Tsukuba Bus Terminal
In September of 1989 I took an assignment to work onsite at a foreign-capital company in Tsukuba, Japan for three months—a short-term assignment that would eventually stretch to five months. I had been conducting management development training in California for “high-potential” Japanese managers from The Company since 1987, so I knew quite a few people working there, people I’d bonded with in the course of a 13-week training program in the Bay Area—but I hadn’t had a chance to visit its Japanese head office except for a one-week trip in February of 1989. In the fall, a hole opened up in the on-site training program, and I was offered the chance to fill it temporarily until we found and (I) trained a new trainer. I would actually work inside the company, see first-hand how things really worked there, see all my old trainees, and meet lots of new faces. I’d lived in Japan from 1975-77 and 1979-1984, and I jumped at the chance to live there, albeit for a short while, again.
Tsukuba Center
Tsukuba (called Tsukuba Science City), is a center of research, the home of Tsukuba University, and was built on a grid when there was at one time a plan to move all the government buildings there from Tokyo. It is a very modern, rational, and un-Japanese city. There was, for example, no train station. Everyone drove cars along straight, wide streets. It resembled Mountain View, with less traffic. The suicide rate was said to be high. There was Mt. Tsukuba, a Daiei Department Store, a bus terminal and hotel, the aforementioned University, and not a whole lot else. Oh yes, and The Company. So it promised to be a somewhat solitary, work-intensive assignment—but a solitary, work-intensive life in Japan.
One way that I kept myself amused (and blew off steam) was by writing a series of humorous letters about my experiences back to the home office. We didn’t have email at that time. I actually wrote these letters by hand and sent them to one of my coworkers, who started posting them on the bulletin board at work. (Today they would be a blog.) It became a kind of Dickensian serial of corporate life in a foreign-capital company in Japan, in the twilight of Japan’s bubble economy.
Welcome to “Tsukuba Monogatari” (Tsukuba Story). (Names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.)
“Tsukuba Bus Terminal“: Courtesy of Jun Seita. Licensed under cc by 2.0
“Tsukuba Center“: Courtesy of Toyohara. Licensed under cc by NC 2.0
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