Word: japanism
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...Efficient, capable and well paid, Haruko (played by the 33-year-old actress Ryoko Shinohara) is a contract worker who has been dispatched to a struggling Tokyo food-manufacturing company. Efficient and deadly capable, she is totally lacking in interpersonal skills - which in Japan, even more than in other countries, are at least as important as actually being able to do the job. The comedy in Haken - which at times resembles a Japanese version of The Office, minus the meanness - comes from Haruko's clashes with her often incompetent full-time colleagues (one of whom is ironically played by Koutaro...
...Dignity is one thing temps don't have in Japan, where a worker is often still judged by the quality of the corporation to which they've pledged their lifetime loyalty. (Indeed, Japanese will introduce themselves company name first: "I'm TIME's Bryan Walsh.") Haken - a serial drama that began airing in January and ends this month - is popular in part because it inverts the accepted rules of a Japanese office and satirizes the social divide between full-timers and lowly part-timers...
Haruko Ohmae, the lead character in the hit new Japanese TV drama Haken no Hinkaku, has the sort of job skills that should get her hired on the spot. She can program a computer, chop sushi, speak Russian, operate heavy equipment - and this being Japan, pour tea. But Haruko doesn't have a full-time job. She's a part-timer, a temp - hence the title of the show, which roughly translates to "the dignity of temp workers...
...joke may be on full-timers and part-timers alike. Although the salaryman's lifetime employment is still considered the Japanese ideal, today nearly one-third of workers in Japan are part-timers like Haruko, up from 20% in 1994. The change is the result of a painful transformation that saw Japanese corporations drastically cut back on hiring while shedding tens of thousands of workers during the economically disastrous years of the 1990s and early 2000s...
...help "open a dialogue" on Nanjing's legacy. There are even signs that reconciliation might not be out of the question. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken pains to mend fences with China in his first months in office, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is scheduled to visit Japan in April. As Kingston says, both sides are coming to the realization that "this relationship is far too important to hold hostage to history...