a good tea-serving secretary was discouraging.
His list also included five goals to keep in mind throughout the training. One, learn the operations of the executive secretariat; two, learn Japanese; three, learn the way Honda operates in Japan; four, study the approach to public relations; and five, study Honda’s philosophy. These basic ideas appealed to my hopes for a higher purpose, and I embraced the Zen-like quality of his direction. It gave me hope that some day I would be given more sophisticated assignments. I desperately wanted to believe that I had a significant role, that I was good for something more than monitoring attendance.
Immeasurable as the goals were, I earnestly went about pursuing them. I started to keep daily lists of all the new Japanese words I learned and asked my colleagues to explain unfamiliar phrases. Every few days I sent Mr. Yoshida a fax describing my duties and reporting on events. He responded promptly, which gave me a feeling of importance that I didn’t get from doing the tasks themselves.
I threw myself into organizing all the English mail. Part of the job was to filter junk mail from legitimate mail, but I had to do more than just filter it. If an envelope was addressed to a specific director, his secretary felt personally responsible for it even if it was a computer-generated invitation to buy millions of dollars of personal life insurance from a guy named Buddy. As a result, I first had to weed out the junk and then I had to persuade each secretary to throw it away.
One of the first letters I read was from an American woman. She wrote to the president of the company warning him of a plot to use gamma rays in conjunction with Sputnik to destroy the Japanese. The letter went on for twelve pages detailing, among other things, what pop astrologer Jeanne Dixon had predicted for the year.
I usually knew a letter would be interesting when I saw that it was simply addressed to: Mr. Honda, Main Post Office, Tokyo, Japan. One letter came written on rumpled paper in elementary-school script. It was from an American man saying that he had written Honda about an engineering idea. He had since moved, but had heard from a friend in his old neighborhood that a Japanese-looking person had been in the area. The man figured that it was Mr. Honda looking for him and so he wanted us to have his new address.
Another amusing letter came from a young Californian woman who sent a set of holistic, psychedelic love poems to the president. She wrote of her special mission to serve him in any way possible and kindly included nude photos of herself posed next to a waterfall. Although the president and other executives might have been entertained by these scandalous letters, they never even heard about them because it was my job to throw them away.
Some of the English correspondence demanded serious attention. Mixed in with the junk and freak mail were letters from international government agencies and legitimate customer comments. During the first week I came across a letter that had been set aside by one of the secretaries because she didn’t understand it. The letter came from a United States federal agency inviting Honda’s president to a meeting in America with other guests including the President of the United States. By the time I got to the letter, however, the event had already passed.
Although I had successfully avoided having to serve tea, I received special tea-brewing training from the president’s secretary, Ms. Onoguchi.
“You make sure the teapot is completely dry,” she said, giving the inside of the pot an extra wipe with a towel. “Then sprinkle in the tea leaves so that they cover the bottom of the pot.” I watched as she visually measured the dry flakes, which had a fresh, earthy aroma.
“Then, pour in the hot water and let it steep. If you don’t let it steep long enough the tea will be too weak, kind of a light yellow color. If you let it steep too long it will be too dark and bitter.” While the tea brewed, she selected a cup from the cupboard.
“This is a special tea cup with a lid,” she explained. “Usually only the president uses this cup. It keeps the tea extra hot.” The cup had no handles and sat on a wooden saucer.
“The special secret for delicious tea,” she said, taking the cup in her palm, “is to heat the cup before the tea is poured in.” She poured plain hot water into the cup, swished it around for a moment, and dumped it out into the sink.
“When the tea is ready, you pour it into the warm cup and place the lid on top. That’s all there is to it.” She poured the clear yellowish liquid. It smelled sharper than the caramel-colored Lipton tea I drank with milk.
Ms. Onoguchi, like the other women, had been making and serving tea for years, and every time she prepared a new cup for the president she followed the same detailed procedure.
As the weeks passed, sounds in the office began to make sense. I got great satisfaction from figuring out Japanese words, recognizing faces, and practicing how to write everyone’s name. Even the daily routine gave me comfort.
At home I had started to develop my own routine. I broke in the new leased furniture, spread brightly colored cushions on the floor, and tacked family photos to my tiny refrigerator. The housing allowance helped me acquire appliances, but I needed a Japanese-English dictionary to learn how to use them.
Every night I wrote down questions about the appliances and consulted my colleagues in the pantry the next morning. I figured out how to record a message on the answering machine, but I didn’t know how to retrieve one. My new rice cooker had only one switch, but the rice still turned out hard. I even drew a diagram of the washing machine settings so my colleagues could teach me which one was the delicate cycle.
The most challenging appliance was the one I had bought on a whim, an electric bread maker. After struggling to read the directions, translating the recipe and converting metric measuring units in order to use my American measuring tools, the first few tries were disastrous.
Instead of bread, the maker produced hard, mealy clumps of dough. I took my problem to the pantry for consultation. I learned where to find yeast in the supermarket, and Ms. Ogi bought me a measuring cup that correctly converted everything to metric.
One Monday night I decided that I finally understood how to do it. I carefully measured the flour directly into the machine and sprinkled the dry yeast in a little pool of milk and melted butter. The entire cooking process would take four hours. My goal was to wake up to a fresh loaf of warm bread, so I set the timer to start at 2:00 A.M. I was almost afraid to go to sleep, worried that maybe I had miscalculated the amount of yeast or programmed the timer incorrectly. When I went into the tatami room to sleep, I closed the sliding door that separated the two rooms wondering what I would find the next day.
I woke up at 5:30 A.M. on Tuesday feeling the excitement of a Christmas morning. Cautiously, I slid open the door as though expecting the entire living room to be filled with an enormous loaf of bread. Instead, the room was filled with a sweet aroma. I ran over to the bread maker and popped open the lid. Inside was a benign, square loaf with a toasty brown crust waiting patiently in its warm home. I was so excited that I ate a piece right away and went back to bed.
I took the loaf to work. By then the crust had sunk a little, but the secretaries praised my efforts. After my initial excitement, I decided that it tasted like homemade bread made by a robot. There were two odd holes in the square loaf, one in the base and one on the side, where the cooking devices had been lodged. But we ate the goofy-looking mass anyway and talked about how to cure hiccups.
Ms. Ogi spent time explaining some of the general secretarial duties. We went into the pantry where the women made tea and took breaks. On the wall were various schedules and lists written in some kind of code. Ms. Ogi pointed to one of the papers. “This is the morning chore list. Every morning two people arrive before work to do these jobs. We rotate each week so we only have to do it about once a month.”
She explained that “A” chores included unlocking doors, turning on the computers and video monitors, checking the meeting rooms, and making sure that the cologne bottle in the men’s bathroom was full. The “B” job was to file the eight daily papers into the newspaper rack.
“Each person in the office has a single letter code name that we use to simplify the lists. My code is the letter M because my first name is Mieko.” She showed me all the code names, most of them Roman