TAKE THE BULLET TRAIN

Yesterday, over a “few” beers I told my friend Dennis about one of my stays in Japan.

In the mid seventies, I was working at Kawasaki Steel in Kobe Japan. I was installing a Zenzamer rolling mill that would be making transformer steel. The mill itself was built by Waterbury Ferrel in Waterbury Connecticut. A zenzamer mill is a complicated machine that rolls extremely precise cold roll steel. I worked for LFE Corp who built the control system. It was a non-contact guage that used a radioactive Americium isotope gamma source that could penetrate steel. The gauge also automatically controlled the gauge, thickness, of the steel in real time.

Working in Japan was a real adventure. I stayed at the Hotel Newport, what would be called a boutique hotel nowadays. It was a real Japanese hotel, not at all like a Holiday Inn, with tatami mats and in the evening after dinner your little Japanese bed was laid out on the floor. I met a sweet young girl in Kobe and we would take the Bullet Train to Kyoto which is one of the top places in the world to visit. We attended a Moody Blues concert one Friday at the civic auditorium. We were running late when we arrived and little honey san said that we wouldn't be let in. I scoffed and replied that this is a rock concert, everybody's late. She countered that this is Japan and things are different here. Sure enough, when we arrived, we were barred at the door. The good news was when the warmup act was through, they let us late comers in for the big show. Needless to say, it was a far cry from SoCal concerts. 

But I digress.

I and the guy from Waterbury worked all day in the extremely clean mill. Japanese factories are much different than most other plants. Not only are they clean but if a Japanese foreman tells a worker to pick up a hose, or something, the worker doesn’t say not my job, he bows and then runs over to the hose, or whatever and coils it and hangs it up.

My Waterbury cohort was actually a pilot in the Luftwaffe in WWII. It was in the waning days of the war and he was only sixteen years old. He received about a weeks worth of flight training and then he got a pat on the ass and stuck in a Messerschmidt. He only flew three or four missions and then the war was over. He was a happy guy just to be still alive.

When we were done at the job, I called our trading company in Tokyo and they rightfully  advised me to buy my ticket and call the office back so they could have someone pick me up at the train station because if you get lost at the Tokyo train station, you might as well be lost in the desert, the station is like an iceberg. Ninety percent of it is below the surface.  They needed the train and seat number, the Shinkangsen, bullet train, is as all things Japanese, very prompt. Not one minute late or one minute early.  If they know the seat number I'll be sitting in, they will know the car number. On the platform, there are colored squares with numbers painted in them. At the precise time the train is due to arrive, the door to your car number will be aligned with the square and my driver will be waiting with his sign.

OK, I bought my ticket and I walked over to the telephones. All of a sudden, it hit me. I had no idea how to make a long distance phone call in Japan. In Japan on side of a business card is in English horizontally. On the reverse side it is in Japanese charictors and is vertical. I was standing by the phones with a handful of yen in my left paw and the trading company's vertically held card in my right hand. A well dressed Japanese gentleman approaches me and as he takes the card out of my hand asks in unaccented English "What's the matter, don't you know how to make a long distance phone call in Japan." He reads the English side and makes my call for me chatting in Japanese on the phone. When he is done, I am flabbergasted  and ask him where he is from. He replies Chicago. He tells me how he owns a Japanese restaurant in Chicago and the price of the disposable  wooden chopsticks is skyrocketing being the wood has to be imported into Japan. He tells me that he asked fellow Asian Restaurant owners that if he bought a chopstick machine and set it up in Chicago, would they buy chopsticks from him at greatly reduced prices. Of course they all said yes. 
He then flew to Japan and visited relatives and had a great time. Finally, he had to justify his trip and went to some large plant that made chopstick machines. He told me that they were beautiful machines but they all made bamboo chopsticks. He inquired as to where he could get a wooden chopstick machine and they replied, Chicago.  
By now, if you don't know the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story, I'll tell you. A fairy tale starts out once upon a time. The sea story starts out this is no shit.
And this is no shit.