First period was uneventful. Arriving a bit too late to pretend like I was trying to understand the lecture, and sitting in the back, which always seems to distract me with what other students are doing (the room has raised levels of seats like a traditional lecture hall). While jotting down some notes of unknown vocabulary words I worked on a paper for third period about what system of work you would prefer best- long-term employment with a secure increase in payment as you build seniority, or employment that rewards the most talented and successful employees, regardless of when they entered the company. I did a completely cynical take on wanting life-long employment, in saying that with company's that reward individual prowess are for people people who want to prove their skills and thereby rise through company ranks are self-serving and will either be exploited by higher-positioned company members or reach those higher-level positions and become coke-addled hedonistic materialists. In conclusion I said I'd rather not have to think about getting anywhere in the company and just work and let the years go by and carry me to death. Writing about it here makes it seem a little bit too over-the-top, but I think in a way it had some value in criticizing both systems of work. Although I did not get to actually doing it, I wanted to explain my take on the issue with the decline of the traditional Japanese system of long-term to life-long employment. I believe the traditional system has started to decline due to the consumerism that has become deeply rooted in modern Japan. Consumerism inevitably puts value on individuals as customers, in order to appeal to individual senses so that they will but products. In doing so, the importance of "self" is inflated. Japanese educational systems, however, have not adapted to these changes in a sufficient way. Because Japanese education attempts to create a sense of uniformity, it does not effectively develop the intellectual qualities of individuals. The culture of consumerism therefore clashes with the uniformity of becoming a life-long employee to a corporation upon graduating college. Since a consumerist culture promises personal enjoyment and fulfillment, it seems less and less appealing to commit oneself to a corporation, and in a more vague sense, one's country, when you could be shopping, going to Karaoke, going to expensive clubs where you pay women to talk to you, playing music in the Folk Song Club, and so on. If Japan wants to create a work structure that utilizes individual talents rather than a samurai-like pledge of life-long commitment to a corporation, it will need to rethink it's social values in a changing world. While the overall economic recession is by far more complicated than painting Japanese society with wide brush-strokes, the overall state of Japanese society holds plenty to worry about- a crumbling financial system and a massive decline in national birthrate, on top of a generation of younger Japanese that largely couldn't care less.
Second period was Chinese Communication. I had to order the required textbook from the campus store as they were all out, which also meant I wouldn't have the necessary study materials for class.
Third period, Technical Japanese, involved studying a worksheet about job outsourcing and its merits and demerits. Many of the Chinese students favored outsourcing, which I suppose makes sense, as China became wealthy off of countries like the United States relying on cheap labor in China to manufacture products and largely depleting domestic labor; I guess in the current climate it's inherent that I as an American view outsourcing negatively, while the Chinese might not have a feeling of victimization from it. None of this has to do with Japanese culture, of course, and other than standard reading practice there wasn't anything else noteworthy for the class aside from what I discussed at the beginning of this post with my essay.
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