Friday, February 10, 2012

Renewal

I usually don’t like to write about work. Mainly for professional reasons, but it also feels contrary to the point of “Better Door than Window.” My idea is to “open the door” on ideas, not to provide a window into my life. There are sometimes when the stories that we live through my be more educational than if I were just to tell you something. This is one of those times.

So, I’ll start this story back in 2011, when I was on winter vacation and visiting my family.

While I was at home in the US, I wanted to get my American Driver’s License renewed. I wasn’t super keen on driving in the US, and sort of wanted to just relax at home, but I figured I should get my license renewed just so I can drive somewhere when it was too cold and late. I was dreading having to go to the DMV and was procrastinating the whole thing. It was then my parents told me that the policy in my state had changed, and the only thing a person needed to do to renew their driver’s license was to stick a sticker on the back of your license that they had already sent. My license was about 6 months out of date, so I was happy that I could put the sticker on and be done with it. Even with that simplicity though, I remember my parents bugging me at least twice about doing it. I finally did it and spent some time driving. I am always surprised how easy it is for me to switch from driving on the left in Japan, to driving on the right in the USA. It made me realize how much driving is just following the guy in front of you.

I spent New Years at my girlfriend’s family’s house and while having fun there, I got a little money charm in my wallet. While I don’t see myself as a superstitious person (something I have wrote in this blog before), a little charm here and there can’t hurt. Maybe what makes charms affective is how when you see them, they remind you, perhaps on only a subconscious level, about what you really need to be worried about. It is that sort of reminder that I could have used in that next month.

The reminder I needed didn’t come until I was doing a seminar about obtaining a driver’s license in Japan. I wasn’t too nervous about the presentation because I had done it the year before, but due to much too much cold weather, normal day-to-day work, and some personal anxiety stuff, I found my self to be somewhat nervous. It was that kind of excited nervous I get when I am going to get in front of a ton of people or when I drink too much coffee. I went to the presentation with my co-workers and one of them insisted about talking about people who need to go through the entire “acquiring Japanese license” procedure.

You see, for most people who want to drive in Japan they already have a driver’s license in their native country. Having a driver’s license in your native country makes getting the process of getting one in Japan much simpler than starting from scratch. Since most people who do not have any sort of driver’s license don’t get one when they get to Japan, I was curious why we needed to go over this in the presentation. It was then I learned that if you don’t get your Japanese driver’s license renewed on time, then you might have to go through most of the process again if you don’t renew it within 6 months time. I hurried and looked at my wallet and my worst fears were beginning to be realized when I saw that my Japanese Driver’s license was about 6 months and 2 weeks after the deadline.

I can’t give any good excuses why I waited that long to renew my driver’s license, except that, in the US, the driver’s license is normally the main ID I would use. In Japan I  mainly use my Alien Registration Card. I never took my Japanese license for anything other than to look at the bad picture of me. It never occurred to me that not renewing my Japanese driver’s licence could cost me dearly. I would love to be able to say that was never communicated to me and therefore I am not entirely responsible, but in the end, I know I had no one else to blame but myself.

So I told my supervisor the following Monday, and she told me to immediately stop driving and take the bus to work. To be honest, I am not the biggest fan of driving, and would rather take public transportation whenever I can. The problem is that is impossible due to the places I work being so far away from one another. Just the idea of having to go through the rigmarole of the Japanese Driving test (which by all accounts, is much more about following their rules rather than if you can actually drive) is something I would have only cooked up in my nightmares, and it was coming true. I felt like the man who found himself naked at his old school and had to retake all his high school finals again. The worst part was that it was looking like I didn’t just have to take all the tests, but 10 hours of driving lessons as well. Ten hours of driving lessons would have came out to about 100,000 yen (about 1,200 dollars).

Which is kind of funny, in a way, because at that same conference I went to, there was talks about the difference between how Japanese workers tend to deal with emotion at the workplace and how Westerners tend to deal with the same emotion. In the US, I found that as long as it doesn’t affect your work too much, showing your emotions can be a way to connect to your co-workers and make it easier to work together. In Japan, emotion in the workplace is rather discouraged. While the Western way of showing emotion is more intuitive for me, the Japanese way of not showing emotion makes a lot of sense to me. It is something that I take into consideration when I think about being professional in the workplace.

Unfortunately, when I heard the news that I would have to pay all that money to re-learn how to drive, as much as I wanted to fit into the Japanese workplace, my American instincts took over. While I never let it on how much it bothered me when people needed me to work, but any time I had any free time I would be sighing heavily to myself and have my head on my desk. I just couldn’t believe this was happening to me. While I had been saving money for a vacation or something fancy for myself, having all that money wash away and be erased in what seemed like an instant was disheartening to say the least. All because of a mistake. It didn’t even feel like a mistake, it just felt like I didn’t follow all the rules exactly and now I am being punished for it. Sometimes the worst thing we do to ourselves is not do anything at all.

I was feeling down and out, studying my own handouts that I had presented on just a few days earlier to people learning to get their own driver’s license, when I got a phone call. “What could make this any worse?” I thought to myself while picking up the receiver. I then misheard my co-worker say on the phone that he had a a “happy shiawase” to tell me (“happy shiawase” would mean “happy happiness”). It turns out that I won’t have to take most of those tests, and all I have to do is gather all the paperwork, take a simple eye test, and I could have my license renewed. I kept asking over and over again if the tests really weren’t necessary, and he kept repeating that they were not. No 10 hour classes, no stressful tests, as long as I didn’t go blind in the next two weeks, I would be fine. It turned out that because I had renewed my license in the US, I was in the clear in Japan.

Even as things began to look up for me, I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things had been going from bad to good so fast that I wasn’t sure if the roller-coaster was almost over or if I should had been prepping myself for another drop. I had to go to the license place two times to get my JP license renewed. First time I needed to fill out some paperwork and find out what I need to get in order to proceed. Then the second time I needed to get all the stuff they requested, take the eye test, take some photos, and leave that place with a new license. Normally this not a very hard process, but I was so nervous that I would do strange things like mess up my birth date and have to manipulate the number in a way that makes it look like the real number, but just looking like it was written by a 10 year old child. Through both visits, I found myself worried that at some point someone was going to drag me aside and inform me that they are very sorry, but I needed to take all these tests and pay all this money before even thinking of getting my license back.

In the end, everyone was actually quite nice, and I got my new licence with no problem (well, except for the photographer, he was a bit of a butt, but the only consequence of that is an odd looking picture). On the way home, I began to wonder what I should take out of this. For one, I needed to buy my co-workers presents because the magic they preformed somehow to not have to not have to retake all those tests. I also needed to make sure to be more aware of when things expire. More than those things though I wanted a lesson, some sort of moral that I could bring out of all of this. I thought a lot about the difference between doing what is necessary versus what is compassionate (it could have so easily been that I would have to take all those tests and pay all that money, but I have no idea if what happened could really be called “compassion”). I thought a lot about how listening to my parents may had saved me a lot of money. I thought a lot about how maybe that charm helped me somehow. I thought about how much in life can change depending on who you upset and who you make friends with. I think the thing I thought of the most on the way home was how happy I was to have this be over with and hoping that the next crisis I have is a long way away.

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