Sylvia's Journal

Of the 30 participants we had planned for, only 19 showed up. This was both good and bad news. The good news was that we were more comfortable in the small room, the only one available now that the organization has moved to smaller quarters. The bad news was that the carefully assigned groups had to be re-assigned.

English language levels, promised to be high, were more mixed. It was easy to tell who grew up or worked outside Japan. They are all supposed to speak English well for their future UN careers but some have a long way to go. I wondered whether learning English here is like in Afghanistan where teachers who speak very poorly are teaching others in a downward spiral of competence.

Most of the material we covered was new (Kolb’s learning styles, Cohen and Bradford’s Influence Model, with an emphasis on currencies, and emotional intelligence, using a playing cards exercise that I learned years ago at OBTC). The currency session was productive, even though some didn’t quite get it, in that they added some very Japanese examples to the ones I gave them.

Today will be a lighter day for us but a heavier day for them as they have to give a powerpoint presentation about a topic they care about and that relates to their UN ambitions. The specs for this were handed down by the ministry – powerpoint is still the most used tool for communicating content and interest, like it or not.

I do love working here in Japan and with these young professionals, primarily because they had to compete to get into this program, they have to pay for it themselves and they do it on weekends after their regular workweek has ended. And they do this for months, every weekend from 9 till 5). Unlike the other places I work, no one is there because of per diem or transport reimbursements and there isn’t the usual ritual at the end of the day of people clustering anxiously with their hands stretched out around a seated accountant with a money bag and a recording form.

My co-facilitator joined us for dinner – we picked a food type we hadn’t had yet (Monja and Okonomiyaki). For this we had to travel to a section of Tokyo that is famous for this type of food. Once arrived we found ourselves standing in front of a long lane lined with tiny or small restaurants, all offering the same dishes. We picked one at random and were pleased with our choice.  It was good we had a Japanese speaker with us because nothing was written in a script we could read and the wait staff did not speak a word of English. We would have had to do a kind of culinary trustfall and then we would have been eating with so many question and no answers.