Sometime in the very early 90s, I was on another of my breaks from grad school where I'd take a fulltime job in order to make some Christmas money, and, more importantly, get back on medical benefits.
The objective was mainly to sustain my healthcare coverage ("WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORRRRLD...." except for not having universal health coverage, subsidized university, extensive public transportation, and a sense of safety from being shot up in schools by civilians with automatic weapons.
Had I been born in Europe, I not only would have completed my doctorate but I wouldn't have had to take so much time off here and there to get a job to maintain health coverage. But qadr ("destiny") dictates the life trajectory of all of us. Along with our own choices, of course.
How much our life and choices is based on either will or divine decree is up for grabs. "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Something like that.
During one of these work-for-healthcare interludes I applied with an agency that hired administrative workers (read: fancy name for a secretary).
Immediately I was offered a job with a well-known Japanese bank. They’d promised me the chance to move up the ladder eventually; from admin to personnel, as one example.
I'd spent four years in Japan as an English teacher, so I guess they felt it was a good match. It was, at first. But that didn't last long.
As sometimes happens in administrative work, an admin may be assigned to TWO executives.
At this Japanese bank, I was assigned primarily to the president of the branch, and then also, to his second in command, one of the vice presidents.
Any company that sets up this kind of reporting relationship has never heard of, or has decided to blithely ignore, the biblical maxim "No man can serve two masters: either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other."
Every time I have been assigned to two bosses, this is precisely what transpires.
One will have a tape to be transcribed on the Dictaphone, ASAP.
The other will have a mailing, ASAP.
In business, it is rare that a thing is not ASAP.
I had been in those situations before, so I managed to navigate the double ASAP thing. That wasn't the problem. The problem wasn't my boss; the problem was his underling.
We'll call the President "Mr. Yamamoto."
We'll call the VP "Mr. Bakamoto." Not their real names.
The CEO, the top man, Mr. Yamamoto, who was the branch president, was a well-mannered, courtly older gentleman, with a kind, wise, fatherly demeanor.
I could tell that he was fond of me in a decent, grandfatherly sort of way.
I think he appreciated that I had a working knowledge of Japanese culture; I dressed and behaved professionally, and my work was more than up to par.
Once he told me to "post" a notecard.
He must have had a British English teacher along the way, because an American would have said "mail this for me."
He had said "Post this," so I went to the bulletin board and tacked it up on the wall with pushpins!
When he realized what I'd done, he laughed with genuine enjoyment and mirth.
Mr. Yamamoto had a very gentle spirit, and the best of manners. It was a pleasure to work for him.
I can not say the same for his underling.
Mr. Bakamoto, the vice president who reported to my primary boss, was, among other things, a drunk. Asian people often flush very red in the face when they consume alcohol. Many lack the enzyme that enables others to digest and process alcohol. The red face is a classic giveaway that the person has indulged.
Mr. Bakamoto was red in the face from the moment he sat down at his desk at 7 am till long after the workday was over.
He drank the entire day, but he really imbibed during lunch, probably under the polite fiction that these were "business" lunches.
He spent the rest of his day on the telephone, yelling and ranting in Japanese and English, always with that telltale red flush across his face.
I had barely turned 30 at that time, but I’d been around long enough to recognize when a man has less than honorable intentions. Mr. Baka, a married man, as virtually all Japanese businessmen of his age were, began dropping hints that became more and more broad as time went on.
I was able to play the dumb gaijin for a while, but his English was more than good enough for him to get his point across.
The dumb American act only worked for so long.
When it became clear to him that I was not interested, not even to the slightest degree, the harassment started.
He began a long and detailed crusade to make my life so miserable that I’d just quit and save him the trouble. Maybe the next cute young American woman would oblige.
When I didn’t do that, he began to “build his ‘case.’” “We must adhere to the law!” was one of his favorite sayings. Since I hadn’t planned on doing otherwise, I wondered what he was getting at. I soon found out.
Another young American woman had been through something similar, with similarly dismal results, and he’d tried to fire her.
Her father, who was a savvy New York businessman himself, got her a lawyer and they sued the bank for a whole lot of money. She was still there when I was there.
Blouses and skirts were in fashion then, and hers had a bad habit of falling open and falling apart. She’d sit at her desk and try to pin herself back together with safety pins.
The American workers would blush and look the other way or make a sudden phone call which enabled them to study a paper on their desks.
The Japanese would look right through her, as if she weren’t there. If you’ve ever been on a crowded Japanese commuter train, you’ll recognize that blandness immediately.
But evidently Baka HAD noticed. He got nowhere with her and nowhere with me. If he’d had the notion that American women were easy, he was quickly disabused of the idea.
Evidently he considered extracurriculars part of an unwritten job description, because when I did not respond to his clumsy attempts at flirtation, he started looking for excuses to harass me at any opportunity. If no opportunity presented itself, he’d make one up.
The admin assistants would usually go to lunch all together in a group to a nearby restaurant. There would be five or six of us all together.
We’d leave together and we’d come back together. Japanese are big on togetherness. The idea of one of us breaking away from the group would have been upsetting.
We always stayed together.
We were all working in exactly the same section on the office floor, which did not even have cubicles: all of our desks were set on the floor in the exact same section, a completely open area, so nobody was more than a few seconds’ walk from anyone else.
If our lunch group returned to the office a few minutes late, or even a PARTIAL minute late, the others would simply return to their desks and resume their work.
But every time I was even a HALF a minute late, I was called into a private room immediately, with a cursory nod of the head. I was then reamed out for being “late.”
It never dawned on him that EVERYONE ELSE AT MY LEVEL WAS ALSO BACK AT PRECISELY THE SAME TIME, but none of them were ever reprimanded for the crime of being a minute and a half late from lunch.
WE ALL WENT TOGETHER and we all RETURNED together.
Today, this kind of thing has a name: sexual harassment, or just harassment full stop. Today, workers simply do not put up with this sort of thing. I suppose we just put up with more then.
Or, MY father, who was a very hardworking artisan type of guy, just didn’t have the kind of cash liquidity to hire a lawyer on my behalf for a mere secretarial job in Manhattan, where administrative jobs were plentiful and easy to get, especially if you were a reasonably attractive, single young woman. Now that I think of it, I never even mentioned any of this to my father. I was too humiliated to talk about it.
The micro and macro aggressions continued.
When I stopped coming back “late” from lunch, he found other ways to make my life miserable.
I’d type and retype letters, which were always PERFECT, but he’d find something wrong with the text. He was not above reprinting something that had been turned in, PERFECT, with another copy that had been meddled with, to “prove” that my work was flawed.
He expected me to learn D Base on the fly. D Base was a very powerful programming language from the 1980s that he wanted me to use merely to generate the equivalent of a Christmas card list.
A computer expert friend told me that using D Base to generate mailing labels was like using a sledgehammer to kill a fruitfly.
Knowing a programming language had NOT been in the job description.
With no computer science background, no programming expertise, I had to teach myself D Base just to develop a mailing list and produce address labels.
The fact that this was way beyond the job description didn’t matter.
He had to find ways to make me look incompetent, because I refused to give him a BJ in the stationery closet.
As far as the mailing labels, I purchased a junior version of D Base on my own dime, that was MUCH easier to use and was designed for light jobs—like address labels—and generated the labels. I got the job done in less time than it would have taken for me to learn D Base from scratch.
Then he said, no, the junior version of D Base was no good…
Not good enough. Getting the job actually DONE wasn’t good enough. D Base, D Base, D Base. Mr. Yamamoto intervened at that point and told him, “as long as she gets done what we ask, let her use the easier software. This is not a programming job. Leave her be.”
Baka got more and more frustrated. It got to the point where he merely CLAIMED I was ‘late,’ but my time card said otherwise. That made his face turn even redder.
One day, I was exactly fifteen seconds late from lunch, and back we went in the private staffroom for another verbal screaming fit. I imagine that he had other plans for that private staffroom. He did not succeed in realizing those plans.
I said to my boyfriend at the time, who was a former CBS functionary and well acquainted with the Manhattan working life and employers who manufactured excuses to get rid of workers, that I wanted to quit.
He argued long and hard that I should ride it out and let them fire me, because in that case, I could collect unemployment, which I could not do if I quit the job myself.
So ride it out I did.
A lot is communicated without words in any culture, but that is especially true in Japanese culture.
We'd had an appointment to meet all together for my coup d'etat at 1pm.
One pm came and went. Mr. Baka was yelling on the phone as usual.
Mr. Yamamoto was sitting at his desk placidly reading the newspaper in a very leisurely fashion. Read a bit... slowly turn the page. Read a bit...turn the page. Slowly and slowly..he made his way through the entire newspaper.
He pushed that meeting forward for at least an hour. I was ansty and wanted to get it over with, but he was sending a message--not to me, but to Baka, that he was not pleased with what had been done. Not displeased enough to override Baka, but displeased enough to make us all wait an hour before the sentencing and execution.
Eventually I was called into a little room with HR, the VP and the president, and was told to clean out my desk. “With pleasure,” I said. “Mr. Yamamoto, it was a delight to work for you.”
When I left, I planted a small American flag in the middle of my bare desk, meant as a symbolic middle finger rude salute to Mr. Baka. I’m pretty sure my coworkers, both Americans and Japanese, smiled to themselves when they saw that.
So much for the plan to stay till retirement with that renowned Japanese bank. So much for the chance of a promotion. So much for the occasional paid visits and holidays back to Japan, on the company’s dime. So much for a would-be career in Manhattan.
The fact that I’d already learned Japanese didn’t matter. Baka wanted a BJ in the staffroom and I steadily refused.
The bank I worked for ever so briefly and ever so miserably was Mitsui Bank and Trust. It was located on the 83rd floor of the South Tower at the World Trade Center. When I looked at the list of those killed, I recognized some of the names: the lovely blond bank officer who occasionally shared with me that her Harvard business school classmates wondered why “she was still working for the Japanese.” The cut-throat Filipino accountant who was fond of getting other employees into trouble whenever she could.
I think Mr. Yamamoto had already been sent back to Japan, as were a few others I had liked. I do not know what happened to Bakamoto.
I hope that the ones who’d been kind to me, and my lunch friends, survived. They don’t keep people out of Japan for too long; a couple of years in the States, and back to Japan. I hope that’s what happened to the people who were kind to me, which was most of them. All of them, really with two exceptions: Baka and the accountant. But mostly Baka. He made my life a living hell.
I wish now that I HAD quit. Some things are more important than money. Like your dignity. For starters.
There are many clichés and truisms that come to mind when I think of how this played itself out.
One of them is: while we are here, for as long as we are here, we MUST treat one another with justice, fairness, and kindness, because tomorrow really ISN’T promised to anyone.
When you think of how fragile life could be… did it really matter that someone borrowed the accountant’s software package, to install it on her work computer? Did it matter that I used a junior version of a database software rather than a programming language? Did it matter that a few times, when I was WITH THE GROUP, I got back from lunch precisely ONE MINUTE LATE?
Did it matter that I refused to have sex with Baka, who had no right to ask for that from an employee?
I did not sue them, even though I could have. I just packed a bag, gave away personal items like notepads and pens, went home, filed for NY state unemployment, and was miserable for a long time.
Looking back, NONE of it mattered. None of it.
What mattered and what reverberates through the universe still to this day, is that a few people were really kind and gentle.
One man took his own handkerchief out and gave it to me when I was crying in his office over what had been happening. Mr. Yamamoto laughing at my “post” mistake, instead of yelling at me and writing me up.
Those good things, the small, good things, when people behaved with justice and kindness, are still echoing down the ribbon of time.
The bad things too, reverberate.
WE HAVE SO LITTLE TIME ON THIS PLANET.
So little time….and you never really know when that timecard gets punched for the last time.
Qadr means destiny, divine will, in Arabic.
The goal of life is to figure out what is qadr, and predestined, and what is within the circle of human volition.
I’d had hopes and aspirations for that job. Didn’t work out.
Qadr had other plans.
Thanks be to God.
Ameen.
