1988RedT2 said:Wow. How do these people ever get anything done?
So this is a very good question, and I'm going to go out on some limbs answering it, so please don't take any of this for gospel.
1. I don't think it works like this normally, especially not for Japanese people. My Japanese coworkers and friends have been helping me with the process all along, and they've been shocked. Their experiences have been "slow but accurate" rather than "slow, expensive, and wrong with literally everything for months on end." I've also talked to some US ex-pats who came straight from the US, and they haven't experienced this sort of continual train wrecking either.
2. I get the very strong feeling there's a cultural resistance to saying "I don't know" if you are in a position of official responsibility. This becomes a problem when you're dealing with somebody like me. I'm not Japanese, so the normal procedures for Japanese folks don't apply. I'm also not straight from the US, I lived in Korea for 15 years. This means I have US citizenship but almost my entire life's worth of relevant - finances, IDs, insurance stuff, health records, etc - have all been done in Korea. I don't think they've dealt with many Americans who's lives are written in Korean. And when you're not allowed to say "I don't know, let me check," this snowballs into month's long chaos train wrecks.
3. I suspect this is a cultural thing based on a bunch of small experiences. I've had staff people at the airport confidently tell me where my gate is, and send me in the exact wrong direction. I've been lost in train stations for hours because I believed a security guy. In each instance, the person was new, young, probably not entirely up to speed. And culturally, the response to being unsure and unable to say "I don't know," seems to default to "make E36 M3 up." This is a particularly bad thing for me personally, because I'm used to Korea, and in Korea it's also not acceptable for an official to say "I don't know," but the default in Korea is "whatever you want is impossible." So I'm used to hearing "impossible" and then looking for a supervisor. That obviously doesn't work in Japan.
4. I think that I'm going to be taking names and signatures for everything going forward. I'm also going to go back to Mrs. Kato and give her a present for helping me. I made sure she had no choice in the process, and she's probably terrified of me right now, but she also did her job properly. I intend to reward her, and to show that I'm not just the scary man with mysterious and probably evil plans. Personal relationships seem to really help everywhere, but especially in East Asia.
4.
