Inside the mind of a Japanese bureaucrat

The Big Old Boss has a full-time secretary for dealing with his administrative work. This is a luxury, but he is the most accomplished (and funded) professor at this off-site department.

She is a very nice person, but very formal. She had helped me to fill in applications for visa and Japanese ID card where everything, even my name and address have to be written in Japanese. It is better she did it than me, because we foreigners cannot write quite neatly and we make mistakes, and forms with mistakes often have to be filled in from scratch anyway, so she saved us both some time.

Confusing situations arose during many procedures, for example when I filled in the field "home address" on the form with my address in Scotland, whereas my nationality is Polish. I came here from the address in Scotland and I am going back there afterwards, so it seemed logical to give them that address to contact me. But that has confused the bureaucrats to the degree they were phoning the higher-level administration for the decision.

The field "home address" was a translation of Japanese phrase "address in the country of nationality" which in my case was Poland. I tried to explain that I do not live in Poland any more nor am I going back there after leaving Japan, but it did not matter. What was more important than to have contact details for me was to have properly filled in form. (I know, I wrote about this before, I do repeat myself here, because it was soooo annoying).

I kind of got used to their diligent form filling now, and whenever I have to fill in a form I ask a Japanese person to write my address for me instead of writing it in Roman letters and confusing them (and their computer systems) to the impossible degree.

The story I wanted to describe happened a few days ago, after I asked professor and the secretary who is going to help me with flat hunting. They booked my accommodation till the end of March and since they have some PhD student coming here they will not let me stay there for the rest of my time here, they want me to find a flat on the market and move out there.

Let’s leave the issue of Japanese landlords not wanting to rent their properties to foreigners aside for now, together with the enormous deposit (partly non-returnable) required to rent a flat here, and let’s see what support they offer to me with this tricky situation.

The secretary came to our office with some forms and told me that they are going to help me to find accommodation. She asked me to write on a piece of paper the price of rent I want to pay and how many rooms (but not the location) and told me that they will help me to find a place. I asked about the details and she told me to give the form to the undergraduate I am working with, to the Happy Puppy student.

So here she comes in, the Japanese bureaucrat, to manage how the undergraduate is to help me in flat hunting. She tells us what process we have to follow, even though we work side by side everyday and we can speak and communicate in English.

We can sit at the computer and search through internet together, we do not need some silly bureaucratic procedure to communicate. Thank you very much for your help.