Mishimoto-san docked half day’s pay for early lunch
OUR Prime Minister wants us to look East.
Civil servants aren’t so sure. Every time they look towards Japan, they feel worried. You can’t blame them either. Look at what happened in Kobe five months ago.
A Japanese city official there was docked half a day’s pay for repeatedly leaving his desk “a few minutes too early” for lunch. Dr M might have approved but Cuepacs would have been outraged.
On top of that, officials of the Kobe waterworks bureau, where the 64-year old miscreant worked, gave a televised press conference to apologise for the man’s early-bird practices.
You can understand the worry of Malaysian civil servants. I mean, here, if they come to work a bit late, they make up for it by leaving a bit early.
But I am not the best person to talk. When I first graduated, I began with the government where I am proud to report that I was great at multi-tasking. I could waste time, be unproductive and procrastinate all at the same time.
I am not even sure about the term “civil” servants. On my first visit to Japan sometime in the 1980s, the Japanese immigration officer who attended to me had all the manners of a Rotweiler, yelling at me in Japanese for having had the temerity to look like Osama or some such criminal. “Civil” wouldn’t be the word that comes to mind regarding his behaviour.
Grammarians like to say that the phrase is an oxymoron, or a figure of speech where apparently contradictory words appear in conjunction.
Like, say, a civil war. Have you ever heard of a war that was ever mannerly, courteous or polite? And, of course, there is “military intelligence” but maybe we shouldn’t go there.
Back to the unfortunate Japanese official. The man had left his desk to buy a takeaway bento lunch three minutes before his lunch break was supposed to begin, officials said. And he’d done this before, they gasped in shock.
“It is very regrettable that such misconduct took place,” a bureau official said at the press conference last week. “We deeply apologise for it.”
All four officials at the conference then stood and bowed deeply.
Japan is changing. More importantly, what happened to the Bento loving official may go down in history as you will find out shortly.
The news conference drew ridicule and fierce criticism on social media, with people commenting on the excessive nature of the punishment.
The most vicious tweet was aimed at the official who bowed the lowest. “There are two parts to your brain – right and left. On the left side, there’s nothing right and on the right side, there’s nothing left.”
The slur went viral and suspicion quickly centred on the Bento-loving miscreant not least because the tweet’s writer was one Mishi-san and the man himself was named Mishimoto.
OK, so he wasn’t very bright but he was known as a wit. In fact, his village regularly referred to him as “that half-wit”.
Mishimoto-san may have felt empowered by the glare of fame.
Speaking to a newspaper on condition of anonymity – I never said he was smart – he was quoted as saying: “A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. In my office, I have a work station at my desk.”
Old Mishi’s riposte made the headlines and he became even more famous. Given his widower status, he even received marriage proposals and he began dating one person until she inexplicably dumped him. The event left his adoring audience in shock.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a perplexed Mishimoto-san explained the situation to the paper: “I never said her perfume was too strong. All I said was that the canary had been alive until she got here.”