The meeting place was at Mitaka station, on the Chuo line, about 20 minutes west of Shinjuku. It took me almost an hour and a half to get there. This better be worth it.
I got there on time and saw a bunch of foreigners standing around, looking lost. This was the group, surely. I approached them and found out that we were still waiting for the representative from the company to receive us. As we stood around some more, I noticed that there was a man passed out on a park bench in front of a statue, in front of the station. There were two policemen hovering around him, one was wiping his forehead and the other was watching. A crowd was starting to gather.
I turned around to the girl beside me and pointed at the commontion. She promptly turned around and ran off in the other direction. Her reaction kind of surprised me, but then it struck me that that`s exactly what Clark Kent would do in such a situation. He`d be notified of trouble (he was always the last one on the scene for some reason. What a shitty reporter, no wonder he never nailed Lois) and then he`d turn and run away, ripping his shirt open and exclaiming, "This is a job for Superman!"
Of course, the emergency vehicles showed about 5 seconds later, and oddly enough, the girl returned, fixing her sweater. The ambulance guys beat her to it. I guess there weren`t any telephone booths handy.
So, the rep finally shows with her assistant and they lead the way back to the office building. It turns out to be an NTT building, which doesn`t really surprise me, as NTT seems to own almost everything in this place.
We are herded into a room and the administration begins. We write down our vitals and give them our bank information so that they can pay us later. Back home, I`d never fall for the ol` we`ll-pay-you-tomorrow routine, but here, I trust them. I hope they pay me.
After all that is done, they quickly explain what we have to do and split us into two groups of four. I am in Group B, which means I will be sitting out for the first half hour session.
As we sat in the tiny little board room, we start to chat about the regular junk like where we`re from and what we do here. One of the girls in my group worked as a freelance writer in Tokyo, she was originally from Hamilton. I asked if she had ever heard of my aunt and uncle`s old Chinese restaurant, Marks. She hadn`t.
There was a guy from Sacramento. He was Japanese, but born in the States. He didn`t talk all that much, but I found out that this wasn`t his first time in Tokyo and he was here on working holiday visa, looking for work. I told him to stay as far away from Nova as possible and he laughed.
The last girl that was in Group B was from Ottawa. She was about my age, having just graduated from university and had finished a brief back packing stint in Europe and Thailand. She told me that she had to resort to being a hostess here for a little while because she needed the money. It was interesting to hear about the job. You have to be really nice to people, regardless of whether you like them or not. You have to act interested in what they are saying and tickle their egos a little. Sounds a lot like my job.
For those of you who don`t know what a hostess is, she`s basically someone you pay to keep you company and laugh at your jokes. There`s usually no sex involved, and you aren`t allowed to touch. Kinda like rent-a-first-date.
The first half hour goes quickly and soon, I find myself filing into a sound proof room with the rest of Group B. It`s about the size of a small bathroom and there is one table in the middle, surrounded by four chairs. We`re asked to sit down and strap headphones on our heads.
Our job was to compare two sets of sentences and judge the quality of the second set against the first set. As I sad down at my station, I felt like I was taking part in some forced Nazi human experiment, where they would send electric shocks through your body until you collapsed, just to see how much pain you could endure. Either that or something creepy would happen like we`d all end up having the same dream tonight or suddenly be able to speak backwards Latin.
Much to my relief, the test started with no electric shocks or hypnotic voices. Instead, all I felt was a slight buzz, as a voice came out of the left headphone speaker.
"The oak is strong and provides shade. It got its hind legs caught in a rusty trap."
"The oak is strong and provides shade. It got its hind legs caught in a rusty trap."
What? These sentences made no sense whatsoever and both sounded exactly the same to me. We compared 40 sets the first session, then 80 in the next two and 56 in the last session. After a while, I just stopped listening and was choosing rankings at random (you had to decide whether the second set was better, worse, or the same as the first, clarity-wise). I didn`t feel too badly about it. It`s not like our actions would decide the fate of the free world or anything.
It occurred to me more than once that we were just subjects of some cruel university psych test rather than what they had told us in the little room.
After what seemed like a lot more than four hours, they let us go. I headed back toward home and decided to stop off in Shinjuku for a little. I remembered that I didn`t get a shot that I really wanted last time - you know, of the school girls getting felt up on the subway car? Well, I walked over to Kabuki-cho and got it. Sort of. The sign is tilted a little, so I couldn`t get a decent shot of it without going down the stairs to the establishment (which I didn`t want to do).
This is the company that runs the joint. I suppose that just explains it all.
Japan: Land of Wonders.
I really should come here more often. Shinjuku is enormous and I haven`t even seen half of it yet. Everywhere you look, you will see scenes like this. It goes on for blocks and blocks. Incredible.
On the way back home now, at Shinjuku station. This is one of the funnier signs I`ve seen here (and believe me, there are many).
I`m tempted to drop something onto the track to see if the station guard will grab his big, long calipers and fish it back out for me. I`ll be sure to take a photo of it if I do.
