Month: July 2005

These long, dreary trips out to factories way out in the country – I will not miss them.
When you leave the concrete landscapes of urban sprawl and start seeing more trees than cars, you know you have left the embrace of modern Japan. Strange things start occuring to you in the sweltering heat of an uncontrolled climate, as the lush green of summer passes by.
Perhaps the majority of Japanese will die never having peed in the woods.
Most have never camped outside for free, or without being in close proximity of the car they came in.
Surely, none would know how to wage a guerilla war from the forest and fire an M-60 one-handed like John Rambo.
Like I said, the heat gets to you. But the reason I will not miss these trips out to factories in the sticks is not really the locales persay, it’s the people who work in them. You see, it’s my own private theory that for the vast majority of Japanese people, happiness can be directly calculated from the concentration of convenience stores, train stations, and pachinko parlors in their proximity. Remove just one of these factors from the equation, and you are tempting fate.
It’s like the triangle theory of efficient kitchen design – you want the sink, the stove, and the refrigerator positioned equidistantly.
Anyway, factories are usually located out in the boonies, and the ones I visit are no exception. The workers live close by in dorms or cheap apartments (that they jokingly refer to as “log mansions”), and you can tell there is a serious lack of the Golden Three, as mentioned above, because everyone looks seriously brain dead, and zombified, and honestly, just plain uninterested in living much longer.
In Japan, it is very hard working with brain dead zombies who have lost the will to live in the sweltering heat of pre-summer.
That is all.