The First Few Days

Hello all. I have safely made it to Japan! I apologize for the lack of posts. Fortunately, I have fully adjusted to time zone and have managed to squeeze in a lot of Tokyo within this past week.

I’ll make separate posts about what I did specifically on each day at a later time when I have a chance to edit some of the pictures that I took. 

This post will just be my musings on starting my internship!

For those of you who don’t know what Co-Op Japan is, let me explain. Co-Op is a big retail store chain that in centrally located in Nakano, Tokyo. It has branch stores at many of the major universities across Japan. Co-op also specializes in home delivery of its products. 

For my internship, I will be working in the different sectors of the business as sort of managerial training in order to understand how a business functions from the corporate level to the consumer level. 

On Thursday, I started work at the main office in Nakano. Rob, the other intern from America, and I met outside the office at 8:45 for our first meeting at 9. We went over the basic principles of the company and made introductions (all in Japanese) to the CEO and COO of the company (that was scary). 

Fortunately, I was able to remember my 敬語 (けいご/Keigo: high formality and honorifics in the Japanese language usually used in business settings), so I think I made a good impression!

After out meeting on Thursday, our boss took us to Asakusa to get a feel for what Tokyo was like back in the Edo Period. Asakusa houses many various tidbits in the Tokyo area, but we specifically went for the history. We first grabbed lunch in an old restaurant styled to that of a sumo area. For those that don't know, Sumo is (in a very dumbed down way) the traditional Japanese version of heavy-weight wrestling. We sat close to the center and our boss was explaining to us a little bit about the sumo culture. Traditionally, before competing, sumo wrestlers would eat what the Japanese call ちゃんこ(chanko). Chanko is a pot of boiling soup loaded with different meats (or seafood) and vegetables with a huge pot of rice and sashimi on the side. I, being the bottomless pit that I am, ordered the seafood chanko and finished all of it (keep in mind that these meals are feeding two/three hundred pound men). After we finished but were still too full to move, our boss told us a little bit more about the ceremony surrounding sumo wrestling. The sumo ground is sacred to those who "create their art on it" (my bosses words, not mine) and those who are tainted could not climb onto the platform. He pointed out signs all around the arena and, sure enough, those who were viewed as tainted in traditional Japanese culture were women. It's funny how cultures can be so different, yet be so similar. 

When we were able to finally hoist ourselves up, we went to the Edo Tokyo museum and got a tour by literally the smallest and oldest Japanese woman I've ever seen in my life. Learning about Tokyo's history and how it became what it is today was really eyeopening. I didn't know a lot of the specifics of the Tokugawa Shogunate and what traditional Japanese life was like back in the Edo Period. The dates of the museum ran from around the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

One thing that I found interesting in the museum was that there was absolutely NOTHING (and I can't emphasize nothing enough) about the Atomic Bombs during World War Two. Nothing, zip, zilch, nada. The museum had artifacts of US planes that the Japanese were able to shoot down during air raids, but when it came to that one thing that changed the course of Japan's history so significantly, not even a mention. 

So before this post becomes too long, I will wrap it up with some teasers for my next few posts:

Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Central Tokyo! 

Central Tokyo Tea House