and legitimate customer comments. During the first week I came across a letter that had been set aside by one of the secretaries because she didn’t understand it. The letter came from a United States federal agency inviting Honda’s president to a meeting in America with other guests including the President of the United States. By the time I got to the letter, however, the event had already passed.
Although I had successfully avoided having to serve tea, I received special tea-brewing training from the president’s secretary, Ms. Onoguchi.
“You make sure the teapot is completely dry,” she said, giving the inside of the pot an extra wipe with a towel. “Then sprinkle in the tea leaves so that they cover the bottom of the pot.” I watched as she visually measured the dry flakes, which had a fresh, earthy aroma.
“Then, pour in the hot water and let it steep. If you don’t let it steep long enough the tea will be too weak, kind of a light yellow color. If you let it steep too long it will be too dark and bitter.” While the tea brewed, she selected a cup from the cupboard.
“This is a special tea cup with a lid,” she explained. “Usually only the president uses this cup. It keeps the tea extra hot.” The cup had no handles and sat on a wooden saucer.
“The special secret for delicious tea,” she said, taking the cup in her palm, “is to heat the cup before the tea is poured in.” She poured plain hot water into the cup, swished it around for a moment, and dumped it out into the sink.
“When the tea is ready, you pour it into the warm cup and place the lid on top. That’s all there is to it.” She poured the clear yellowish liquid. It smelled sharper than the caramel-colored Lipton tea I drank with milk.
Ms. Onoguchi, like the other women, had been making and serving tea for years, and every time she prepared a new cup for the president she followed the same detailed procedure.
As the weeks passed, sounds in the office began to make sense. I got great satisfaction from figuring out Japanese words, recognizing faces, and practicing how to write everyone’s name. Even the daily routine gave me comfort.
At home I had started to develop my own routine. I broke in the new leased furniture, spread brightly colored cushions on the floor, and tacked family photos to my tiny refrigerator. The housing allowance helped me acquire appliances, but I needed a Japanese-English dictionary to learn how to use them.
Every night I wrote down questions about the appliances and consulted my colleagues in the pantry the next morning. I figured out how to record a message on the answering machine, but I didn’t know how to retrieve one. My new rice cooker had only one switch, but the rice still turned out hard. I even drew a diagram of the washing machine settings so my colleagues could teach me which one was the delicate cycle.
The most challenging appliance was the one I had bought on a whim, an electric bread maker. After struggling to read the directions, translating the recipe and converting metric measuring units in order to use my American measuring tools, the first few tries were disastrous.
Instead of bread, the maker produced hard, mealy clumps of dough. I took my problem to the pantry for consultation. I learned where to find yeast in the supermarket, and Ms. Ogi bought me a measuring cup that correctly converted everything to metric.
One Monday night I decided that I finally understood how to do it. I carefully measured the flour directly into the machine and sprinkled the dry yeast in a little pool of milk and melted butter. The entire cooking process would take four hours. My goal was to wake up to a fresh loaf of warm bread, so I set the timer to start at 2:00 A.M. I was almost afraid to go to sleep, worried that maybe I had miscalculated the amount of yeast or programmed the timer incorrectly. When I went into the tatami room to sleep, I closed the sliding door that separated the two rooms wondering what I would find the next day.
I woke up at 5:30 A.M. on Tuesday feeling the excitement of a Christmas morning. Cautiously, I slid open the door as though expecting the entire living room to be filled with an enormous loaf of bread. Instead, the room was filled with a sweet aroma. I ran over to the bread maker and popped open the lid. Inside was a benign, square loaf with a toasty brown crust waiting patiently in its warm home. I was so excited that I ate a piece right away and went back to bed.
I took the loaf to work. By then the crust had sunk a little, but the secretaries praised my efforts. After my initial excitement, I decided that it tasted like homemade bread made by a robot. There were two odd holes in the square loaf, one in the base and one on the side, where the cooking devices had been lodged. But we ate the goofy-looking mass anyway and talked about how to cure hiccups.
Ms. Ogi spent time explaining some of the general secretarial duties. We went into the pantry where the women made tea and took breaks. On the wall were various schedules and lists written in some kind of code. Ms. Ogi pointed to one of the papers. “This is the morning chore list. Every morning two people arrive before work to do these jobs. We rotate each week so we only have to do it about once a month.”
She explained that “A” chores included unlocking doors, turning on the computers and video monitors, checking the meeting rooms, and making sure that the cologne bottle in the men’s bathroom was full. The “B” job was to file the eight daily papers into the newspaper rack.
“Each person in the office has a single letter code name that we use to simplify the lists. My code is the letter M because my first name is Mieko.” She showed me all the code names, most of them Roman letters, each encased in a small circle. “This one is Ms. Shoji’s name,” she said, pointing to the letter Y with a circle around it. “The Y is from her first name Yumi.” Another list showed the codes for all thirty-seven directors. Ms. Ogi explained that the secretaries used the codes for all interoffice memos because writing the full names took too long.
“Of course, you need to have a code name too,” Ms. Ogi said. I wondered if I should tell her I already had a code name in Japanese—Kiki. But this was the professional world, and Kiki sounded silly to me. The uniform alone took away much of the professional image I had hoped to present. I was already resigned to being called Rora, so I agreed when Ms. Ogi suggested using the phonetic symbol for “RO,” which was one of the easiest in the language, a simple square. In Japanese kanji characters the square symbolized mouth. She pulled out a scrap of paper and handed me a pencil. I drew a small square and circled it.
“That’s it,” Ms. Ogi said. “I’ll make a memo and pass it around the office to tell everyone that you are
I decided to host a Halloween party for the group, thinking that it would help me get to know more about my colleagues than just their names. When I passed out invitations everyone immediately accepted. My dilemma of what to cook was solved by El Paso taco supplies from the international grocery store, which were twice the price of the same thing in America, but worth it because I wanted to prepare something unusual. I used every dish and plate and maneuvered my few furniture items to make sitting room for eleven on the floor.
All the secretaries, except for Ms. Mori, arrived together on a Friday after work. I was shocked to see how sophisticated the women looked wearing dresses and skirts—an improvement over the juvenile uniforms. Everyone brought a mask or hat as a costume, except for Ms. Shoji who was in full costume with a frilly white maid’s apron and hat. Ms. Ogi wore a cone-shaped orange paper hat and a gold mask.
Everyone was curious about my apartment, especially since most of them lived with their parents. Even though the space was so small that a full tour could be given by standing in one place, it was roomy by Tokyo standards. The kitchen area was against the wall of the entryway, but
