WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 29

Minarai: Rosco and I

(This is a blog by me, a foreign man cleaning Japanese train stations. I refer to my coworkers by nicknames and even so I’m not sure how wise it is to be posting all this work shit on the internet…)

Today I trained at two new stations.

My instructor was scheduled to be Flint, a reserved and agreeable man about my own age, but at the last minute he was switched out for Rosco. That’s the gruff older gent I was training with when I bashed my head open six weeks ago, necessitating a trip to hospital and five skin staples.

The April afternoon I got injured, Rosco was pissing me off… The Japanese word ‘minarai’ refers to a state of apprenticeship, or being taught, though the Chinese characters used to write it are the ones for ‘look’ and ‘learn’. The day of my head wound, the ‘minarai’ consisted not so much of me looking and learning as of me doing absolutely fucking everything while Rosco followed behind, at a distance that frequently shrunk to zero.

The man was on top of me, pointing and nagging and speaking with the discourteous seniority characteristic of many supervisors the world over. He even put his hands on me, turning my body left or right when he wanted me to change direction. As the hours went by, I grew irritated, then angry, then sort of hyperactive. Midway through the afternoon, I knelt down to wipe a length of steel siding, running along it with a cloth. This caused me to headbutt a metal counter, opening a gash in my scalp.

I’m not saying the accident was Rosco’s fault, because I should have ended my irritation by telling him to keep his hands off, and I definitely should not have run skull-first into a hard, solid object. But the fact remains that he was an aggravating presence that day six weeks back, and I was unhappy to be paired with him this morning.

So… Around 8:15, he came up to me in the corridor of the dispatch office before the managers’ address.

‘I’m with you today,’ he said, demeanour friendly.

‘Great,’ I replied, ‘I have a request, though.’
‘Make your request, please.’
‘That last time we were together, you would guide me this way and that with your hands when you wanted me turn my body,’ I mimed it out, ‘It put me into a state of irritation.’
‘I’m sorry… I won’t do that anymore. And you can just watch me today. But don’t copy my methods too closely. You’re with Flint tomorrow, and he’s the one to ask about things. His way is the correct way.’
True to his word, when we reached the first station, which I’ll call Bird’s Nest Station on account of its nesting birds, Rosco threw himself into the work and left me to observe. In fact, I got the impression that he didn’t want me touching anything in case I hurt myself again and he got blamed. I wonder if in April he was chewed out when I cut myself during his delicate tutelage. Anyway, he did let me carry some garbage bags and, later on, wipe a few things down, but most of the morning’s instruction consisted of me standing on the sidelines as he swept and gathered up crap.

Now, one thing I noticed, finally watching him work, is that Rosco gives way less of a fuck than Flint, the other trainer. Though we aren’t supposed to, he swept trash out from right by the feet of commuters, cleaned stairways from top to bottom instead of the manual-mandated bottom-to-top (people starting at the top have a greater tendency to misstep and topple over backwards), and dumped trash bags about the platform so he could circle back to them later. Plus, he almost hit me in the face with a broom handle a couple of times, once when abruptly spinning the thing inside the pokey closet where we stood.

If Flint gives a fuck about his job, Rosco gives the equivalent of a somewhat careless handjob. He is quite thorough in going through the motions, but tends to use the same cloths for everything, skip elements of certain tasks, and wield his implements perilously close to members of the public. And I feel like he might have skipped even more stuff if I hadn’t been there.

Even so, today he was more pleasant than during our fateful shift last month. He still spoke to me roughly, which I chalked up as standard old guy Japanese workplace culture, but he didn’t encroach on my personal space. In April, he was all over me like snot on a kid’s face, banging on and grunting orders, clattering around, and pointing at bits of concourse trash I would have noticed anyway. That day was a pile of shit, but today he flipped between mildly offensive and genuinely nice.

After Bird’s Nest Station, we moved on to a place I shall nickname Shoebox because it’s all cramped and bustling. Anyhow, as stated, I did next to nothing at Bird’s Nest, idling on the tiles and concrete while he cleaned the place up good. By the time we reached Shoebox, however, his comfort with me seemed to have grown. Perhaps he had been persuaded I wasn’t about to slice off an arm, because he began to assign me actual tasks.

We ploughed through everything, finishing early, and he went away for a thirty-minute smoke. Meanwhile, I sat in the pokey closet, dancing between phone apps, sipping a litre of sports drink to stave off heatstroke.

At the end of the day, before we returned to the dispatch office, Rosco came in the closet and pulled up a seat. We got to chatting, and I told him about the film script I sold last year (for a modest sum that has since become groceries). He talked about his old job, praised my initiative, and stressed how important it is to have dreams. We discussed other things too: heat, solitude, and the strain of my previous employment toiling in an open plan office.

On a sidenote: I find the cleaners more interesting than the office people I worked with and I wonder if that might simply be because cleaners are freer to talk.

Anyway, I started to realise that Rosco hadn’t really been rude to me. He had been talking to me normally, the way a much older Japanese man would speak to a younger one. He seldom said ‘Please…’ or ‘Could you…?’ because it wasn’t customary. It wasn’t needed. All he wanted was to tell me ‘Grab that’ and ‘Put that there’ as a neutral sequence of directives, a set of communications to get the job done. And it wasn’t like he was scolding me or imposing standards on my handiwork. He didn’t look for mistakes to chide me for, and, in fact, went out of his way to praise me a couple of times.

I thought back to the first day we worked together, when I battered my dome in April, and recalled positive feedback on that occasion too. He had been trying to encourage me then also, but I hadn’t appreciated it because I couldn’t see past his rough vernacular and annoyingly zealous physical comportment.

Today he took a step back and mellowed out, possibly having learned from our first experience together. And I learned something too: to view others with nuance, instead of reducing them to allies and villains. In the end, as we shared a chuckle at Shoebox Station, I was glad to be paired with Rosco again, because something between us had been repaired.

The next part of this series can be found here.

You can read Part 28 of this blog here.

And here is a funny book I wrote.