Office Observations 5/12/2005

Mornings.

I'll never forget mornings at Japanese camp in junior high. Showers were so packed in the morning that with my group of friends I would head down to the lakeside, and we would all hop in the sauna together. Then we would bathe in the lake (with biodegredable soap of course)

Then we would rush back to our uchi (cabin, mine was called Fukuoka) to make in time before rajio taisou (radio excercises) before breakfast everyday.

A tape would play with an authorative sounding Japanese guy saying a bunch of stuff, of which the only thing I could catch were numbers. We would do jumping jacks, toe touches, etc.

I guess I never relaized at the time that what we were doing was a Japanese custom; I just figured they wanted the seito (campers) to get their muscles moving before the day started.

In my office in Miyazaki, we always had rajio taiso over the PA, and it made me laugh to see people actually doing it in the office. We also had rajio taisou at 3:00 every afternoon.

Now that I'm back in Tokyo, it's funny to see how even here old customs die hard. My office now plays rajio taisou every monring (the exact same one from Japanese camp acutally (dai ichi)). I had yet to see a single person do it though.

Until Yesterday that is. One of the non-OL women in the department stood up when the music started, and just started doing rajio taiso all by herself. People always talk about fading customs, but I bet this is one that very few people now about. It brought back a lot of memories from my summers at Mori No Ike.