Japan quake map

Thanks to Tadhg in Koga, Ibaraki, for this visual of quake events starting on March 11th:

Japan quake map

(Epicenter of the 9.0M quake: 38.322°N, 142.369°E)

This will give you a sense of how people in Japan “slept” on the first night afterward.

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And gratitude to Jon and wife, Noriko-san, (translation), in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, for this chart of radiation levels:

Radiation Chart

Note that radiation at Fukushima Daiichi has briefly hit 200 mSv, (borderline), but subsided. Note also that the radiation levels in Tokyo are reported as “ten times normal”, i.e. still next to nothing.

Nevertheless, the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, 37 25 15.84N 141 1 57.96E, is not at all under control at this time. (The French Nuclear Safety Authority have deemed it a level 6 accident. (Chernobyl, level 7.))

Emergency Crew Battling Nuclear Disaster
Radioactive Contamination: The Unfolding Nuclear Catastrophe in Japan

Kaizen

Right now is the end of the busy season in the furniture removals industry and that is closely related to the school holidays. (School recommences tomorrow.)

In December, I spent a couple of days in a hamlet on the fringe of the Barossa Valley, 110 kilometres north-east of Adelaide, closing down a two-room, Little House on the Prairie style school-house; it had been established in 1882. Its fifteen (15) students would, starting in 2011, be trekking to larger, area schools and learning, hopefully, to swim in larger ponds, (holding their lunch money close).

The Australian government is amalgamating many schools into new, “super schools”, (freeing up hundreds of millions of dollars worth of city real estate in the process).

Also recently, on a Saturday, I arrived with a crew of nearly 20 to strip one such city school. The boss was already on-site: “Six trucks? Where’s the seventh?” A good question. There were seven drivers but one had ridden as a passenger, not knowing he had been assigned as a driver. The other guys went to work while I was chosen to be ferried back to the depot to pick up the remaining truck. An embarrassing occurrence, expensive and amateurish.

Naturally, during the ride back, my mind turned to how this mishap had occurred. It was quite plain to me. I wondered if the boss would figure it out and make a change, but I decided to say nothing in any case. (I am new in the trucking industry and my policy for survival has been based on I, Claudius from the get-go. That is to say, I emulate the harmless half-wit and keep my mouth shut. )

On a different occasion, a couple of weeks later, I arrived at work and scanned the run-sheets on the lunch-room table. I found one with my name and two others on it. The vehicle was a Transit van and, normally, the drivers name is on the top of the list. But not always. I went out to find the van but found the other two guys first. They were heading out to a truck so I accompanied them, thinking perhaps the vehicle assignment had been changed.

A few minutes into the trip, we discovered that between us we had two run sheets, for two vehicles. Each listed all three members of the crew. We phoned the office, turned around, returned to the depot and picked up the other vehicle — the Transit van.

Run sheets list every member of a crew but there is one run sheet for every vehicle. So your name might appear on one or more run sheets with no indication of how many vehicles in total are involved. Multiple run-sheets for a job are placed together on the table early in the morning but soon get split up as people arrive and sift through them all to find out what job they are on. To further confuse the issue, early arrivers often take run sheets out to the warehouse to use its list of required materials to begin loading.

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In the West, failures like these are usually regretted as unavoidable errors made by individuals and promptly forgotten. Often enough also, tempers are lost and the perceived offender is hunted, blamed and berated to do better. He is expected to conform to the system and to know it intimately even if no training is offered.

But as an engineer, I know that (business) systems are living entities that must be nurtured. They are the repository of experience and methodology. They are usually the product of numerous minds and it may be that they are understood wholly by none.

Every failure is an opportunity for discovery, tuning and improvement.

The Japanese use the word, kaizen, to describe this incremental refinement. In Japanese culture, every failure is perceived as an opportunity. Blame has little role since the objective is a system that itself possesses the fault-tolerance to succeed with the human material available.

Remarkably, in the 50s and 60s, “Made in Japan” was synonymous with “cheap, worthless junk”, (just as “Made in China” is now). The man[1] who taught the Japanese much of what they needed to spur their relentless quest for quality was hardly known in his own country until not long before his death, but is revered as a hero in Japan and is also regarded as the foreigner who has had most impact upon Japan.

In Japan, every worker is a participant in this quest for quality and shares in responsibility for it. Thus, the elementary human trait of taking pride in one’s work is stimulated. Furthermore, in complex systems in which no one person possesses a complete overview[2] of a system, input from all perspectives is essential in studying a system failure.

Every failure in a system that is corrected prevents future repeats. A system that is being perpetually refined incrementally tends also to be more adaptable to change in environment and requirements.

Any system that requires perfect performance from people, or extensive system knowledge, or consideration of what other parts of the system are doing is a poor system and one likely to fail often and horribly.

The system is the key asset and yet it is the workers who tend it that drive it toward ultimate success. (If you are envisaging a parallel with the symbiotic relationship between ants and their colony, you are on track.)

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What if our whole society were perceived by us as a system to be constantly monitored, analyzed and refined?

What if every failure and short-coming were taken seriously with a view to preventing re-occurrence or to improve performance in serving the members of society?

What if each of us felt responsible, insofar as we each were capable, of contributing to a better quality of experience for all?

Could we all continue to blithely ignore major structural failures in society or deem them merely as unfortunate accidents?

Failures such as:

• Representative democracy is hardly at all representing the welfare of people any more. The rule of law has been blighted in the process.
• The major, financial institutions that have destroyed the economies of the West in the last decade through reckless decisions go unpunished; in fact, are rewarded with bail-outs and greater influence. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is nowhere to be seen.
• British Petroleum last year dealt the ecology of the planet the most stunning blow in human history. Tens of thousands of people in states neighboring the Gulf of Mexico will be impacted by health problems related to ethylbenzene contamination of their bloodstreams, but even this pales compared to the damage done to the oceans and life therein.

Would we not think long and hard about the systemic causes of such failures and try to comprehend?

Or failing that, would we still condemn those who do theorize about patterns of failure in our society to meet its stated goals?

Do we just put our heads in the sand and think, “not my responsibility”, “too hard”, “nothing I can do”?

From the cultural viewpoint of kaizen, missing the opportunity to make things better is what is really weird to try to understand.

[To be continued]

[1] The American, W.E.Deming

[2] In computer systems comprised of hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of lines of code written over time spanning years, it is very typical for no one person to have read every line of code or understand every part of the design or operation of the system.

The Herbivore’s Dilemma

Japan panics about the rise of "grass-eating men," who shun sex, don't spend money, and like taking walks.

By Alexandra HarneyPosted Monday, June 15, 2009, at 2:04 PM ET

Ryoma Igarashi likes going for long drives through the mountains, taking photographs of Buddhist temples and exploring old neighborhoods. He's just taken up gardening, growing radishes in a planter in his apartment. Until recently, Igarashi, a 27-year-old Japanese television presenter, would have been considered effeminate, even gay. Japanese men have long been expected to live like characters on Mad Men, chasing secretaries, drinking with the boys, and splurging on watches, golf, and new cars.

Today, Igarashi has a new identity (and plenty of company among young Japanese men) as one of the soushoku danshi—literally translated, "grass-eating boys." Named for their lack of interest in sex and their preference for quieter, less competitive lives, Japan's "herbivores" are provoking a national debate about how the country's economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men's behavior.

Newspapers, magazines, and television shows are newly fixated on the herbivores. "Have men gotten weaker?" was one theme of a recent TV talk show. "Herbivores Aren't So Bad" is the title of a regular column on the Japanese Web site NB Online.

In this age of bromance and metrosexuals, why all the fuss? The short answer is that grass-eating men are alarming because they are the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anemic consumption. Herbivores represent an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy. Media Shakers, a consulting company that is a subsidiary of Dentsu, the country's largest advertising agency, estimates that 60 percent of men in their early 20s and at least 42 percent of men aged 23 to 34 consider themselves grass-eating men. Partner Agent, a Japanese dating agency, found in a survey that 61 percent of unmarried men in their 30s identified themselves as herbivores. Of the 1,000 single men in their 20s and 30s polled by Lifenet, a Japanese life-insurance company, 75 percent described themselves as grass-eating men.

Japanese companies are worried that herbivorous boys aren't the status-conscious consumers their parents once were. They love to putter around the house. According to Media Shakers' research, they are more likely to want to spend time by themselves or with close friends, more likely to shop for things to decorate their homes, and more likely to buy little luxuries than big-ticket items. They prefer vacationing in Japan to venturing abroad. They're often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they're in no rush to get married themselves, according to Maki Fukasawa, the Japanese editor and columnist who coined the term in NB Online in 2006.Grass-eating boys' commitment phobia is not the only thing that's worrying Japanese women. Unlike earlier generations of Japanese men, they prefer not to make the first move, they like to split the bill, and they're not particularly motivated by sex. "I spent the night at one guy's house, and nothing happened—we just went to sleep!" moaned one incredulous woman on a TV program devoted to herbivores. "It's like something's missing with them," said Yoko Yatsu, a 34-year-old housewife, in an interview. "If they were more normal, they'd be more interested in women. They'd at least want to talk to women."

Shigeru Sakai of Media Shakers suggests that grass-eating men don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. He attributes their poor communication skills to the fact that many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked. "Because they had TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms, it became more common for them to shut themselves in their rooms when they got home and communicate less with their families, which left them with poor communication skills," he wrote in an e-mail. (Japan has rarely needed its men to have sex as much as it does now. Low birth rates, combined with a lack of immigration, have caused the country's population to shrink every year since 2005.)

It may be that Japan's efforts to make the workplace more egalitarian planted the seeds for the grass-eating boys, says Fukasawa. In the wake of Japan's 1985 Equal Employment Opportunity Law, women assumed greater responsibility at work, and the balance of power between the sexes began to shift. Though there are still significant barriers to career advancement for women, a new breed of female executive who could party almost as hard as her male colleagues emerged. Office lechery, which had been socially acceptable, became stigmatized as seku hara, or sexual harassment.

But it was the bursting of Japan's bubble in the early 1990s, coupled with this shift in the social landscape, that made the old model of Japanese manhood unsustainable. Before the bubble collapsed, Japanese companies offered jobs for life. Salarymen who knew exactly where their next paycheck was coming from were more confident buying a Tiffany necklace or an expensive French dinner for their girlfriend. Now, nearly 40 percent of Japanese work in nonstaff positions with much less job security.

"When the economy was good, Japanese men had only one lifestyle choice: They joined a company after they graduated from college, got married, bought a car, and regularly replaced it with a new one," says Fukasawa. "Men today simply can't live that stereotypical 'happy' life."

Yoto Hosho, a 22-year-old college dropout who considers himself and most of his friends herbivores, believes the term describes a diverse group of men who have no desire to live up to traditional social expectations in their relationships with women, their jobs, or anything else. "We don't care at all what people think about how we live," he says.

Many of Hosho's friends spend so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing. And the Internet, he says, has helped make alternative lifestyles more acceptable. Hosho believes that the lines between men and women in his generation have blurred. He points to the popularity of "boys love," a genre of manga and novels written for women about romantic relationships between men that has spawned its own line of videos, computer games, magazines, and cafes where women dress as men.

Fukasawa contends that while some grass-eating men may be gay, many are not. Nor are they metrosexuals. Rather, their behavior reflects a rejection of both the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West's "commercialization" of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman's affection. Some Western concepts, like going to dinner parties as a couple, never fit easily into Japanese culture, she says. Others never even made it into the language—the term "ladies first," for instance, is usually said in English in Japan. During Japan's bubble economy, "Japanese people had to live according to both Western standards and Japanese standards," says Fukasawa. "That trend has run its course."

Japanese women are not taking the herbivores' indifference lightly. In response to the herbivorous boys' tepidity, "carnivorous girls" are taking matters into their own hands, pursuing men more aggressively. Also known as "hunters," these women could be seen as Japan's version of America's cougars.

While many Japanese women might disagree, Fukasawa sees grass-eating boys as a positive development for Japanese society. She notes that before World War II, herbivores were more common: Novelists such as Osamu Dazai and Soseki Natsume would have been considered grass-eating boys. But in the postwar economic boom, men became increasingly macho, increasingly hungry for products to mark their personal economic progress. Young Japanese men today are choosing to have less to prove.

Alexandra Harney is the author of The China Price and a regular commentator on Japanese television.

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My first tip

I'm talking gratuity.   Pourboire…

Today I received my first tip.  In my whole life!  I grew up in Australia where there is no tipping.  I live in Japan where there is no tipping.  I owe Graham 30$ on my bar tab.  So what are the odds?

I used to have days in the IT biz when I swore I'd put a tip jar on my desk.  (All the time, now that I think about it.)  I might still be in that line of work if everyone who ventured into my cube had slipped a fiver into that jar.  (Ah, maybe not.)

Four joyous weddings today.  At the bottom of the third, the bride's mother slipped me the packet.  I'd heard it happens.  But not to me.  Not until now.

At home, I called my fellow Knight Templar, Father Graham, and he talked me through opening the packet.  5,000円.  That's 50 rallods.  One Ulysses S. Grant.  We are starting to talk real religion here.

IN GOD WE TRUST. 

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Leaving Japan

My first blog/post and coming at a strange juncture: the end of a long odyssey.

After 25 years absent, I am returning to the country of my birth — Australia.  I do not quite know how to feel about the prospect, but have determined to treat it as a new country and a new adventure.

About Japan, I think I will miss a) delicious, fresh, cheap sashimi; b) long, hot, deep baths; c) sakura, hanami, nihonshu.  And, of course, d) fast Internet…

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