WORKING IN JAPAN: PT.10

An aside about job options

Thinking about types of work, I have sorted many of the jobs that exist into three rough categories. I am aware that these categories are incredibly reductive, but I’ll run through them nonetheless.

One type is very high-level brainwork. These are jobs for innovators with niche technical knowledge, people who can develop cutting edge AI or design sophisticated buildings and civil infrastructure. You might insert lawyers, medical researchers and chefs into this category. Anyway, there are people who use their brains at work in a way that is imaginative and stimulating. With my total lack of experience in any of these fields, and my master’s degree in English literature, I would struggle to find employment like this.

I can, however, get paid to do a different kind of brainwork, and it is, for me, the worst kind: repetitive and unvaried mental tasks that must be performed within a tightly prescribed framework of action. Things like creating a spreadsheet of sales leads, each evaluated by their level of promise. Or taking long notes during a Zoom call about the market strategy of a partner company. Or creating a PowerPoint presentation based on the vision of my employer, one that needs to include a bunch of finely dictated elements and which will inevitably be returned to me multiple times for revision.

I can get this type of office job, where the mind is full but bored. Your head is packed with THEIR thoughts, leaving little space for dreaming. Your thinking meat becomes a machine, a processor, a worn-out tool the employer expects to perform accurately and to order as they push you to constantly improve and develop your ‘skills’. It’s an unnatural and dull circumstance for the (or, at least, my) human mind: repetitive and unstimulating tasks of processing, editing and file creation. It’s not like the cool kind of brainwork, the type that entails conjuring novelties at the frontier.

A further bugbear of basic office positions is coworkers. There are few exciting conversations to be had because the work is routine, and chat about private matters is frowned upon. Colleagues are just kind of… present. And if it’s open plan, like it normally is in Japan, you can see them the entire time, often in the periphery of your vision, or hear them typing behind you. You’re cooped up with fifty randos that aren’t your friends or family. They’re simply there: semi-strangers in your world, forced associates each, in his or her own way, amplifying the ceaseless pedantry of the company’s practices. I wish I could do the other brainwork, the type where you design, discover, build, or pioneer.

The final category of labour, within my extremely reductive view, is body-work. Physical labour. This might be serving food, walking dogs or pushing a broom, which is what I do now. It’s manual and, often, surrounded by the public. You can chat and stay fit, and your thoughts are your own.

I took my current job – cleaning train stations – because, to my taste, the menial brainwork and physical office environment accessible to an humanities graduate like me, a person with little scientific or technical knowledge or education, is the worst kind of work there is. It’s like being highjacked or parasitised. You’re constantly computing, tapping away, and chasing deadlines for things the employer cares about but you don’t, and which you end up taking home…

You realise, in the shower, that you’ve made a mistake in an Excel table, or remember a task you should have started already. Suddenly, an idea for a new slide in some presentation occurs and you’re wondering where to put it. You’re having these thoughts at home, in your own time, office managers squatting in your skull.

I never think about cleaning the train station when I am at home. I don’t get ideas on how to better hold a mop or wonder if there was a piece of platform garbage I missed. Unless I am writing this blog, the job is gone from the sphere of my conscious concern. In fact, it’s not even really there while I am at work. My limbs have remembered the sweeping, wiping and trash-collection tasks with their muscles, and I stroll around on autopilot thinking about plans for my next book. I breathe beautifully oxygenated air. I’m outside in the sunshine and breeze, thinking what I wish to.

This may sound selfish, but I only want to have thoughts I’m interested in. So, work has to be one of two extremes: opening portals to another dimension or cleaning the inside of a vending machine. In either case, my inner monologue can be free, imaginative, and exciting. I simply can’t abide the mundane, middle-gear torture of the Microsoft Office-powered Office, with its stuffy air, training to nowhere, and the menial mental tasks associated with petty commerce.

And, as I’m no rocket scientist, I have chosen the path of the vending machine. I may not make a lot of money these days, but it sure beats getting nagged into a coma.

Read Part 11 here.

Part 9 here.