BureaucracySpeak

I blogged before I would work for a beltway bandit business. My work takes the government institutions as clients. The first day of work, my boss had prepared for me the best immersion program: a big meeting with officials from JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency, the Japanese equivalent of USAID) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the Japanese Dept. of State). This was a briefing on security in Afghanistan.

So I sat in the meeting room trying to look as professional as I could, with a bunch of middle-aged men (OK, I'm middle-aged, so they're a bit older) in dark suits (for the record, there was one other woman besides me). I was trying not to betray the fact that I was being amused.

The meeting began with an explanation that the situation in Afghanistan is difficult and we have to keep paying attention. Fair enough. Then the briefing started.

The presentations were about their analysis of the current situation in Afghanistan and how we could carry on development projects or when and how to make decisions about pulling out. This was my first official meeting, and they had my full+ attention.

I still got lost.

It sounded like their talk was going nowhere, and I found it very hard to follow. I understood the language, but I couldn't decipher what they were trying to communicate.

Afterwards, I asked my boss: "So what was the conclusion? I didn't quite get what they were saying."

"They talk to not say anything. It's bureaucracyspeak. They go around and around and avoid saying anything definitive."

Ah. If you work in Afghanistan, and something happens, they want to leave it as open to interpretation as possible as to who is responsible. Vagueness is their art of speech.

Moving into an apartment

Immediately after arriving in Japan, I began apartment-hunting. I had some ideas of locations and prices through Internet searches, and had focused on the East side of Tokyo (or rather, outside of Tokyo to the East). Rental prices aside, one advantage that a mega-city like Tokyo has is public transportation; we decided to forgo an automobile. Well, we would be too scared to drive on the left side of Tokyo's narrow streets. So our basic conditions for the apartment were, in the order of importance:

a) Pets allowed;
b) A good kitchen;
c) Two or three bedrooms (so friends can come and stay);
d) Within 10 minutes' walk from a nearby station;
e) Within 60-minute commute from my work (not bad for Tokyo);
f) A reheatable bath;
g) Second floor or up.

Little did I know, pet policies are quite strict in the rental market in Japan. Once you have the above a) and b) as conditions, the search returned only a few apartments. Thus I was forced to broaden the area to all Tokyo. Luckily, I found an apartment that met all those above within a few days of search.

I grew up in a large suburban development where all the streets were so planned that a pedestrian's encounters with automobiles were minimum. In the US, the only time I thought walking was impossible was in Los Angeles; or perhaps I would just drive to get to walkable areas. The neighborhood I moved in is entirely different--one has to constantly dodge cars and bicycles. I'm going to have to learn to walk in Tokyo again.