Category: Japanese Society/Culture

Paperwork Crossfire

Having lived and worked at a large company in Japan for over a decade, I got used to dealing with red tape, idiot bureaucracy, and daunting stacks of interoffice paperwork and documentation. When I moved to Thailand to live a “simpler” life, it never occurred to me that I might find a tangled mess of paperwork to rival that of any developed country. However, today I find myself in the crossfire of two separate government offices that simply cannot agree with each other and hope to silence the other by firing enormous salvos of paperwork at each other.

It seems like every other day I’m getting a new form from one office, demanding that I provide a detailed answer to every request, and then almost immediately afterwards another form from the other office, with significantly different and sometimes contradictory requests. I try to explain the situation and provide the correct answer, but it doesn’t seem to help.

Jiro Inagaki & Soul Media – Funky Stuff (1975)

ファンキー・スタッフ
稲垣次郎とソウル・メディア

You may think you are cool… But you will be much cooler after you pour this in your ear and let it seep from your pores and permeate throughout your personal space.

I mean, until you hear homie singing and humming along to the bass line, you really haven’t lived. This is what he looks like:

Our storage room with all my Case Logic gear was flooded in October. So I’ve been going through the absolute mess made of my perfectly organized collection and listening to CDs for the first time in 20 years. There’s some real gems in there.

Jeff Goldblum – The Future is on LSIs (Rohm)

When I started out as a copywriter in a medium-sized translation office in Miyakojima, Osaka, I had more translation and technical writing jobs than anything very creative… but in that first year, a huge job landed on my desk, unbeknownst to me. The job was simple, the client wanted a rewrite and “native check” from a random gaijin on staff – me. The original headline was a single sentence, roughly worded. Something like, “We can see the future on this LSI.” Of course, nobody knew (and to this day, nobody knows) what an LSI was, so: “Large-scale integration (LSI) is the process of integrating or embedding thousands of transistors on a single silicon semiconductor microchip.” In semiconductor manufacturing circles, it refers to a specific kind of microchip.

I tried to convince the client to replace “LSI” with “microchip” for a few hours, but to no avail – the nomenclature was set in stone. So I suggested “The Future is on LSIs,” and promptly moved onto the next job. I was used to knocking out several quick jobs a day, so I didn’t really give it a second thought. Until I was watching TV one day half a year later and saw Jeff Goldblum, in the desert, with a spiky haircut, speaking words I had written:

It was my proudest day as a copywriter.

Later in my career, I would work with advertising legends like Leo Burnett on hot accounts like Sony Vaio, Virgin Records, and the Honda Insight, but I would always be drawn back to that hot day in the translation office in Osaka.

Kewpie’s Frankeneggs – Snowman Kimipuchi

On the right, a normal egg yolk. On the left, a fake yolk AKA the Snowman Kimipuchi:

A user on Twitter performed this experiment in a frying pan with a fake egg found in a convenience store bento, and the Japanese are outraged!

The list of ingredients on the Kewpie page sounds a lot like the ingredients in their mayonnaise:

I understand the concern of Japanese bento eaters, but I’m also really curious about the taste…