Please Read Before Use...

I love the Japanese version of the dollar store (100 Yen Shop), all of the products have really hilarious English instructions. It's the thought that counts. And I know they don't expect me to buy a cleaning product because I'm actually going to use it, I only buy it so I can read the directions when I go home.

Telephone

No, not the Lady Gaga song that’s music video was playing on a giant 3D Sony TV at the electronics store the other day, it’s the thing that makes everyday at work exciting (in a if-you-don’t-role-with-it-you’d-feel-humiliated-so-it’s-better-to-find-the-silver-lining kind of way).
One of the most important new words I’ve learned coming to Japan this time is ‘shomu’. I think if you look it up in a dictionary you’ll probably find something vague and innocent like “general affairs”. But what shomu really is, is all of the little things that incoming employees are expected to do during their first year. I think I heard the term “grunt work” whispered somewhere ;)
I imagine shomu duties vary by company, but in general you can assume it’s probably stuff you wouldn’t want to do for more than a year.
Anyways, one of my duties is answering the phones. There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of protocol that goes into answering phones in Japan. For example, (after picking up the phone in one ring) you use a different way of speaking depending on if the caller is from within or from outside of the company. It gets tricky so I have a lovely chart that I have basically permanently affixed to my desk to help me along. A lot of the time, people have no idea that they are speaking with an American and that leads to a lot of embarrassing stories, wait, I mean funny stories in a non-humiliating sense…
I’m thinking of starting a hall of fame for my most entertaining hiccups. In the meantime, here is my latest failed, I mean interesting, exchange:
I picked up a call from a local chain in Japan called Yodobashi Camera, or in Japanese-English Yodobashi KAmera (pronounced kah-meh-ra). I’ve always had the bad habit of saying camera with a slightly more English accent, ‘kyamera’. When I was taking a message for the caller, I repeated the store name to double-check and he stopped me, “No no, it’s not Yodobashi Kyabakura, it’s Kamera”. I burst out laughing as soon as I hung up. The caller mistook my accent and thought I was calling his store a ‘kyabakura’, a Japanese host club where men pay lots of money to sit with pretty girls!! Cest’ la vie :)
Incidents like this make me wonder who gets to decide the Japanese-English pronunciation of English words, it always gets me into trouble. Like, I can’t call Ikea ‘Ikea’ anymore, it has to be ‘Eekeha’. So now I call my iPhone an ‘Eephone’.
Moral of the story, if you’re going to be making a lot of mistakes in the future, have some fun doing it. And eat some chocolate or something.