There are some things here which I find absolutely hilarious as to the amount of work and effort put into them. Memo’s, forms, attendance sheets, requests etc. Everything goes through an incredibly complicated process of approvals and hierarchies that must be notarized and stamped by a thousand assorted people along the way, and to skip someone in order of hierarchy or approach these processes from the wrong order would be an insurmountable folly. Take, for example this note I received today. To give a little bit of a back story, I signed up for the JET Japanese course, and was delivered my course materials in the mail yesterday. I’ve now completed several of the lessons, and begun to work on the kanji, as it seems like the book was designed for my learning style and I’m powering right through it.  Now, today when I got to school there were two sheets of paper all in kanji on my desk with an assortment of official seals (Hanko’s) decorating the top, as well as two notes from each of my supervisors to draw my attention to these papers. There were no less than 12 hanko’s on this sheet (which had been emailed to us from the board of education and printed off downstairs), and the information inside was utterly useless. This note took so long to be approved by each person along the way that the note books it describes and is alerting me to had already arrived and been consumed before the silly memo reached me. I suddenly realized why so many little things that were actually important for me to know about have “slipped through the cracks” - because the bureaucracy of it all is astounding. Why did the principal need to stamp this again? That poor man must deal with so much nonsense!


There are some things here which I find absolutely hilarious as to the amount of work and effort put into them. Memo’s, forms, attendance sheets, requests etc. Everything goes through an incredibly complicated process of approvals and hierarchies that must be notarized and stamped by a thousand assorted people along the way, and to skip someone in order of hierarchy or approach these processes from the wrong order would be an insurmountable folly. Take, for example this note I received today. To give a little bit of a back story, I signed up for the JET Japanese course, and was delivered my course materials in the mail yesterday. I’ve now completed several of the lessons, and begun to work on the kanji, as it seems like the book was designed for my learning style and I’m powering right through it.  Now, today when I got to school there were two sheets of paper all in kanji on my desk with an assortment of official seals (Hanko’s) decorating the top, as well as two notes from each of my supervisors to draw my attention to these papers. There were no less than 12 hanko’s on this sheet (which had been emailed to us from the board of education and printed off downstairs), and the information inside was utterly useless. This note took so long to be approved by each person along the way that the note books it describes and is alerting me to had already arrived and been consumed before the silly memo reached me. I suddenly realized why so many little things that were actually important for me to know about have “slipped through the cracks” - because the bureaucracy of it all is astounding. Why did the principal need to stamp this again? That poor man must deal with so much nonsense!

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