Today, the agent sent me detailed information about the dormitory accommodation, including an app that I would need to download, register for, and sign in to.
One small detail struck me as rather interesting. The accommodation provider manages many buildings at once. Although the invoice named the building where I would be staying, and although the registration guide had been personalised with details such as my contract number and login code,
not one of the official documents I received stated the dormitory's full address.
As a result, I had to search online for the publicly listed address. Otherwise, I would not even have known what to enter in the arrival information on Visit Japan Web.
It was a curious thing indeed.
I also took the opportunity to look for organisations and associations in Osaka where I might practise iaido.
This much must be said: Japan is very good at organising information. Even kendo and iaido association websites provide remarkably complete information about their administration and dojos. As long as one understands Japan's administrative divisions, the contact details and practice times are all perfectly clear.
I looked at the website of the iaido association nearest my dormitory. It warmly welcomed beginners, but added one condition: practitioners had to buy their own sword.
How could a foreigner staying for only three months possibly buy a sword there…
I was also a little worried about the language. The instructors would presumably teach in Japanese. Would someone like me, who spoke almost none of it, really be accepted and allowed to train?
Better to write and ask than to worry too much. That was what I thought at the time.
Yet the previous week I had sent collaboration enquiries to many Japanese companies, and replies had been few and far between. I had sent thirty-three messages and received only three: two rejections and one positive response.
When I replied to that positive message, however, I heard nothing more from them either.
To lessen Japanese recipients' resistance to reading an email in English, I had AI draft everything in Chinese first. I reviewed the drafts myself before asking it to translate them into Japanese. Yet my impression of Japanese organisations and companies, now as in the past, has always been that most of the time they choose silence.
What, exactly, is the password that gets a Japanese business email through the gate? Might I have a chance to solve that mystery within my lifetime?
Over the past few days, whenever I had time, I also searched YouTube for videos complaining about Japan's latest visa policies. I wanted to hear how Chinese residents in Japan viewed the stricter new rules.
Even a Japanese friend I had known online for years, though we spoke only occasionally, responded briefly when she heard that I was going to Japan. The Japanese government, she said, was very unwelcoming to foreigners now, and she deeply regretted it.
In truth, because I have never actually lived within Japanese society, I find it difficult to comment on anti-foreigner sentiment there.
The same is true of Germany. If one looked only at YouTube, one would see an almost entirely one-sided picture of fear surrounding the refugee crisis.
I do not deny that these reports and arguments have some grounding in reality.
Some YouTube commentators said that both anti-foreigner sentiment in Japan and the tightening of eligibility for the Business Manager visa stemmed partly from people growing tired of perceived abuse of government social systems.
The same resentment appears in Germany: goodwill built into a system turns into something one might as well use simply because it is there.
That reminded me of how, nearly ten years ago, I fell out with a Taiwanese person over precisely this issue. I believed that certain social welfare systems should not be abused. She felt that I did not understand her hardship, and that using those benefits was, after all, within what the law permitted.
If I appealed to morality and told her that her conduct was questionable, the challenge would come back at me: was I some kind of saint in every aspect of my own life? When such disputes take place between different races or peoples, moreover, they are easily regarded as racism or discriminatory speech.
And so exclusionary feeling really can be stirred into life.
When a society asks newcomers to abide by its social compact, does that count as exclusion, or as discrimination?
When everyone believes that, because the law permits it, they may act as they please, apply for benefits, use them, and even tread along the grey boundary,
the collapse of a system becomes foreseeable.
讀者留言