Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Eating process is important

Aug 23, 2007 14:57 pm / 2 comments

My Aus­tralian friend once men­tioned to me dur­ing his first visit to Japan that he noticed that eat­ing is inter­act­ing in Japan.

At many sushi place, you grinde your own wasabi.
We mix chopped nori, ground gin­ger to our taste at the table when we eat cold soba noo­dle.
We beat our own egg to mix with soy sauce for fer­mented beans, natto.

Today, my Japan­ese friend asked me, why do Amer­i­cans like to just bite into a whole apple instead of peel­ing it and cut­ting them up when he watched me bit­ing into a whole tomato dur­ing lunch. My brown bag lunch was a hard roll, whole tomato, cheese and olives.

I don’t know why. I just know I enjoy an apple a lot more, get more sat­is­fac­tion out of bit­ing into it. I con­fessed to my friend that mother-in-law is angel of a per­son, but I dis­like the way she serves apples at home. She care­fully peels them, cuts them up into nice slices, dip them into salt water to pre­vent brown­ing of it before serv­ing it on a nice plate. My friend com­mented, that’s the way we eat apples. My other friend who was lis­ten­ing com­mented, yes, me too.

 

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2 Comments

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1. Joanne said on Sep 20, 2007 10:13 am:

Hi I just stum­bled on to your blog from Google. I was hop­ing you could help shed some light on work­ing life in Japan.

I am a Sin­ga­porean uni­ver­sity stu­dent major­ing in Bank­ing and Finance and am look­ing to carry out an intern­ship in a for­eign / multi­na­tional bank in Japan. How­ever, my com­mand of the Japan­ese lan­guage is very poor so I’m not too sure of my chances of scor­ing an intern­ship there. So my ques­tion is — Is Eng­lish the lan­guage of com­mu­ni­ca­tion at for­eign com­pa­nies in Japan?

Thanks!


 
2. Fujiko Suda said on Sep 21, 2007 00:09 am:

Hi! Thanks for com­ment­ing in my blog.
To answer your ques­tion, unfor­tu­nately, even in for­eign
com­pa­nies, lan­guage is pri­mar­ily Japan­ese. How­ever,
the for­eign com­pa­nies are employ­ing more and more
for­eign­ers who is not flu­ent in Japan­ese. So do try!
You should have a good chance of being hired.

Good luck!


 

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