Wax On, Wax Off

A thing that consistently amuses me on Japanese TV is the portrayal of the offices and surroundings of this country’s politicians as very fancy and pristine. Imagine softly lit, spacious, immaculate spaces with tasteful leather and mahogany furniture. In my experience from 2005 to now, the representatives’ offices adjacent to the Diet Building are sometimes nice—although they were smoky roach-infested prisons until the new office buildings were completed circa 2010—but the local offices are as shabby and lived in as you could imagine. Ancient grimy office furniture. Overloaded octopus electric plugs just waiting to ignite the abundant dust bunnies lying near them. Sheaf after sheaf of yellowing papers and binders chock full of who knows what policy or event information from who knows what imperial reign. Cabinets half bursting, festooned with cellophane tape remnants galore. Carpets that would make you long for packed dirt.

To me this characteristic is endearing. There is zero fanciness. Just function. Well, a kind of desperate, let’s-just-get-through-this-day function.

I mention this because today I am helping out for a day at The Boss’s office. It is a lot of fun to watch several university student interns scurrying about doing tasks and getting corrected and generally having what I think is a valuable experience. It is very wax on, wax off stuff.

⚠️Old man reminiscences warning⚠️

It is a story I have told many times, but back in January 2005, with no introduction or prior warning, I knocked on the door of my local Japan House of Representatives member to ask if they would let me volunteer so I could study Japanese politics. I wanted to become a J politics expert and then join the US Foreign Service. I searched Google, found an address, put on a suit, and went on January 4 to the place where the office was. Luckily I reached the office of The Boss, and not his main opponent at the time, who had an office in the same floor of the same building.

One aide was there that day—it was still the New Years holiday and things were not yet restarted for the year—and he sat me down and asked about me, how I came to be in Hachioji, who was my family in-law, did I like The Beatles, and so forth.

A few weeks later they called me and asked me to come in on a Saturday to meet the representative himself and start volunteering. That first day, I was asked to introduce myself to the staff and other interns. I was 25, and the other interns were university students of around 19 to 22 years of age, which felt exceedingly younger than me.

That first Saturday, I was allowed to ride shotgun while one of the aides drove The Boss around. We went to a few different events to which he had been invited. The one that sticks in memory was the opening ceremony for a new recycling plant in the hills of Inagi City. The event featured tents pitched on the facility property and drinks being handed out to the invitees by servers. I was told to just follow The Boss around. I did. It was interesting as hell. The Boss was very kind and answered my questions in the car, although he probably just wanted some quiet time. I was nervous to be suddenly seeing into situations that I had never been a part of.

Opportunities to tag along as an intern proved rare.

The next time I was at the office was a weekday. I spent all day there under the supervision of the main aide. The things I was asked to do were the polar opposite of riding around in a Toyota Crown with a national politician (although back then he was at the bottom of the food chain as national politicians went). One task was to read names from postcards sent to the office, and enter them into the supporter name database, complete with both kanji and the readings thereof. Of course I had no idea how to read a large percentage of given names, which have much different readings from those that kanji have when used in non-name words.

So I would pick up a postcard, enter the info I could read, and then ask the old man who ran the local party office in the next room how a particular name should be read. He also could not always say, since there are some names that have multiple possible readings one could only learn on a case-by-case basis. But he educated me and made a best guess each time. Other times, names would have the furigana written above them to tell me how the name was read. This educated me as well. Pretty soon I was mastering the main ways all the main name kanji are read, and learning what names were prominent and plentiful locally.

Another job was to put together maps of the locations of supporters’ homes from the Zenrin maps that show the detailed streets and names of houses in every neighborhood. The maps were used to create books for each neighborhood, so The Boss or his staff could go and visit them at intervals. The job consisted of looking up in the index on what page an address was to be found in one of the three Zenrin gazetteer books for our city, making a copy of that page, highlighting the supporter’s house and making sure the main roads to access the house were visible (this might require copying adjacent pages if the house was on the corner of a map), and finishing the entry by folding it all into an A4-sized shape.

A favorite job (eventually) was to make and pour green tea for visitors who came to have meetings with The Boss. This was not tea ceremony by any means, but there were protocols. After a while I finally had the protocols down. I had learned things such as the importance of pouring the tea a little at a time into each cup in a rotation to make all cups the same strength, and who to serve first once I brought the tea into the office. With those and some other aspects under my belt I was able to serve without my nervous hands shaking the tray or the teacups and their saucers in a way that disconcerted or amused the visitors. Of course once I was good at it, these simple skills drew effusive praise (let us call this ocha-jouzuing).

My least favorite job was to answer the phone. I was good at speaking Japanese by then, but my listening still needed improvement and the difficulty was compounded by it being over the phone with people who were not aware of who I was. My accent when answering the phone was passable enough that they always assumed I said “Ueshima desu” as opposed to “Uesuman desu.” (When The Boss later hired me as an aide this made it so sometimes people would call the office asking for an Ueshima.) But because people always opened with [name of organization] no [name] desu, while I was still anxiously starting the call, I would frequently miss or misunderstand their name and organization and have to ask again, to their consternation. It was so stressful. [P.S. at this moment I am manning the phones in the office alone, and the anxiety is 5% of what it used to be but will never be zero] One time I answered the phone and the voice on the other end simply said “Souri desu,” or “This is the Prime Minister.” I stood up ramrod straight and immediately connected him to The Boss. But the stress, hoo boy.

A job that wasn’t as bad as you might imagine was cleaning the toilet. Since it was easier than some other things, I didn’t mind doing it at all.

When The Boss hired me as an aide, I took on more duties. One was to respond to constituent concerns or requests. A very scruffy man came into the office one day asking about mobile phone signal gaps in the mountains on the west side of the city. He worked in forestry and was unhappy when his phone didn’t work. This was a reasonable complaint and everything, but as an arrogant young man I couldn’t get past superficial things like his eccentric way of talking to people or the multiple digits missing on his hands. But this Yasuharu Abe kept coming to the office to follow up. One of the senior aides, a woman who had previously risen to become a powerhouse official in City Hall, chided me for taking the man lightly and made sure that I addressed his concerns. Eventually his complaint led to us summoning national bureaucrats and identifying a Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications program to subsidize the building of mobile phone towers to serve remote areas. Now there are very few areas of our city without service. The Boss would cite this as one of his accomplishments in speeches.

The very first job I was given after being hired was to give sixth-grade elementary students tours of The Diet Building for their social studies classes. This was a genius assignment by The Boss, because I had been a tour guide and had the basic crowd control skills, but the kids and the teachers would also freak out that a gringo was giving them their tour. This meant that the kids would go home and tell their parents, who were of course voters and would get a stronger impression of The Boss and his fancy international staff. I loved—still love—the Diet Building. I took a lot of sixth grade classes through and now kind of freak out to realize that the kids from then are around 30 now. Maybe I will organize a Diet tour for friends who want to see it.

When it came time for me to drive The Boss around, I got into the driver’s seat the first day and began to drive with my right hand on the wheel and my elbow rested on the middle armrest. The Boss took me to task: “My life is in your hands. Hold the steering wheel with both.” Eventually he said I was his favorite driver. I quite enjoyed that, because although it was more stressful moment-by-moment, it beat the hell out of being in the dingy office all day. At the time I didn’t realize it was just like interpreting, in that it made me have to focus and use my brain to solve problems on the fly and did not allow procrastination. Also we ate a lot of ramen together, polishing off volcanically hot bowls in two minutes flat.

So anyway, all these memories bounced around in my head today as I watched interns get flustered on the phone, get gently chided for using insufficiently polite speech (even politician offices know the kids won’t stand harsh scoldings these days, and that is a good thing), and run into situations where they had to figure something out or ask for help. Looking back, being an intern and then an aide was the most influential experience of my life in Japan, hands down. I got to see just about every part of society and learn how things are done, and most importantly, how to do things right in the sense of the way society expects. It was truly the best possible 修行 training for me. After the stress and refiner’s fire of a politician’s office, pretty much no situation made me nervous anymore. I could meet a company president or whatever and it was no big deal, nothing compared to meeting a Prime Minister.

But at the time I hated a large percentage of the tasks. This may verge on old-man justification of hard experiences, but I really did come out on the other side with a huge array of skills that I had no idea I was developing at the time. Very wax on, wax off.