Gerald's work:
As many of you know, I'm working as, of course, an English Instructor. I work at Gaba providing as they call it "man-to-man" lessons (very Japanese! just means 1 on 1 lesson) in 40 minute blocks "lessons". I work in Shinjuku, great for me as it is one of the shopping mecca, bad for my atm card!
On my first day, I had an interesting line-up of students. My very first lesson was with a girl, who I shall not name, nearly made me pee my pants laughing. Me: "So tell me about your boss?", Student: "He is a pussy." Me: "ehhhhh? (laughing)" Unfortunately I couldn't get her to elaborate on what she meant b/c my boss was sitting opposite me!
This lesson was shortly followed by the next lesson where the student insisted on spending her 40 mins by reading aloud a really high level text book about the "Hispanic and other minorities in USA", where words like "stratification", "idiosyncratic" etc were commonplace. I'm sure I made up a couple of definitions when she asked what certain words meant... hehe, don't tell!
But overall, the majority of my students make me laugh and keep me entertained. It seems like they really just want to come in and have a chat.
Rich's work:
I'm now what the locals call a 'salary man' and work in the UBS Securities office in Otemachi. Otemachi is a pure business district, nothing but offices and food! Working at UBS so far has been pretty good. What's most amazing is the cultural diversity of the company.
In my Equity Derivatives IT team there is a Romanian (my boss), Englishman, Frenchman, Indian, American, Russian, and two Japanese locals. A subsidiary of the United Nations! Working conditions are pretty good, not too much different from home. Seriously, the office is like my office back in Melbourne, the only difference is when you walk outside. Everyone speaks English, there is an internal chat client that everyone is on, regular meetings, and a social club that organises events and services such as massages and shoe polishing. The corporate world it seems is a common global culture.
Regarding working hours, Japan is considered one of the hardest working countries in the world, and doubled by the fact that UBS is an investment bank, I wasn't looking forward to amount of time I had to put in! When I first met up with my recruiter here, I asked him what my working hours were going to be like, to which his immediate response was "welcome to japan!" with a grin on his face. My throat pretty much went dry as I signed the contract.
But luckily it isn't that bad, it could be a LOT worse. So far on average I work on average over 10 hours a day (including break). Sometimes I see people on the train going home even after 9PM! Man the Aussies have it sweet with our 9 to 5! I remember one day one of my colleagues announced that he had to leave early, and I look at the clock and it was 6:30PM!!
A huge highlight of my (and probably everyone else's) working day is lunch time, because the lunch food in Tokyo is something that makes my mouth water at around about 11AM everyday. Not to say Melbourne doesn't have good food, but the o-bento (boxed lunch) culture in Japan is sooo good! For example, since it's a business district, all the eateries 'specialise' in lunch food for the office workers. Most restaurants have tables set up outside with a heap of boxed lunch sets that you can just pick up on the go. There is so much variety and everything just tastes really good! Each set usually has rice, a serving of meat, vegetables, salad, pickles and sometimes even miso soup. Average price being $6-$8, what a bargain!
Now I know everyone must be dying to know what I actually do at work, and because you asked nicely I'll explain. Currently I'm developing a new component for a pre-trading email pricing system. This is when clients to the company are interested in buying a product, they would sent a email with the figures and terms they want. Instead of traders having to manually make up a quote for them, we want to automate this process. So hopefully by the end a client would be able to send an email request and get back a quote within minutes! I'm actually really enjoying this project, it is bare bones Java and data manipulation (what a geek!).
Unfortunately work is on the other side of the city, 30 minutes by subway. So Gerald is the lucky one who gets to decide if she wants to ride her bike to work or not, I have to squash myself into the peak hour train. But it's not so bad, because unlike in Melbourne, people like the trains here. The trains are always clean, all stations are manned, we have never seen a machine out of order, heck we haven't seen a single piece of graffiti. No one speaks loudly on the train either so it's peaceful cruising all the way. 5 minutes is probably the most time we had to wait for a train.
Anyway that's enough from us about work...no photos either, I'm sure you've seen plenty of glass windowed buildings before!
Take care!
Gerald and Richard
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