望まれるヘルプ (Help Wanted)
It was declared at the office a couple of weeks ago that another native English speaking foreigner would be needed to help out with an incoming assload of work headed right to my department. I took this news with mixed feelings. On the one hand...yay! Finally, someone who could possibly understand my all my weird jokes and slang usage without needing a lengthy explanation! And maybe, just maybe, having two legit foreigners will force us to have meetings in English (ya know...so I could understand 100% of the things talked about instead of 80%-70%). But then I wondered...what if I suck and they're secretly trying to replace me> Kinda low how Gus got Walter to train Dale so he could take over the lab. Only hopefully they wouldn't also try to kill me in the process...
However, in a strange turn of events, the first person to show up for an interview wasn't even a native English speaking foreigner. It was a Japanese person married to a native English speaking foreigner. Mmmmmkay...
My pseudo-foreign co-worker and I were, of course, asked to help out with the interview. Somebody had to be there to make sure the English was straight. Not too familiar with the Japanese interviewing system (most of my interviews have been friendly conversations, with questions asked being, "do you like yakiniku?"), I asked another of my co-workers what things we should ask. to which she replied that we should find out if she has kids and if she'd be able to work if something happened to them.
And I was all like:
And as we kept thinking of questions to ask, it dawned on me that everything you can't ask a person in the US, you totally can in Japan. You can ask what nationality someone is, where they're from, if they're married, how many kids they have, etc...etc...etc...and you just gotta sit there and answer it. In theory you could not be hired for being Canadian, or divorced (huge no-no here), or being a dedicated mother (because that would take away from your time working and drinking with co-workers), or for not having a car (because maybe you'll miss the bus and be late often). How Japan has gone so long without anti-discrimination laws is beyond me, but it is what it is and I haven't heard nary a Japanese person complain about it.
Really makes me wonder about those times waaaaaaay back in the day when I was looking for a job, and if I got passed over a bunch of times because of lack of experience or some superfluous nonsense.