Drifting Train Thoughts
(February 23, 2017)
Sitting in the board-restaurant of the Inter-City-Express from Berlin to Hamburg. 95% of the people in here look very square and very teutonic. They all look a bit as if they don’t enjoy being alive, and especially not being alive around other people in the same train-compartment.
Even the younger ones, in their twenties — wear haircuts that would most easily be described as a “fashy hairtcut”: short on the sides and the back of the head, medium-short and nicely groomed on the top. I used to wear a haircut like that when I was younger, but then it was ironic.
How times have changed: these people don’t look ironic and I’m letting my hair grow without going to the barber anymore, I’m turning into some kind of Hippie I guess.
In a world of perfectly groomed neo-teutonic pseudo-liberal Identitarians I enjoy looking like a long-haired hobo. Maybe I’ll cut my curls soon, if only to infiltrate and subvert the system from within.
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Yesterday at the supermarket: the cashier complaining to the client in front of me in the queue that he has to work for another 2 hours.
Westerners perfectionized being unhappy with what they are doing. They cherish their coffee-mugs with “I Hate Mondays” printed on them.
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What I liked most about Japan in this respect is that the Japanese are finding a purpose in whatever they are doing, however small and insignificant their job might be. They are 100% commited to what they are doing.
When you walk down a major street in Tokyo at late night it’s probable that you’ll find a small construction-site, where they are exchanging or adding telecommunication-cables or maintaining electrical connections. You’ll find two guys in the hole shoveling and 6 guys around the hole holding glowing sticks, that look like light-sabers from Star Wars. When you come closer they will slightly bow towards you, wish you a good evening and ask you extremely politely to watch out for the hole and to carefully choose a safe way around it, all while pointing their pointy blinking sticks into the direction where you’re supposed to go for a safe passage. It’s one of the most useless jobs I’ve ever seen and in the beginning I made fun about these guys and their commitment to that insignificant work.
I laughed until I understood.
I learned that the Japanese find fulfillment in their service for society, they have a place in their society and they are absolutely committed to do what they have to do with absolute perfection. I love that about Japan.
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But as with anything also the German’s dislike for work has its upsides and the Japanese commitment has its downsides. I think one of the reasons why Germans are so extremely concise and quick at the same time in their work is because they dislike it so much that they want to end it very quickly, so they try to do it right from the beginning and finish as soon as possible. They quickly want to be finished and then go into their “Feierabend” (= time after work-hours). The Japanese on the other side are so committed to their work that they are often very slow. They just like to be precise in their work so much that they double and triple-check everything. In the end the result of what they’ve worked on is then absolutely perfect, but they sometimes need twice or three times the time to do a job that a German would have needed.
I’m somehow trying to find a middle-way between both approaches. As a simple example I finally learned to love washing my dishes, even though I hated it so much when I was younger. I love washing my dishes now because I forced myself to love it. It used to be an annoying task for me, now it’s a welcome break, close to a small meditation. I need to do it anyway, so why not love what I have to do? It’s somehow more fulfilling to like what I’m doing, even if it’s an actually annoying task.
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Some remarks:
I’ve been writing that stuff directly onto Facebook without redacting anything, it’s very direct and probably a little bit polemic. Please don’t feel offended, see it as satire. Mayer on the train equals drifting thoughts.
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After some thinking I came to the point that Germans do not necessarily “dislike” their work in general (even though it seems to be quite common among a lot of people here that they love to hate their daily job). It’s also not necessarily why they want to be finished sooner and therefore work quicker.
Japanese are maybe in love with details and perfectionism and therefore they are slower than the Germans, but it also only describes their work-ethic partly.
The more defined (and probably more true) point that I found after a bit of thinking is following: Germans seem to be much more goal-oriented than the Japanese. The outcome is very important, but the way how to get to a desired result is much less important than in Japan.
Japanese people are much more concerned about the work itself, about the way to a destination, it’s much more about the “how” when working towards a goal. I assume that this also shows for example when describing traditional martial arts: Kyu-DO meaning THE WAY of the bow, Ju-DO meaning THE WAY of gentleness, etc… it’s not only about reaching a goal but it’s about the way, about the HOW to reach that goal.
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It’s also a culture in which gesture plays a central role. For example when you give a present to someone it’s not so much about what’s inside the packaging, no: the packaging itself plays a very important role; even the gesture of giving the gift, HOW you give it to someone, is probably more important than the gift itself.
When my then-girlfriend Aichan visited my parents for the first time for christmas she was shocked to see how we (I and my sisters and their children) opened our gift-boxes under the christmas-tree: we just ripped off the paper and threw it onto a pile, just to see what’s inside the box. For Aichan it looked barbaric and uncivilized, but I can guarantee to you that my family is not opening presents in a very different way from your familie’s way of opening a gift-box!
The Japanese celebrate the pure act of giving a gift and the packaging of the gift is as much admired and celebrated as the way of how the gift is given. There are some really extreme examples of the right way of “how to give money on a wedding” or the right way to give money at a funeral (both customs differ and both are very precisely defined).
Look at a tea-ceremony: it’s definitely NOT about the goal of having a hot cup of tea. It’s — to say it simply — about the beauty of the gesture of preparing the tea. It’s the celebration of making the tea.
This importance of the gesture is something that I learned to admire a lot and something that I definitely try to integrate into my life on a daily basis. I realize that I wanna go places and maybe I want to be someone in the future, but maybe I should think about the movement of the bow more than about the arrow hitting bull’s eye. It’s not really about the goal of being some place or being some one, but more about the way, the gesture of getting there, the gesture of becoming one.
