A note about the quirkiness of Japan.

When people ask me what’s special about Japan, I think for a minute and then say, amongst other things, the quirkiness. They then ask me what I mean by that and that is where things get difficult. It is tough to put your finger on it really. In many, many ways, Japan is just like a big city back home. Trains and buses and cars, ferry people around busy streets, rain falls, the sun shines, people go to work and come home from work, stopping off at the pub on the way -just like back home. But it’s not like back home; there's a multitude of minute things that add up that make it quirky. Some examples. Back home, men are not instructed to sit down when having a wee in a public toilet, 

back home you can’t get apple flavoured coca cola 

and imagine you wanted to name your beauty parlour after someone famous, who would you choose? Not Claude Monet, I bet.

 Also, back home we tend not to decorate our religious icons with knitted hats and make up.

These are just four examples, but everything is like that, everything is just a little bit off kilter. But the one only in Japan thing I really want to focus on is the 'office clean'. I've not worked in an office for a long time but I guess my office is  like any office in the world. There are the hard workers and those who work hard at appearing to be hard at work when actually they are hardly working. You can see the kettle dwellers who make constant cups of tea and the early packer-uppers who have turned getting ready to go home into a thirty-minute choreographed production. So, as you can see just a normal office setting. Except, on Friday mornings. Friday morning is cleaning time. All the staff head to the cleaning cupboard and grab feather dusters, hand-held vacuums, lint rollers or wet wipes and give the place a once over. For the Japanese staff, this is second nature, they know their roles and they get dusting. The immigrant staff on the other hand, well, we all shuffle about looking embarrassed, not really knowing what to do, wondering what fresh hell this is. I’m not knocking this, by the way. I love the idea of taking responsibility for your environment in a community event, but it just takes a bit of getting used to.