Man-Mobilizations
Our 町会 / chokai / Neighborhood Association annual meeting was held on Sunday. Since my term as vice president and director from our 組 / kumi / sub-group ended last April, I have focused solely on being the squad leader of the 消防団 / Shobodan / fire squad whose territory is coincidental with that of our chokai. It has been nice. The duty of the squad leader as regards the general meeting is to attend in uniform and report on the previous year’s activities.
When called upon, I stood. I had scrawled some notes in the margins of my report spreadsheet. First, I thanked them for their support, and patience when we make noise, including at various times of night. Then the report: We responded to some fires, and a lot more false alarms, did a lot of training, assisted the chokai with disaster preparedness activities and festivals, maintained our pump, truck, and firehouse, and placed sandbags for the aged residents living in one flood-prone area. Only activities sanctioned by the City Disaster Section were counted in the report, so we did quite a bit more than it included.
The main stats from the report were: We mobilized on 88 occasions, as a total of 327 “people.” For amusement, let us here coin the term Man-Mobilizations. (Everyone in our squad identifies as a man. [Checks online] Yep, the term does not seem to appear when searched in quotes.)
We did 327 Man-Mobilizations. I like the sound of that.
I also tooted our horn by telling the assembled neighborhood residents that we received an award for our good firefighting to prevent a house fire from spreading back in December. After that, I said that we always need new recruits. This is true. One of our members recently had to leave the squad because he got married and moved out of the city. You need to either live or work in the city to be in the city fire corps.
An adjacent area’s squad has been moribund for some time and could be abolished or absorbed into another squad, I told them. We wouldn’t want things to come to that. We are not even close to that point, but getting new members is key. (Although there are macro factors behind the other squad’s decline, such as the overall aging society, in reality the root cause is their lack of a good relationship with their chokai (which yields new members), and also that the longtime squad leader until a few years ago was kind of a jerk.)
I also pointed out that in recent years we do as much disaster-related activity as we do firefighting. I added that, as the neighborhood has experienced in such years as 2019, the ways that rain falls into our river and winds arrive in our area are changing along with the climate. We need to expect the unexpected. At this time I added a mild comment directed at one man in particular: “Please keep yourselves safe at times such as when the river rises.” The man, of some advanced age, showed up when we were monitoring a very swollen river last year. It was not helpful.
A week or two before the meeting, the chokai president had called me up. Honestly, I used to fear his calls and sometimes screen them. This time I answered. He asked me to be the 議長 / gicho / chair of the annual meeting. He knows I run a nice tight meeting, from our time doing monthly meetings up to last April.
I first expressed my willingness to help out if absolutely needed. He needed to know that I would do it if no one else would/could. Chokai president is a thankless, time-consuming job. Even the far-less intensive vice presidency was a lot of work, which I sometimes resented. If I can help out the president, I try to. Not out of charity, mind you. Supporting the current president will help to keep him in office, so none of us have to do the damned job.
That said*, I followed up my statement of willingness with the important point that I would be attending as the Shobodan squad leader, and therefore loath to serve in any other capacity that might conflict with it. You see, the chokai gives our squad a small amount of money annually as a gratuity for our service. The annual meeting is where this disbursement is approved. The chair of the meeting makes a motion for the proposed business to be approved or rejected. In a situation where some people are very fastidious about conflicts of interest, involving even the tiniest monetary sums, I would not want to ruffle any feathers by being even the ceremonial figure requesting approval.
I suggested that the president instead ask the same person who chaired the meeting last year. That man is excellent at the job. Also, with our president more mainstream (a kind of default LDP) politically, it’s nice for him to appoint the chair I suggested, because that man is a member of the Communist Party. The president did call him and ask, and the man did serve. Nice and neat.
Our neighborhood has people of all political stripes. Some neighborhoods are squarely “ruling party,” and others not so. This doesn’t affect things almost at all, but it is manifest most when the neighborhood festival comes around. Some neighborhoods only invite LDP politicians to take the mic and address the crowd. Some invite all stripes of politician. Some allow no one to take the mic, but they’ll pour a beer for any politician who comes to pay respects. This last format is how our neighborhood works. When I was vice president, I played host to five or six city assembly members, and one or two Tokyo assembly members. They all knew whose aide I’ve been, but knew I respected them and wanted to chew the fat, and maybe learn what’s happening in the city political scene outside my own friends. Lots of fun. Local politics is beautifully civil in our part of the city.
It’s good that our neighborhood keeps things generally neutral. When I help a candidate campaign in the area, I take them around to all the doors of residents who I know are open to at least hearing what the candidate has to say. No one begrudges this, and afterward I’ll thank them for opening their door and talking, because hey I have to take the candidate around, but vote for whoever, eh? Civil politics evokes Canadian speech, what can I say?
After all the usual business of reporting on last year’s actual spending versus budget, and approving this year’s budget, and some other items, it came time to elect a new neighborhood president. Dah. I had forgotten this was to happen at the meeting. The president stood and said “I have served two years. I am tired. It’s time to elect a new president.”
Our chokai is perhaps strange: No one stands for the office—this would be a garish gesture indeed within our specific chokai culture and norms. It’s vaguely Groucho Marxesque: We don’t want anyone to be our president who would outright want the office. This is a pretty good rule of thumb in Japanese organizations, too. You want the capable person who could be prevailed upon to do it, with probably some cursory grumbling. No one nominates anyone in our chokai, either. Instead, ballots (small slips cut from 裏紙 / uragami / the yet-unused side of previously used paper) are passed out and everyone writes who they want to be president. The person who gets the most votes becomes president. Often against their will. It is democracy manifest, to an extreme degree in terms of the “will of the people,” but strange for lacking the elements of standing or nominating others for office.
As the ballots were distributed, the chair asked if anyone wished to stand for the office. Of course, no one did. I had neglected to 根回し / nemawashi / get the ducks in a row behind the scenes to reëlect the current president, because I had been too busy with work to remember that his term was up. So I asked the man in front of me, who was a drinking friend of my late father in-law, “Is [the current president] good to stay on, and are things lined up for him?” He whispered back at me, “Yeah, he’s good.” Whew. I wrote the current president’s name. When the ballots were counted, sure enough, he received the most by a landslide. He had gone through the motions of “quitting” but fooled no one. Except me for a second there.
When the votes were tabulated on the white board, I had received two. There were some blank ones, too. One of mine may have been from my father in-law’s drinking buddy—he had said in the interim that I should serve as president. Another man also remarked as we both left the meeting that he wants me to serve. To both kind supporters, I replied truthfully that my wife would prefer that I do things that make money in my current healthy years. But I was flattered. I’ll take any self-esteem boost. And I will gladly be chokai president in 25 years.
*Everyone in the US seems to say “that being said” now. This is terrible.