An Account of the Regular General Meeting of the Neighborhood Association
The regular general meeting of the neighborhood association is now over. Let me here record for diary and any other purposes the proceedings.
I was asked to conduct the meeting, so I wore a suit, albeit with no tie. Forty-two people showed up in person. Eighty provided proxies with their personal seals thereon. We more than exceeded the bylaw-defined quorum of one-third of the total number of households, which was 218 this fiscal year.
I started speaking welcome greetings at 13:00:00. “定刻となりましたので、” (“Inasmuch as the scheduled time has arrived…”) I love starting a meeting exactly on time without quarter for any circumstance. This is a teaching I received from the Boss and other people who spend a lot of time in community meetings. Get the damn thing rolling and then deal with whatever.
Once we got welcome greetings out of the way, I was tasked with nominating a meeting chair. In the many general annual meetings I have seen in Japan, Robert’s Rules or something close thereunto have been quite faithfully followed. It is a good thing. It is also important to keep things moving, though, so usually someone has been prearranged to serve as the chair, despite the spontaneous appearance put forth. So it was today when I said “Now for the matter of selecting a chair. The bylaws do not prescribe a particular method of selection, so may I be given discretion by the body of attendees as to the selection?” to which the group gave their assent. Then I said “Having gained your assent and discretion, I appoint K-san” to which the group gave their assent by applause.
K-san did a great job of running things. There were several exchanges of opinions, some a bit more energetic than usual. Which is always good.
When the financial report for the previous fiscal year was made, an older woman who I had never before seen raised an objection to the association having placed, as budgeted and executed for several years running, 200,000 yen into its reserve bank account, which as of this writing had grown to 4,800,000 yen ($36,000 or so). She asked what that fund is for. The treasurer, who speaks in a maddeningly small voice that evidently cannot be made louder no matter how strenuous our exhortations, gave a meandering and inaudible explanation that amounted to “I was just doing what had been budgeted and am not really aware of the purpose of the fund.” The vice president who isn’t me then explained in an audible voice that back when we didn’t have our current meeting hall, the reserve fund was begun in anticipation of having to eventually build a new meeting hall. But then the current one was built by a private company that owned the land on which our previous hall stood, and let us rent for a generously low price of 180,000 yen a year a large first-floor space, in what otherwise became a nice apartment residence with a few dozen units. Nevertheless, the reserve saving went on unchecked.
The woman suggested that we return 1,000 yen to every household, rather than bank last year’s 200,000-yen reserve. This was a non-starter for several reasons including the fact that the year’s books were closed and audited already, and that giving every household cash would be a massive pain in the ass. I for one would pay the woman 10,000 yen out of my own pocket to avoid having to track down people from the several households under my aegis and pay them in person, which would be the only viable way to do such a thing.
There is at every general meeting of every organization I have been part of in Japan a person who one has rarely seen doing anything, but who has strong and voluminous opinions on how things should have been done or should be done. Usually they are allowed to say their peace while also being summarily ignored. As a fool I like to engage these people earnestly, somewhat out of sincerity but also in order to leave them with no cause to say they were ignored. Then I spring the trap by trying to bring them into the fold of people who do things rather than just bitch about them.
However, in this case, I also agreed with her. We aren’t building a new meeting hall anytime soon and we don’t have a stated purpose for this reserve. Also, our 6,000-yen-per-household annual dues are on the high side. We should be giving more back to the membership than we do, especially after three years of giving virtually nothing back during covid but still collecting dues as usual. And if it is a rainy-day fund with a particular purpose, then we need to define it as such. Until then, we should stop adding to it for no good reason. Later during discussion of the budget for the new year, I moved that we not add to the reserve but instead place the 200,000 yen in an incidental category, which if unused will roll into the next year and not flow into a reserve that is never again tapped. The motion carried.
A report was given of the previous year’s activities (Ex: “On Saturday, May XX, we held a directors’ meeting at 19:30 in the meeting hall.”). The December community disaster preparedness training was mentioned. After the whole activity report was done, one woman raised her hand in response to the chair asking if there were any questions. She was quite exercised and demanded to know if soon-to-expire emergency food supplies were distributed at that training. The outgoing president replied that yes, well, sort of; already-expired foodstuffs were given to the association. The woman was disappointed that the general membership had not been given a chance to avail themselves of the food. I got the chair’s leave to respond, and said that since the food was expired and covid was still a bit touch-and-go, we had decided not to distribute them or invite people to come collect them. She did not like that, and the previous woman who had opposed the reserve fund addition chimed in to agree. I answered that next year, we would be happy to provide such an opportunity. The chimer-in snapped back, “Well, not everyone can walk to the disaster supply shed, so the directors should bring the supplies to everyone’s home.” I said that is not practical and is too much of a burden on the directors. She said that surely the directors can be expected to do at least that. The crowd laughed at this exchange, because, several people told me later, that was a ridiculous demand. At the time, though, my insecurity made me wonder if the crowd was laughing at me for having gotten my ass handed to me by these inquisitors. That feeling did not subside, but my logical side also told me things were fine. This is a nice thing—there was a time when my youthful temper and insecurity would have folded at that moment. In any case I grinned and bore it and laughed along with everyone. “Sure, will do,” I said.
I should explain somewhere, and so I will explain here, that the reason I responded to so many questions despite not being the president was that (a) the other vice president is more given to fiery and somewhat hard-to-follow responses of a defensive nature and (b) the outgoing president is simply not one to even get into such an exchange because he doesn’t give a single damn. So I elected to try my hand at both explaining our thinking and actions while saying lots of “おっしゃる通り” (“You’re totally right, and [reasons they weren’t totally right]”. )
During the proceedings, several of the college sumo wrestlers who inhabit a nearby apartment could be seen milling about outside the entrance to our meeting hall. Then a fireman came in with a face that sought out someone who was in charge. I was not in charge, but I went over to him to see what was the matter. “There has been a vehicle accident on the street in front of here,” he said. He needed to contact the property manager. I told him to call the company listed on the sign out front, since we were just the neighborhood association and our meeting hall was all we controlled. Fifteen minutes later a policeman came in to have the selfsame conversation with me.
Later, it was time for the most important event of the meeting: The election of a new president. First, the chair asked if anyone wished to stand for the office. No one ever has nor probably ever will in our neighborhood. And if they do they will lose. People here understand that the more a person wants the job, they less qualified they are likely to be. This is of course a contortion of the Groucho Marx saying “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
When no one stood for the office, the chair dutifully asked, “Then is there anyone who would like to make a recommendation?” As pre-arranged, the outgoing president said “I would like to recommend K.T.-san,” to which K.T.-san, having been buttonholed by at least me and probably many others, indicated his willingness to be a candidate while maintaining a practiced air of humility.
No one else was subsequently nominated. For a moment the chair and others seemed at a loss as to how the election should be conducted. Someone mentioned paper ballots. Knowing that our bylaws do not require paper ballots, and fearing that someone would get over-procedural and try to make us get out paper needlessly, I moved that we vote by raise of hands or by applause to see if we would not achieve acclamation and thereby spare a few trees. This approved and applause requested of the attendees, we indeed achieved acclamation and K.T. was chosen as our new president.
Another happening was that the aforementioned tiny-voiced but diligent and competent treasurer realized in mid-explanation of the new fiscal year’s budget that he had provided us all with papers containing the wrong damn version. He scrambled to his (mercifully nearby) home and retrieved the new version, then made 40 or so copies of it on the ancient printer that sat next to me, and which had incidentally been approved for replacement in the previous motion. “Take that, ingrates,” it seemed to sneer.
While the wrong-budget-version crisis played out, I poked my head outside the meeting hall to be a yajiuma/looky-loo. A vehicle that was trying to back up to let another vehicle come from the opposite direction had struck a man on a moped who awaited the transaction behind the first vehicle. He had fallen off and hurt his back a little bit, but luckily not too severely. An ambulance and police traffic accident investigation crew had responded though. It was quite the hullabaloo. One of the sumo wrestlers had been the driver of the vehicle that backed up and hit the moped driver. I felt bad for him—people who are willing to back up to let another vehicle pass on our narrow street are the good guys.
Otherwise things went more or less smoothly, and the proceedings were done in a mere two hours.
After we concluded and everyone started to leave for home, I cornered the above woman who had objected to the previous year’s financial results and chimed in on the failure to hold an expired disaster food giveaway. (She had also made several nearly-shrill comments thereafter.) I thanked her with deep bows for the energetic participation and valuable opinions. I was sincere, while also fighting my natural defensiveness as one on the side being criticized to some degree. I introduced myself and asked her name. She was kind and maybe even a little sheepish at having been so exercised. I really was grateful and told her so. Now we are friends. And guess who will get a call from me when it’s time to make the summer festival happen for the first time in four years?
My bottle of tea that never had a chance to be drunk amid all the action.