Category Archives: Just a thought

Companies love to make illusions to increase their revenue. In North America, fat-free is widely believed to be good for your health, but for me who came from a country where people widely recognize that too much sugar is not good for our health, sweetened fat-free yogurt is bad for your health. In Japan, people call electric car “eco-car”, but they cannot be environmentally friendly because the majority of electricity in Japan is generated by burning fossil fuel. The difference between gasoline cars and electric cars is where to pollute, whether on the road or at the power plant. There is virtually no difference between them in terms of global warming. But I don’t blame those consumers because such illusions have been imprinted on their mind by those companies who love to increase their revenue by all means.

Recently, nearly 200 countries gathered in Paris and agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emission. It sounds very challenging. Using electric cars cannot be a solution, at least in Japan for now.

According to this internet article, some researchers have concluded that the world could run entirely on renewable energy by 2050. Is this an illusion? According to the internet article, claiming that replacing all fossil fuel is unrealistic is “mythical”. The following is a quote from the article.

“People who are trying to prevent this change would argue that it’s too expensive, or there’s just not enough power, or they try to say that it’s unreliable, that it will take too much land area or resources,” Jacobson says. “What this shows is that all these claims are mythical.”

“Myth” is often deliberately made. Electric car as “eco-car” in Japan, as mentioned above, is a typical example; the car industry deliberately made the myth (I mean, I hope they are not so ignorant that they seriously think electric cars are environmentally friendly. They are smart, knowledgeable people). If the argument in the internet article is true, who made the myth? Oil and gas industry? I don’t know. In other cases, the root of myth is often unclear. One example is recycling. Many people believe that recycling is good, but in fact it can be only better than disposing because recycling itself requires energy. Reuse is generally better than recycle, or even disposing harmless materials can be better than recycling equivalent materials. I don’t know if the myth was made by recyclable material manufacturers or it has been made because of people’s misunderstanding or ignorance.

When I studied design at the University of Calgary, we took some core courses where students from all the programs of the faculty got together and learned together. In one class, a student from another program provided a short presentation to discuss speed in today’s life style, and asked me a question; “Japanese people do everything fast. What makes you guys do so?” I couldn’t answer the question well because it is “the norm” and we don’t know what has shaped the norm. Some people always rush other people around them assuming it’s “efficient”, but it’s not always the case. Even when nobody rushes us, typical Japanese feel they are forced by “something” to do everything fast. It’s the norm.

This tendency is often obvious in some office environment in Japan. People in Japan generally think they must work log hours everyday, and when they leave their office earlier than their coworkers, even after having worked for more than 10 hours, they apologize. One day, in my third year in my first company (which means, I was only one of a bunch of young employees), a newcomer told me “excuse me Mr. Shibata, I have to leave now. I’m sorry.” I asked him “why do you apologize? Do you think I take offence if you leave earlier than I do?” He replied “no.” Then I asked “who do you think would get angry if you leave now?” He said “you may be right. Nobody, maybe.” What I wanted to tell him is that he wouldn’t need to worry about it, but it revealed that we were somehow controlled by ambiguous rules. Why does it happen?

You may have heard of recent news about Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, like this internet article; he has decided to take parental leave for two months. By the way, if I understand correctly, the term “parental leave” has been recognized relatively recently because that type of leave used to be only called “maternity leave”. Anyways. Many people might wonder why it was possible, and the internet article describes the theory behind that.

New parents at Facebook can take four paid months off. They receive benefits such as $4,000 for each child born or adopted. As we’ve written before, however, employees may feel reluctant to take advantage of such plans if their companies don’t have a culture that encourages taking time off. And company culture typically comes from the top.

I believe he thought not only about his family but also thought of his employees. According to another internet article, only few employees take this type of leave even if everyone is allowed to do so. There must be different reasons, and probably some of them do not take leave because it’s the norm. I want to believe that such a norm can be changed by strong leadership, and it can even influence other companies or organizations where people are controlled by unwritten rules. While the norm is usually formed unintentionally by a big group of people, corporate culture can be developed by leaders as mentioned in the internet article above. Unfortunately, many people at higher positions in an organization, typically managers, do not have to lead others as long as they manage their job, as I wrote in an old post. As I wrote in another old post, a sophisticated system can be made by smart people in an organization, and I want to believe that they also, or possibly other people, lead others to maintain the system.

My mom never listened to me (and she must have thought I never listened to her). For a few years after graduating from my university, I stayed at my parents’ place and spent more than an hour to commute to work. I usually worked until late and as a result had supper at home late at night. It was only something to take to live and I didn’t want to spend time on it. I preferred something simple and told it to my mom, but she always prepared something that takes time to have such as hot pot. Eating was not something to enjoy but a time consuming daily task to me.

At that time I only thought I didn’t have time, but it might not be a matter of time. It might be the way of my thinking. I could have thought that supper was a time to forget about the job and release myself. But because of the demanding job I was not mentally healthy enough to think in that way. I don’t know if my mom wanted me to enjoy supper for this reason or she simply didn’t listen to me. Whichever it was, one thing that worsened the situation was that I didn’t know what cooking for other people is like then.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I went to ROM, Royal Ontario Museum, right after being laid off by the uncivilized company. Whenever I go there, as I wrote in an previous post, I find different things interesting or attractive to me. This time, a collection of cookware and tableware in the Pompeii special exhibition caught my attention. The common practice in Pompeii, or in any ancient Roman cities, seems not very different from that in Japan in the Samurai era as we see in so-called samurai dramas or movies; in upper-class houses, the kitchen was a busy place where servants worked and the dining room was a place for the rich people to enjoy meals, as depicted by the practically designed cookware and the decorative tableware. But that style of having a meal, which is still common in many societies today, is only a form of happiness, I believe. After having experienced living by myself and cooking for myself, I’ve found that cooking can be as fun as having a meal especially when cooking for other people.

Yesterday I had Izakaya Hiro with my ex-coworkers. In an old post that I wrote a little after moving to my current apartment room, I wrote that I would invite my friends and have a party. Izakaya is Japanese style bar restaurant where people enjoy drinking and eating traditional and modern Japanese food. Izakaya Hiro is a small party at my place where I serve my original Japanese and Asian fusion food to my friends. I enjoyed cooking for my friends and everyone thoroughly enjoyed the meal. It was really fun. I’ve had Izakaya Hiro several times and now I know what cooking should be like and what eating should be like.

In the Izakaya Hiro yesterday we talked about a book that I wrote about in an early post: 佐賀のがばいばあちゃん (My Gabai Grandma from Saga). In the book, the author tells about his financially-poor AND happy life with his grandma in his childhood. Today I read the book again and found something I have forgotten, which happens to be one of the 12 tools for more mindful living as I wrote in the previous post: be grateful. We tend to seek things that we don’t have and forget to appreciate what we have. Whether we are happy or not depends on how we think. Interestingly, in the foreword the author says that even layoff could be good if you think differently; it could be a chance to release you from a demanding life. When I read it, I thought “bingo!” Of course it does not mean that I don’t need to do job hunting, but it means that the current unstable situation could be a good period for me.

My apartment is very old and many things do not work. Elevators never work normally. Intercom does not work at all. Air condition does not work properly especially when the season changes. Hot water stops once in a few months. Those are all technical issues, but they are not all. The laundry room is supposed to be opened at 9:30 am on weekend, but it rarely happens because someone does not do his or her job (we even don’t know who the someone is). Last weekend, I went to the laundry room around 9:45 am to find it was still locked and more than a few people were waiting. I waited for one minute and decided to go back to my room. About half an hour later, I went there again, but it was still locked and all the people who I saw last time were still waiting there. They wasted at least half an hour, and no one knew how many more minutes they would need to wait.

I was only lucky when I decided to go back to my room. There is no strategy to predict what time the laundry room will be opened. This laundry room case is only a simple example, of course, and everything happening around us is unpredictable (except for the speed of light!?). We often need to let things happen, and when something undesirable happens, we often need to accept it.

This is pretty much like what I learned and wrote on this blog a little more than two years ago. At that time, I found an internet article titled “12 Tools For More Mindful Living” and learned, for example, to become okay with discomfort or to let go of control, but two years seem long enough to forget that. This is what I wrote in an old post titled “Memory” a little more than a year and half ago.

As I wrote in the previous post, life is uncontrollable, and probably I should accept that being unstable is “normal”. It is kind of good to remember the feeling of helplessness to get ready for the next helpless period. Who knows?

Now I am a job hunter again. Who knew it? Nobody. I should recall this feeling again, and accept whatever as it is.

Today I had a chance to go to a cafe where a friend of mine works. This is what I found inside the cafe.

Actually I found that happiness in my cup of coffee. Even when we do not have a cup of nice coffee, we should be able to find happiness everywhere. We should learn what mindful living is like.

By the way, I wrote about a ladybug in a recent post, and according to an internet article (sorry but turn down the volume on your computer before clicking this link), there was a reason for “ladybug invasion”: warm weather. A more surprising fact for me is that ladybugs are generally disliked in Canada, while they are usually liked in Japan. Hey, Canadians, be happy whether ladybugs are beneficial insects or not!

Nearly three years ago I wrote about my old-fashioned manual coffee grinder. Now it is more than ten years old, and cannot grind coffee evenly. I don’t think I will throw it away even if it does not work properly because I have developed attachment for it. It is actually one of two manual coffee grinders I brought from Japan, and today I cleaned the other one, which is more “stylish” and has not been used as much as the old-fashioned one, to use it from now on. I need a manual coffee grinder to brew a cup of coffee which satisfies me.

My passion for coffee dates back to my young adult days. It was when I had worked for my first company for about a couple of years. One day, I was going to have a small party with my university friends after work. We were meeting at a train station, but in those days we did not have google map and could not estimate travel time accurately. When I got to the train station it was still too early and I had to kill time. In Japan, in front of or around every major train station, there is shotengai, which is usually translated to “shopping street” in English. But typical shotengai is different from what people in North America imagine from “shopping street”; it is usually a busy place, streets are typically narrow, they rarely sell luxuries but mainly sell commodities, and shops are generally not stylish. At the train station, I thought there might be a coffee shop or something to kill time in the shotengai, and walked around there. After a while, unexpectedly, on the second floor of a small building I found a sophisticated coffee shop which did not match the shotengai atmosphere. It did not need to be an elegant place only to kill time, but I was interested in the fine-looking cafe. I went upstairs and took a window-side table. There was a couple of university students near me, and they were talking like “is it really OK for us to be in such a nice place? Can we afford this?” At that time I was a working adult dressed in a suit and quietly thought “I can afford this”. The coffee they served were more expensive than typical ones, and I found the price “reasonable”. It tasted so good, and gave me a nice feeling. Then I looked down outside the window. There were busy people walking on the narrow street. Suddenly they looked like a bunch of emotionless poor people to me. But the fact is that I was only one of them until several minutes ago. I asked myself “what makes me different from them?” Then I thought “does this cup of coffee makes me different from them?” The answer is “no”, obviously.

At that time I could not find anything special that made me myself. When I graduated from my university and started working for the company, I had a sort of future vision. But as a couple of years passed by, I gradually became aware of the gap between the vision and the reality. Since the moment when I though for one second that a cup of nice coffee makes me different from other people, I had thought what I could really do to retain myself. Eventually I decided to go to a developing country to do a volunteer job, and ended up coming to Canada to pursue my dream job. Since that moment, coffee has been something special for me.

Now what? It’s been a week since I was laid off, but I still have no concrete strategy for job hunting. I might be taking time to accept the reality, but one week must have been enough. I know that when doing helpless job hunting it is so easy to lose myself. Let’s sit back and think of it, with a cup of nice coffee in my room. I may need to recall the feeling I had in the elegant coffee shop, but what I see outside now is not a crowd of people but the sky, like this.

When I was a junior high school student, I liked listening to radio programs. One day, I was listening to my favourite live program in bed, but something was different. From time to time during the program, they provided small pieces of information about a big incident. It was when a domestic JAL flight crashed into Osutaka mountain on August 12, 1985.

I frequently check Japanese internet news, and the 30th anniversary of the JAL crash was one of the hot topics in last few days, like this news site. Another hot topic was broadcast even in Canada: restart of first nuclear plant after the Fukushima disaster. As mentioned in this internet article, the majority of Japanese today oppose using nuclear energy. The reason is obvious; they don’t want to repeat an incident like Fukushima Dai-ichi. In other words, they think that nuclear energy is dangerous as proven in the Fukushima disaster. But is it really that dangerous? A fact that most people outside Japan don’t know is that there are three nuclear plants in the disaster area. “Dai-ichi” means “No.1”, which means there is “Fukushima No. 2” nuclear plant. There is another one in the area, and some facilities in those two nuclear plants ware used as shelters right after the disaster.

What makes Fukushima Dai-ichi different from the other two? The answer is not widely known. Fukushima Dai-ichi was designed and built by an American company, and believe or not, they simply copied their nuclear plants in U.S. which were designed based on the risk factors in U.S. One of the major risk factors in U.S. is hurricane or tornado. To protect important properties from tornadoes, whether it is in a house or in a nuclear plant, people in U.S. keep them underground. Based on this concept, the emergency generator of Fukushima Dai-ichi was installed underground where one of the major risk factors is tsunami. As a result, the emergency generator was severely damaged by the tsunami which triggered the incident, while emergency generators of the other two plants safely shut down the nuclear reactors. Those emergency generators are installed upper floor to protect them from tsunami. It seems obvious who has the responsibility for the incident. However, for some reasons, the U.S. company is not accused.

Recently I read a Japanese internet article about the JAL crash, and I found it connects the JAL crash and the Fukushima disaster. The cause of the JAL crash was revealed a while after. The airplane had experienced a minor incident and the rear part was damaged, then it was repaired and used again. But it was not repaired properly, and it caused the crash. One thing I had not known and the Japanese internet article told is that the airplane was repaired by a U.S. company that built the airplane, and it was not accused. It’s a power game.

Today, August 15, is the anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender. It’s been 70 years since the end of WWII. After the war, Japan had been occupied by U.S. for some years. (yes, for “some years”. We do not celebrate our independence day for some reasons and honestly, I don’t know how many years it was.) However, Japan is still somehow forced to obey U.S. They defeated Japan 70 years ago, but it does not mean that they are still freed from accusation of causing death of hundreds of Japanese citizens. But sadly this seems a reality.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I do a part-time job with my car; I go to Pearson airport to pick up Japanese students who come to Canada to learn English, and bring them to their host family’s place. I often enjoy conversation with them. One day I met a girl who came from Western Japan, or Kansai. I noticed her Kansai accent, but she did not use Kansai dialect. She told me that she had spent some days with a group of people who came from Eastern Japan, or Kanto, who spoke “standard” Japanese, and they told her “your language is odd”. It’s not a good attitude, but sadly it’s not uncommon in Japan. She said that since then she hesitates to speak Kansai dialect when talking with people who use “standard” Japanese like me. Then I told her that I had decided to leave Japan and live in Canada, and one of the reasons is that Canadians recognize difference. If you do something different from other majority of people in Japan, people typically say “you are strange“, while in similar situations in Canada people say “you are different“. She seemed to like this notion.

A while after that, I found that Angelina Jolie spoke out even further. As written in this internet article, she told kids “different is good”. This is what she actually said:

When I was little, like Maleficent, I was told that I was different. And I felt out of place — too loud, too full of fire, never good at sitting still, never good at fitting in. And, then one day I realized something, something that I hope you all realize: Different is good.

How encouraging is it even for adults? The audience’s enthusiastic reaction assures us that people can be proud of “being different”.

This may sound odd, or may rather sound natural in a sense, but the notion of “being different” differs depending on the situation. Her speech still implies that being different is normally considered to be something negative even in North America. The situation in which her classmates told her “you are different” and the situation in which my design classmates told me “you are different” ware probably very different, and the message she took and the message I took must have been different as well. But in either case people can be proud of being different.

So, I have not written anything for about 6 months, half a year. Reason? I’ve been tied up mostly due to the depressing full-time job and a demanding side business, that was, translating an entire company web site. Now, I’ve submitted the translation, and whether the job is depressing or not depends on me, or in other words depends on how I take it. So, it’s time to regain myself. Actually I have not felt I am myself for a while.

Yesterday, the first “effective” weekend after submitting the translation, I went to ROM: Royal Ontario Museum. As I wrote in an old post, I love visiting museums, and ROM is one of my most favourite ones. Whenever I go there, I find or “discover” a different thing or things to be attractive to me. This time, it was a cup used around 1800 BC. Its shape is not significantly different from today’s typical mugs, but it is not hard to imagine that the time people spent on making a cup of hot beverage at that time was remarkably different from today; filling a kettle with water was not a matter of turning on a water tap and boiling it was not about turning on an electric stove. However, people did it in a few millenniums ago in their daily life, I suppose. I don’t know if the owner of the cup did it by him/herself or had a servant do it, but I suppose, at least want to believe, that it was worth spending time on preparing for relaxation in their life style.

Now, how much time do I spend on relaxing in this 21st century when many things can be done quite quickly?

As I mentioned above, whether the current job is depressing or not depends on me, depends on how I react to it. I know it. I logically understand it. But it is quite hard to actually take it in that way. I feel I’m depressed. But life shouldn’t be like that. I should regain myself. Since last week, I clean my room and organize things in my room little by little. As I wrote in the previous post a half year ago, it is not “the right” way to be myself by making a comfortable room, but this is at least a good start.

I know it is odd to talk about my New Year’s resolution in March, but it is to “ignite my intellectual curiosity”. Working for an uncivilized company often makes me forget that I am an intellectual being. When I looked back the year 2014, I found that I did not do many intellectual activities. Let’s make this year a year to redefine myself and regain myself. Going to ROM and see what interests me is one way to rediscover myself. Relaxing in a comfortable room is another way to rethink of my value. Let’s see what I can do from here.

As everyone knows, life is tough. My current day-time job is, as I often mention, very stressful. One day, as I wrote in a previous post a few months ago, I went to a park after an extremely stressful work day, to unexpectedly find that I had forgotten something: a peaceful moment. As I mentioned in that previous post, I hoped my new place would be my peaceful space. Now, it’s been about five months since I moved to the current place, and I’m still trying to make it a Hiro-style room, hoping it will be a place to forget about any stressful event. In other words, it will be a place for me to be myself. Slowly but surely, it’s coming.

But before completing my den, I should recall one thing: having my own weather. As I wrote in an old post, as Covey describes in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, proactive people have their own weather. On the other hand, reactive people “are often affected by their physical environment [1]”. I suppose that my “physical environment” includes my room, which means, I’m still “reactive”. As I wrote in that previous post, my former place was so uncomfortable. However, whether it is tidy or messy, roomy or tiny, stylish or dull, I should retain my own weather. To make my room comfortable to regain myself is not the “right” way to remain myself.

Having said that, making a my-style room is fun. When I rented an apartment room in Japan, I bought secondhand pieces of furniture to save money. As a result, the room was somehow uncoordinated because I bought each of them from very limited choices. It was tidy and livable, but no unity among them. Now my neighbour IKEA helps me make a well-coordinated room at a reasonable price.

After making my nest, a next step to “regain myself” is to remember my cooking style. As I wrote in a “recent” post (a couple of months ago), something was wrong and I couldn’t cook as I used to. I still don’t know what was actually wrong, though I’m sure something was obviously wrong. Now, let’s see how I have recovered from that. Hopefully I’ll finish “making my room” soon and remember Hiro style cooking. A cozy place plus Hiro style Asian fusion equals Izakaya Hiro!

[1] S. R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, New York, NY: Fireside, 1989.