WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 9

Sadness, debt, and empty apartments

There is a Japanese expression ‘otsukaresama desu’. If you live here, you will have heard it. It’s a little tough to translate into English but it means something like ‘You have worked well’ or ‘You must be tired’. People say it to each other at the end of the day but also as a nod of recognition when they pass in the corridor at work. So, it can mean ‘End of the day, isn’t it?’ or, simply, ‘Hey’.

After a day’s work, the expression commonly manifests in the past tense: ‘otsukaresama deshita’. Between close colleagues it might be contracted into ‘otsukaresama’. I must have heard this phrase twenty thousand times. In my long-term office position, it usually sounded robotic and meaningless, an obligatory identifier of coworker status as lifeless as a lanyard. Between the cleaning staff I’ve met, though, it does appear to be used with conviction. When we reconvene at the dispatch office, after six or seven hours of serious physical exertion, I hear real warmth in the phrase, mixed with fatigue.

The dispatch office is where we come first thing to grab our spray, four cloths of two colours, uniforms and name tags, lanyard with gate and door codes, and station keys for wherever we might be cleaning that day. We spend maybe ten minutes there, some of it watching TV or using the toilet, then we do a brief chant and disperse. The chant is a checklist to confirm we have everything. That’s it. And then I’m blissfully alone.

Anyhow, as previously mentioned, a few days ago I was approached by a woman at Big Station. She said she was a cleaner too and we linked up on a chat app. Since then, we have been messaging a little and it turns out her husband also cleans for a living, not stations but vacated apartments.

One of our exchanges opened with a declaration that she had acquired around one hundred packets of pocket tissues, accompanied by photographic proof. When I asked what was going on she said her husband had nabbed them from a flat he was dealing with. The occupant had run away in the middle of the night, a practice the Japanese call ‘yonige’, which would translate as ‘night fleeing’. She went on to tell me that she’s had other things from the night vanishers, such as umbrellas and dehumidifiers.

I suppose the official policy of cleaning companies is to throw these items out, and that they tacitly permit cleaners to keep them by not checking up. I found estimates online that 80,000-100,000 people go missing in Japan every year, a staggering number indeed. But there are pressures here and I empathise; work is brutal, social mores strict, and there is a culture of shame that can hit like a hammer.

A lot of it, though, is probably caused by debt. If you’ve borrowed a sum from a loan shark or mobsters, it’s often easier to evaporate than to pay the interest rates, which can be as high as about 30%. There are services that will arrange your disappearance, too, called ‘yonigeya’ (fly-by-nighters), and these are mainstream enough to have websites. ‘We’ll get you away, and no one will know’ announces the very slick front page of a site I visited. If you’re drowning in shady debt, have a stalker, or you’re experiencing domestic violence, it says, just give us a call and we’ll help you reset.

I was hoping I might be good friends with the lady from Big Station, and by extension her husband, and that they might give me appliances he found. Maybe, I speculated, their own apartment has grown full of the bounty from miserable strangers’ lives, and some of it might overflow to friends like me. I think about weird stuff while I am at work.

But then she texted me again, asking if I knew of a certain religious group that operates in the vicinity of Big Station. That’s why she’s friendly, I thought… She’s trying to usher me into a cult! So, I read about this group online, and it seems they hard sell you with hours-long videos, nagging you to join their religion and taking a long time to give up. My heart sank and I began to fear a lengthy campaign of persistent proselytising, but when I asked outright she said she wasn’t connected to them. She was simply making conversation about the area I worked in.

Back to the topic of the dispatch office, there’s also a little speech at the start of the day. One of the managers will issue announcements or warnings, frequently about minor incidents that have occurred, and often about the weather. Be careful out there, they’ll say, because it was windy yesterday and some garbage bags blew out of a storeroom. Or they might encourage us to work carefully, given how it’s getting hot. At first, I found this information quaint, almost scoffing internally. It’s just bags in the wind, I would think… Japanese workplaces really can blow things out of proportion.

But, when I think longer, it seems only normal they’d mention it. You don’t want bags blowing about a station platform, hitting someone in the face. It’s dangerous and unprofessional, and of course you would want to mention it. Sometimes, even after all these years, I tend to see Japan as a different world, viewing it through the lens of my own perception of its otherness, rather than as a place where people are saying the same mundane things they’d say for practical purposes elsewhere. Sometimes, when you live abroad, you look for the exotic but it’s only flying trash bags.

This week I was almost late, for the first time, to the morning announcements and clock-in. I take a separate train line (which is run by a different company) to the area of the dispatch office, and there had been a ‘jinshinjiko’ somewhere. This translates to ‘human body incident’, perhaps, and is an expression denoting, I believe, that someone has fallen on the tracks. Or, tragically, jumped. It happens a lot here, and it feels like this year there have been a lot. Perhaps there is a link to the number of abruptly vacated apartments, the empty abodes from which my new friend’s husband collects her useful items. There is a dense and invisible sadness in Japan, just like in most places, and it hurts to think about it.

Speaking of sadness, I see a range of different vibes in the travelers at the stations I clean. Some are carefree retired people, the very nicest, while some inhabit the poker-faced cohort of clean-suited businessmen, guys I assume are stressed but who manage to emit very neutral vibrations. There are tourists, too, and I help them find their trains. These tend to be nice, one American telling me yesterday, apropos of me wiping a bit of stainless steel, that I was doing a great job. Most station-faring folk are nice to cleaners, though some treat you like an object, a wall or a barrier, a kind of non-person or human obstacle who hasn’t made enough of an effort to keep out of their way.

And then there’s the fresh puke of the morning, suggesting an all-nighter. I’d say this vomit is unlikely from alcoholic morning drinkers, as these would be at home, and was probably left by someone preparing to slouch into the last train home a few hours before. You do see people boozing it up, however, at nine and ten AM. Some of these are older guys, single perhaps, or enjoying a rare day separate from the wife. They generally look happy, savouring a beer in the improving spring climate. Others drinkers, though, exhibit the suffering blankness of the addict, that dead hanging face with a twinkle of desperation in the eyes, the blank and paradoxical expression of present yet dissipated focus.

I would say that 60% of people are indifferent to me, 25% are nice and 15% rather cold. No one yet has been openly hostile. No one has been combatively drunk. Most people seem content, about half mildly downtrodden, many distracted or enslaved by their phones. Yesterday, I got on an elevator with an 80-year-old woman, despite the fact that I am meant to avoid riding the elevator with members of the public, and she said she still cleans part-time at a school, though wonders how long she has to live. She said all this very cheerfully and we shared an awkward handshake I instigated at the end of the conversation.

The work is still good, although I wonder what would happen if I skipped some of it. My bosses don’t come to check on me and I doubt anyone is winding through the surveillance tapes to see if I am wiping every last rail. Though the window ledges get dirty fast, handrails and elevator housing doesn’t look any different to how it was when I cleaned it a day before, and I suspect that once every three days would be fine for some of the work. So long as I changed the vending machine trash bags and toilet paper, and mopped up any vomit, I doubt anyone would notice if I skipped all the rest two out of three times. I’m not planning to do that, but I wonder.

And, because my mind is free of the Microsoft Office Carousel, I think about strange things. Like… if I was a billionaire I’d pay for weird movies to exist. An ageing buddy cop drama called Rusty Badges, starring Bruce Dern and Gary Busey. The veteran actors play octogenarian cops forced by debt from retirement after the force experiences a sharp drop in new recruits. Three hundred million dollar budget. Danny Glover plays the precinct chief.

Plus, I’m meeting new people, like the woman at Big Station, recipient of umbrellas and tissues. We are going for a coffee or something next Monday night. She loves to message me about her work.

And next week I start training again, with Flint, at Crazy Lunatic Paranoid Maniac Station, a place I am yet to fully understand. I have passed through it and the structure is ordinary, but one thing I have learned from working in public is that the people make the place.

Read Part 10 here.

And Part 8 here.