The Beijing Experience

Today is Thursday, August 19^th.  I arrived back in Japan from China on Tuesday and now that I’ve let my memories sit for a bit I feel I can write an adequate letter about my experience.  Although I’m sure that the details will speak for themselves, I feel I should first say that this was an amazing trip, probably the best I’ve ever taken, for the sheer amount of sights, experiences and adventure to intake in a mere week.  My only complaint is that it was too short.

I couldn’t have asked for better people to travel with.  There were nine of us in total.  Seven travelling from Japan, everyone employees with the company I had just finished working for, and two from Korea.  We had our plane tickets and were all set to meet in Beijing.  Chris and Brent were already there and I would be meeting them at the hostel we would stay at, while my fellow travelers from Japan had opted for a hotel. 

Before I even talk about touching down, I should talk a little about the history leading up to this trip.  I had a rocky road in getting to this country.  I was one click on a keyboard away from cancelling my plane ticket after my infuriating experience at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo while trying to get my tourist visa.  In fact, if it hadn’t been for my friend encouraging me to sleep on it and see what would happen, I would have ended up dropping the whole trip before we got news from another city down the train line of a travel agent that could process a Chinese visa.  At that time I was still feeling bitter, but I wanted to see China so much that it didn’t take long to move away from that.  By the time the night before the trip came I was pretty much as excited as I’ve ever been… as excited as I was boarding the plane in Vancouver for the last leg of my journey to Japan two years ago.  This was China.  It’s the place Canadian kids think they can reach if they dig a hole in the earth deep enough.  Except even a few years ago I probably hadn’t fully imagined that I’d one day be going there.

Nihon: 18 Months

Language often provides clues to intrinsic characteristics of its native speaker’s culture.  In the case of Japanese, perhaps a good way to illustrate this is the popular term shouganai, which essentially means “that’s life” or “nothing can be done about it.”  This term is commonly applied, with seemingly a certain degree of indifference, to company decisions and policies, and rules that could have been made by a superior, even if it’s a rule or policy that seems to the individual to be unjust, ineffective, ultimately hindering etc. Of course there are benefits to this way of thinking, group harmony being the main goal in Japan's case, and thus progress and growth resulting from cooperation.  Modern Japan is a very capitalist society, and company employees maintain a high level of loyalty to their company and its hierarchy order to survive against other companies doing the same things.  Perhaps we have to look at the fact that you have over 135 million people living together, by majority, in the compact cities.  Competition is high, and strategies for increasing maximum production and profit are necessary for a company to financially survive in such an environment.  Unfortunately, this mentality leads to overwork and plenty of stress and exhaustion for many employees (also known commonly as a salary men, though the work world certainly encompasses women as well).