Christeph in Japan

I have a fascination this one question, and lately I’ve been asking everyone within earshot: What was your first job? Sometimes this leads to cryptic two-word answers for which you must invent your own back-story (take for example “cookie factory”). Other times you get more information than you were bargaining for (”I mowed lawns so I could buy my first set of bagpipes”).

With my eikaiwa class, this simple question yielded a two hour discussion that shed light not only on the lives of my more <*ahem*> mature students, but also on the economic landscape of country life in Japan.

Their answers included:

• Counting cars. The employee sat by the side of the road with a manual counter in each hand, as part of a feasibility study for building a new street.

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• Correcting tests for cram school students
• Driving patients home from the hospital

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• Cold-calling people to ask for their support of a particular political candidate.

But my personal favorite was assistant driver. Why? Because apparently this job required no actual driving. Nor did it require navigation or keeping the driver alert. After some prodding, we finally got the whole story. Akita, a region famous for rice, produces a lot of rice chaff. In order to make use of this byproduct, the chaff was driven up to Aomori (a region famous for apples), where my student unloaded bags of the stuff. Fruit was then packed in this chaff, and shipped back to Akita, thus creating a perfectly balanced cycle of commerce.

I’m not sure what they did with the apple cores. But my first guess?

Composting them into fertilizer to grow rice.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Ambiance, EverythingElse, Thoughts, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.