RACHEL CHRISTINE HITE

Arttrober Day22: Belldandy (AhMyGoddess)

#for everyone in the tags who doesnt get it: futanari porn. its a reference to futanari porn

This little post has inspired to recount a (slightly) true tale of white guys pretending to know Japanese, and the delightful tension between actual facts of the matter and feeling like it sounds right to you.

I utterly loathe when business folks who know barely any Japanese try to bandy around perfectly ordinary Japanese words and ideas. They often do this to make themselves seem smart and worldly. In the corporate world, that type of Business Motivational Speaker loves to speak very authoritatively of that time they spent a few months in Japan. They barely learned even conversational Japanese, yet are all too happy to act like they are utter experts on the Japanese way of life. It's worse than even the extreme end of the weeaboo spectrum, because while the rabid anime fan may delude themselves and other their obnoxious certainty about what Japan is really like, they usually keep their nonsense in online fandom spaces. They don't try to leverage their misreadings of mundane Japanese words for ordinary concepts like cleanliness or orderliness or patience as profound philosophical concepts that are leveraged to justify the radical restructuring of businesses and people's livelihoods towards the simple end of making a quick buck for the next fiscal quarter.

Such was the stupid little man who I found was teaching the mandatory customer service course my perfectly productive group of records clerk coworkers were forced to spend an afternoon listening to. The company Needed A Change,you see; that is to say, the C-Suite wanted to look good for their investors, and that end, subjecting the hundred-plus workforce of the firm of to unnecessary job-specific training for no other purpose than to "keep our skils sharp" (a euphemism for "it looked good on paper. don't ask questions".)

And thus, the stupid little man teaching the course. He was ex-army, had been stationed in Japan, and even got his Business Degree while he was finishing off his tour of duty there. He'd not foot in the country since the 1990s, but such facts couldn't stand in the way of his believe that was an expert on East Asia and on Business. He loved to make allusions to the Art of War, and claimed it had so many hidden insights into how Asian people think and do business. I scoffed at this, because Sun Tzu's wrote Art of War to teach stupid young Chinese Aristocrats in the 3rd century CE how to avoid getting their nation's soldiers countless soldiers and their lands sacked by blindly pursuing glory. People who compare the act of running a corporation pillaging and conquering a nation understand neither activity, and an sensible person should take great pains to prevent such people from doing either.

Alas, saner powers had failed in this endeavor, and so this stupid little man had been permitted to tout how his New Customer Service Method to us. The Method involved adhering a rigid and inhuman-sounding script he'd developed, one which was scientifically proven to make us more efficient in answering internal information requests that came from within our company. It was hogwash,of course - our group got along very well, and even our section head often shared stories of praise he'd heard from other groups about how well we did our jobs. Alas, this did not spare us from this afternoon in an auditorium with the stupid little man. Between the rigid script, the man's insistence we adhere to it, and his insufferable recurring reference to how Japan made him understand The Philosophy of Business, I was beginning to get annoyed.

As this went on,and we were presented with handouts, I could see the rest of my team was not buying it. This was a mandatory meeting, after all, and our workflow had gotten more intense now that we had to take an afternoon off and listen to this drivel, while the rest of the company was whirring away doing business as usual. Staggering the training days between working groups was more important, and never bothering to think about the operational impacts was proof that our C-suite was Good At Business. So when the sweetest 50-something grandma in my group asked why we needed this fancy new script when the group was already performing very well, the stupid little man began to ramble in perfect business-speak.

Business speak is an art in the way war is an art - it is sometimes necessary for surviving a turbulent world, but too often messy, pointless and cruel. This was no exception. The stupid little man began to talk about corporate change, and how he'd seen so much of it over his career. So much so, in fact, that we went on to found his own company, with the intent of helping others along along. (Naturally his time in Japan was the main reference point.) He dithered and digressed and eventually managed to twist the account of Sun Tzu and the Imperial Concubines as Sun Tzu commanding an army and executing his generals for failing to correctly follow orders. The implication was clear: those who question their masters lose their fucking heads.

This was the point where I got really fucking livid. That stupid little man was not only wasting our time, not only answering honest questions with veiled threats, not only had taken his frustration at being challenged on the most inoffensive and loveliest person on the team..... he even got basic facts about his supposed area of expertise absolutely fucking wrong. This was unforgivable to me, both as a knowledge worker and as a human being. I could feel anger fermenting with in me, threatening to percolate into something nasty.

But I too had read Sun Tzu. And in that moment I recalled a fundamental lesson of the Art of War: all warfare is based on deception.

So I waited patiently. The stupid little man went with his lecture. It was tediously predictable, since most business speakers are tiresomely predictable. They try to be storytellers, and while they may polish their presentation, their stories tend are boringly similar. "The company was in this market sector. Things were doing well and then they didn't. They then looked into the thing they were doing, and learned something, and then did this other thing instead (one which you've paid lots of money for me to pretend I'm an expert on) and that's how they all became productive/profitable/prominent." Such was the stupid little man's lesson, and his captive audience sat and listened and we began to go over the rigid script and nod along like it was an insightful and transformative artefact that would improve our working lives thanks to the stupid little man's hard-won brilliance. "After doing this for a few weeks, you won't even need to read the script." He said,as his audience looked back with a mixture of dead-eyed compliance and nervous eagerness. "It'll just come automatically. You won't even need to think about it." I saw my moment to strike. Summoning my most professional demeanor of polite cordiality, I spoke up "Ah, yeah. it...it makes sense. This script..once we really get it, it becomes 'Golden Flow'... " I looked him dead in the eye, hungry for his reaction. "You know...it's like the Japanese philosophy of omorashi."

I had just compared the stupid little man's lesson plan to being sexually excited by the thought of pissing yourself.

He seemed surprised at first. For a brief moment I thought that the stupid little man had understood what I had said; that he would have acknowledge the knowing the Japanese words for a gross paraphilia or else must struggle to save maintain composure in front of a crowd that he'd just tried to bludgeon into compliance minutes previously. But my hopes of effacement were dashed when his reply of "Yes, exactly!" came with the same vacuous unblinking confidence that only a five-figure speaking fee can buy. He hadn't been surprised by my words; he'd been surprised that I'd spoken intelligently about a topic he claimed to be an expert on.

"It means 'going without thinking'." I added, eager to see what I could get away with. "It's quite popular among some Japanese business leaders."

"Really? That's so interesting. I've never heard of that." " He seemed surprised, yet his words were strangely incurious. I began to suspect he was unable to quite process that someone other than him knew about how they did business in Japan. Did I threaten his unearned sense of expertise? I redoubled my efforts, pushing harder into my feint.

"Buddhism is an old tradition with many different streams," I offered. "Like zen!" came his too-eager reply. "Well, omorashi was little known outside of obscure Buddhist schools, but since the internet began to spread it became quite popular among knowledge workers."

The stupid little man smiled as he seemed to process this. "Ah, that explains it then." He said, his baseless confidence returning. "I don't tend to work with that kind of industry,usually." A dangerous admission to make in front of a group of records clerks, but the stpud little man's stupidity was apparent. " You learn something new every day." He said, before he proceeded to return to his script, and the comforts of exerting petty power over a captive audience. I sank quietly back into silence. I had prevailed, and assured victory against the invading force.

We all forgot to use his script after a week and a half. Our manager quickly dropped reminding us to use it, and after a few months everyone in our department (and outside of it external customers) agreed that we were quite good at doing our jobs. The C-Suite was very happy they spent all that time and money training us, and as the metrics trickled in we were able to show improvements that wholly justified the expense. It's so wonderful to keep your job when your soverign CEO is impressed on their huge expenditures.

But every so often, I think about that petty, stupid little man and his petty, stupid class that wasted both our group's time and our company's money. And I smile.

Because, you see, I handle storing the financial records in the records for the Training department. And I noticed a memorandum on a file that explicitly stated Company would no longer be doing business with the stupid little man's training firm.

I made a few, and eventually heard back from a friend in IT. He wore a look between amusement and discomfort when when I asked the stupid little man, and his stupid little business, and it was in hushed tones that he explained how he'd been flagged by a notification on the company's firewall around the time the stupid little man was in a meeting with the Chief Financial Officer. My friend's supervisor had noticed the incident, and told him to remain quiet about what had transpired. But it seems that, on the day of the meeting, the little man's computer records showed that he accessed Japanese adult content on a work computer, right around the same time he was giving a presentation to the CIO. The response had been swift,quiet, and very effective.

Golden Flow. Going without thinking. Wisdom from the Art of War.