’

‘Hmmm. No. Not really.’

‘I can’t stand being touched like that,’ I said, ‘Makes me wanna fight.’

‘Abunai…’
‘Abunai’ is the Japanese word for dangerous and Flint was probably saying, given his tone, that my statement had made him wary of touching me. Later on, at Injury Station, Flint rekindled the conversation, clearly interested in hearing more, and I speculated that maybe Rosco was being physical because I was a foreigner and he wasn’t sure I could understand everything he conveyed verbally.

‘Perhaps…’ said Flint.

At both stations today, I was careful of my head. Whenever I went through a low door, I would fan my fingers out on top of my skull like a rooster’s comb, so that anything I approached would touch them first. I realised, coming back, that I loved the job and took pride in it and didn’t want to cause further incident. Working in the sunshine, usually alone, to polish, prettify and unclutter a public space is gratifying to me. Like a physically active form of civic meditation.

I moved more slowly today, but with purpose. There is value in doing things calmly, at a kind of steady and medium pace. I avoided thinking into the future, also, being mindful only of the task at hand. A friend at university once told me something that stuck: ‘If you don’t want to get depressed, don’t think more than five minutes into the future.’ That advice works rather well for depression, but it also applies to the rushing, impatient, frenzied soul. In recent days, I had been burning through the slate of cleaning jobs at maximum pace because of the perceived weight of what was left, so today I ceased perceiving it. There is nothing but this, I told myself, this thing I’m doing now.

And that made me slow down. And I was happier, and calmer, and better in my work. Flint, for his part, was awesome. He didn’t mind splitting up so we both got time alone, and didn’t buzz around my shoulder like an ungainly, nitpicking helicopter. And he said aloud a thing I had been thinking: that three days’ training is excessive just to learn the layout of a new station. All you need to know is where the mops and loo roll are, some door codes, and where to chuck the trash.

But I did get sarcastic… once or twice. One of the elevators at Crazy Lunatic Paranoid Maniac Station is due for routine maintenance, and Flint told me it would not be possible to clean it as usual tomorrow. ‘Good,’ I said, reacting to the serious expression on his face, ‘Was that news supposed to make me sad or something?’ He laughed, though that’s not really the kind of joke people often say here.

We finished everything quickly at Injury Station, and I strolled the platform looking for gum to remove. I remembered the decapitated bird head I had found there just before I hit my own, in retrospect an ominously poetic discovery. I wandered to the concourse where I had taken my bloody clown fall, surveying the layout of the ticket machines, counters, and ledges. Looking at the place objectively, I realised how hard it ought to be to get hurt there. You’d have to be incredibly unlucky, incompetent, oblivious or willfully self-destructive to split your head open here, I chuckled internally. Oh well… At least I learned a lesson… I’ll be deeply cautious from now on.

We returned to the dispatch office, where I was told how to apply for reimbursement of medical costs. I got changed and went home. It’s nice to have been back at work, and had a normal day, and reassured myself I’m not a slapstick donkey bouncing ball who shouldn’t be trusted with even a cloth.

I got my confidence back, is what I am saying, and learned a better rhythm at which to navigate my day.

Read Part 13 here.

And here is Part 11.