Not appropriate-o

Is a calendar with girls in bikinis appropriate for a higher education institution’s office?



Fig. 1. 2009 calendar that appeared on the wall of our office in December.*

This is what "boys" on my research team wanted to have on the wall this year. Beautiful Japanese girls in beautiful scenery sit in delicious seducing poses, exposing their assets.

This whole story happened in the last week of December. I asked them whose the calendar was, and they told me an engineering company that supplies to our lab had gifted us with this calendar. I did not want to work among the pictures of semi-naked girls and I asked them to use a different calendar, as this one was in my opinion not appropriate. It was not even functional because the dates were printed with tiny fonts - clearly an unimportant addition to the pictures.

But the calendar stayed. The Engineering Postdoc shrugged his shoulders on my comment. He did not see a problem with it. And he is definitely a leader of this pack. Around him they behave like dogs that follow their leader. I could see that the Talented Postgrad was undecided, but since the office leader took no action neither did he.

A few days later I have discovered another’s company calendar in the mess on the desks. It was boring, had big fonts with dates and the same design that we used last year. I have hung this calendar on and over the bikini girls. A few days later bikini girls had disappeared from underneath the boring calendar. And I have forgotten about them, although the picture of the Melon girl with the matching swimsuit had stayed in my mind. She was very cute**!


Fig. 2. Cute melon girl.*

Fig. 3. Boring 2009 calendar that replaced the bikini girls.

This weekend my husband came to our office briefly and later told me that the bikini girls are now in the toilet.

They are supposedly safe from me there as there is a hand written sign in Japanese (by Engineering Postdoc) on the men’s toilets door "Women not allowed". This sign is E. Postdoc’s reaction to some sign in Japanese about women that used to hang in our office that I took down. Whenever I asked what it said they told me that it is a message to Ms. Master Student (the only other female apart from me in our group). When she used to come to our office they would show her the sing and boo her. She did not look very happy, but was accepting this boyish (?) behaviour with typical Japanese woman patience. How can I ignore that? But I could do nothing because I did not know what the sign was saying and no one wanted to tell me. They never wanted me to know, they just giggled nervously like teenagers whenever I asked.

I finally reacted to it when we had a Japanese visitor for another place and I asked him (when we were alone) what that sign meant. He was very uncomfortable and told me that he was unable to translate it, but it was something about discrimination and women.

I took the sign down and I keep it to ask what exactly its meaning is. I am curious.
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*** UPDATE ***
I have now found out the meaning of the sign. It says "In this room the Sexual Discrimination is practised".
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The sign on the men’s toilet door caused some trouble already too. One day in the morning there was a barely heard faint knock on the door in the morning. The students and visitors usually knock and enter. But this one did not. This person waited about a minute to be called at "Please enter" and they opened the sliding door only slightly and a tiny Japanese woman (cleaning lady) bowed (almost to the ground) and asked something. I heard the guys say "No, no; no problem" and later the Happy Puppy told me that the cleaner was afraid to enter the men’s toilet, because they put this joking sign on the door. The cleaning lady had to come to the big-wigs (to her they are, they are all very clever and powerful future professors) and ask for their permission to enter their rest room to clean it. No comment.

Today I have heard E. Postdoc telling a story to other guys. "Not appropriate-o"*** was the focal point of this story. It was clear he was citing this phrase as said by someone else in this story, as he changed his voice when he was saying it and he paused before saying it too. I have used this phrase only once and I was very strict about it (even though they did not react to it initially). Maybe someone have asked why the bikini girls are lonely in the freezing toilet, when they should be clearly more happy in the warm and busy location of our office?

It is strange how much you can understand from the tone of voice and understanding of a few words (I do understand the English words in Japanese stories, and I do understand my name so I know when they are talking about me). And they seem to think that when they speak Japanese they are completely safe and can talk behind my back… Totally unaware that the non-verbal signals and words borrowed from English make it completely obvious what they are talking about.


* Pictures taken by sneaking into the men's toilet. The sign "Women not allowed" has disappeared now since we had a few official visits to show off our facility to bureaucrats.
** "Cute" (or cute-o) is a favourite word of Japanese young (and not so young) women.
*** Japanese tend to add "o" or "u" to words that end with consonants (labo, appropriate-o, interneto, buso cardo), to make it less strange to them to pronounce (the do not have words that end with consonants in their language)