Interviewed by Tom Mangan
Mike Cash, an American trucker in Japan.
Pictures of his travels are here. He writes about them here.
AUTHORS
Michael Fuchs
Elizabeth Hilts
Paul Riddell
Gary Rivlin
Jim Motavalli
Barbara Shafferman
Jules Siegel
Keith Snyder
ARTISTS/POETS/
PHILOSOPHERS
Jon C. Allen
Will Baker
Mike Leung
Jon Sarkin
COOL SITE KEEPERS
Mike Cash
Scott O'Neal Colf
Godfrey Daniels
Cliff Davis, DDS
Tammy Hocking
Wes Modes
Frank Rogan
DIARISTS
Ralph Becker
J. D. Bruns
Linda DeVault
Mike Reed
Moira Richardson
Jessamyn West
FILMMAKERS
JOURNALISTS
Bernie
Mary Cooley-Jones
Lindsay Crysler
Jamie Dupree
M.O.A.T.M.A.I.
David Moll
Robert Niles
John Orr
Steven Ovadia
Pierce Presley
Mack Reed
Rip Rense
Curtis Ross
Neal Ross
John Scalzi
Catherine Seipp
David Sheets
Dwight Silverman
Matt Welch
MOVIE MAVENS
HUMORISTS
Debbie Farmer
Mike Jasper
Madeleine Begun Kane
Patrick Keller
Bob Sassone
Valerie Sprague
Ken Swarmer
Ian Wolff
SOLDIERS
TEACHERS
TECHIES
Chris Adamson
Mike Gunderloy
Michael Ivey
Greg Knauss
Floyd Maxwell
Ellen McDonough
Mike Pingleton
Wayne Thume
John Worth
TEENS
UNDECLARED
WEBLOGGERS
How'd you end up trucking in Japan, anyway?
I originally came to Japan in January of 1984 as a member of the US Navy. While here I got married to a Japanese woman and we moved to Tennessee in 1986 following my discharge from active duty. I subsequently attended the University of Tennessee at Martin, where I majored in going broke. I refused to take out a student loan, and full-time study doesn't combine well with full-time work. The study suffered. I was just about to drop out and try going to Japan to get work as an English teacher when I learned that UTM had a sister school relationship with Hirosaki National University in Japan, and that some students were exchanged each year. I applied for the scholarship and received it. Free airfare to Japan, 134,000 yen per month living stipend, and not a whole lot of responsibilities.
Following my period on that scholarship, I changed my visa over from a student visa to a spouse visa. The main advantages of this are that it lets me do practically any sort of job I can convince someone to give me. I found a job teaching English in Kiryu City, located in my wife's native Gunma Prefecture.
I was on a one-year contract at the English school, and rapidly approaching time to renew it. For at least two months prior to the expiration, I had been telling the staff I wanted to renew, and wanted to talk about the conditions of the new contract. I kept getting put off because the school's owner was out of the country on business. It would take me anywhere from a month to two months to find a different school should I decide that I didn't like the conditions offered to me at the present one. I didn't have a financial cushion sufficient to sustain us over such a period. But what ended me up in trucking was the matter of my vacation time.
I had seven days paid vacation included in my one year contract, and had used none of them. I asked permission to roll them over to my new contract, but was refused. I either had to use them or lose them. Furthermore, I had to give 30 days notice of intent to take a holiday. I informed them that I would take all of my vacation days 30 days hence. I planned a trip back up north to visit friends at Hirosaki University. While on the road, I encountered a lot of trucks. And I found myself envious of them. They didn't have to wear neckties. They didn't have to smile at students they couldn't stand. They didn't have bosses looking over their shoulders all day. They weren't stuck inside the same four walls spending their days with the same people day in and day out. They got to go places and see things. Not like me at all.
On my return to Gunma, I looked into licensing requirements for truck drivers and found that trucks with load limits under 5 tons required no special license at all, a regular passenger car operator's license being sufficient. By this time, my teaching contract had expired and there still had been no discussion of my new contract terms. I needed a safety net.
A further reason for making such a drastic change in my type of employment was that it bothered me that like almost all other English teachers in Japan, my ability to live here was based primarily on my ability to speak English. I wanted to see if I could live in Japan even though I spoke English, and perhaps in a way to see what things had been like for the millions of immigrants to America who hadn't been English speakers, yet who had persevered and succeeded in their new homes.
In my area of Japan, there are several job information magazines published each week, listing available positions. I bought some and started hunting. Knowing nothing at all about the Japanese trucking industry or how to differentiate good companies from bad ones, I was somehow lucky enough to pick a good one to call.
The man on the phone, however, wasn't at all enthusiastic to receive my call. He agreed to let me come for an interview, although it was clear from his tone that I would be wasting both his time and mine. As it turned out, the man on the phone was the terminal manager. The personnel man and the dispatcher were in favor of giving me a chance, and the terminal manager remained opposed. He brought in a stack of bills of lading and told me to read off the addresses. Fortunately, I hadn't neglected learning to read Japanese at the same time as trying to learn to speak it, and I was able to read them to his satisfaction.
Although hiring is normally handled by local terminals, in my case the decision was referred to headquarters in Kyoto. As luck would have it, the president of the company was a Kyoto native. Kyoto is the beautiful ancient capital of Japan and is full of places of great historical significance to Japan. He was very grateful that America had made the decision not to bomb Kyoto during the war, and he remembers growing up during the occupation era and had a good impression of the American occupiers. So he was predisposed to treating me favorably. I got the job.
That was in 1990. Things have changed a lot since then. The most notable change has been that the faltering economy means a somewhat tightened labor market. When I went for that first driving job, there were more openings than applicants. Now the situation is reversed and it is much harder. Fortunately, I have over the years come to know people who know people, and who don't mind putting in a favorable word for me from time to time. This helps with job hunting these days. In Japan, like everywhere else perhaps, the old expression "It's not what you know, it's who you know" holds very true.
What's a typical reaction the first time you deliver a load to a site and the people on the dock see this white guy at the wheel?
This is something else that has changed greatly since 1990. I used to get a lot more strange reactions than I do now. There were many times when I would go to the reception window to hand in my bills and be entirely ignored by everyone in the office. I would open the window and call out, and everyone would look up and just as quickly look down again, pretending not to have seen me. I knew that eventually somebody would want the stuff off the truck and that they couldn't ignore me forever, so I would just stand there and wait until somebody decided to bite the bullet.
That type of reaction had its origin in the very strong stereotype Japanese have long held about foreigners: that with very rare exceptions we are incapable of learning Japanese. No one in the office had enough confidence in their English abilities to handle the transaction with me, so the easiest thing to do was to ignore me, hoping someone else would go to the window. But some offices weren't so shy, with people at the window instead loudly saying stuff like "Oh no! It's a foreigner! What shall I do? I can't speak English!" Reactions ran about half and half between these two types.
Or if I go with another driver from my company, a more typical reaction is to be ignored entirely, treated as though I'm just some coolie labor they brought along with them. This has on one occasion led to a bizarre situation. On that day, I was the senior driver and went together with a Japanese driver to pick up two truckloads of fertilizer from the factory. He had just joined the company and had never been to this factory. I was asked to show him the procedures for loading there. When we got there, there was some mix-up in the paperwork, and the orders were messed up. A man from the factory office came out to discuss it with us. He steadily ignored me despite my best efforts, instead addressing all his remarks to the Japanese driver. He, of course, had no idea what was going on and kept looking to me for the answers. And when I tried to provide the answers, I would be ignored by the man from the factory. It was finally decided to go the office and straighten things out. When I started to go along, he told me I could just wait there, that I wouldn't be needed. This caused a really troubled look on the face of my coworker. I insisted on going along, and the man very condescendingly agreed to let me come, I might learn something.
Things are much better now, and most people seem completely nonplussed to see a big white guy driving trucks in Japan. Or at least they don't let their surprise show as much as they did in the past. There are still a few rare times when things like those mentioned above happen to me, but now they so few as to be merely amusing, rather than so numerous as to be aggravating as in the past.
American big rigs seem pretty plush compared to the trucks you drive. What are some of the advantages of Japanese trucks?
Not a damned thing. How's that for an answer?
As far as comfort goes, American trucks have Japanese ones beat hands down. I speak from personal experience, having driven trucks professionally in both countries. Japanese trucks are all of the COE (cab over engine) variety, which rides like a buckboard sometimes. The beds are merely narrow benches behind the driver's seat, and there is practically no storage space whatsoever for personal items. In my current truck, my personal effects get stowed in a couple of 10kg tangerine boxes placed on the bunk. If I want to go to bed, I have to move everything up onto the passenger seat or onto the hump over the engine.
For safety, I like the design of one common type of large truck in Japan that uses two steering axles. With four steering tires there is less danger of loss of control in the case of a front tire blowout.
The roads in Japan look to be narrow, crowded and generally nasty to be trucking on. What's to like about them?
Nothing, and everything. Which somehow seems an apt answer in this land of contradictions.
From a practical standpoint, there is nothing at all to like about the roads. They are indeed narrow and crowded, and trucking on them isn't all that easy. City planning seems to be an entirely foreign concept which mostly gets practiced as an afterthought, and roads seem to be in a perpetual state of ongoing construction. Tolls on expressways are prohibitively expensive, especially in the current recession, and most companies don't allow their trucks onto them nearly as much as they used to. As a result surface roads become even more congested and my workday becomes even longer.
But.....one doesn't have to look very far to see that there is still a baby in the bathwater, to make lemonade of the lemons.
You can observe a lot about the human condition while stuck in traffic. Wonder what the latest fashions are this season? They're going down the sidewalk. How's the economy going? Take a look at the increased number of cash advance facilities springing up everywhere, and at the signs advertising title loans on cars. Lots of new housing construction going on? How about commercial buildings? See a lot of empty office space in Tokyo begging for renters? How about those signs on lamp posts advertising houses for sale in the area? How are the prices looking? There's no end of things to be seen if you learn to see the trees, and not just the forest.
There are all sorts of examples of this in the photo albums on my Web site. The vast majority of the photos posted there were taken while I was in the driver's seat of my truck.
We always hear how the Japanese are suspicious of foreigners. Can you share an example that either confirms or counters that stereotype?
There all sorts of examples of this, but the two I will share here both happened to me in relation to my work.
Sometime probably in 1991, I was dispatched to Ibaraki Prefecture to deliver a load to a local branch of the farmers' cooperative. What I am about to relate was only told to me about two years after the incident occurred, and at the time it happened I wasn't even aware anything was going on. My boss said he answered the phone and found himself talking with person from the farmers' cooperative office who was quite upset at finding a foreigner driving up.
"Did you send a foreigner here? Never send him again!" "Why? Did he do or say something wrong?" "Well, no. But this will cause trouble for us. We can't speak English." "He speaks Japanese quite well. Is there some trouble communicating with him?" "Don't know. He just got out of the truck and hasn't come to the office yet." "He's one of our better drivers. Let him do his job. If he gives you any trouble just call us back and we'll never send him again."
Apparently I had just arrived on their lot and gotten out of the truck to remove the tarp from the load. That was enough to trigger the knee-jerk reaction related above. I don't know if it is related or not, but I have in the past been turned down for jobs driving animal feed trucks, being told that the company's customers are farmers and wouldn't react well to a foreigner delivering their animal feed. Personally, I am loath to paint Japanese farmers with such a broad brush. But it didn't bother a fellow Japanese to do it.
In the summer of 1999 I telephoned a company that was advertising for drivers of refrigerated trucks, something in which I have experience. I told the man on the phone I was in the neighborhood and asked if it would be all right to come by right away for an interview. He said that would be fine. When I opened the door five minutes later I was met with a confused look.
"I'm the one who called about the job....." "What?! You're a foreigner! We can't use foreigners! We haul foodstuffs!"
How would that make you feel? It was a quick and candid remark from him. He hadn't been able to tell from our phone conversation that I am not Japanese, and was in such a state of shock from being confronted with me unexpectedly that he just blurted out his true thoughts. I am sure he has good enough manners that he would have found a nicer way to say it, or would have avoided saying it at all had he not been so surprised. In his defense, I will add that he gave one of the best job interviews I ever had. He said that he personally didn't give a damn who hauled the stuff, since the company makes money no matter who is behind the wheel. His concern was similar to the one the feed truck company had. He was worried that the frozen food producers wouldn't react well to a foreigner showing up at their factory.
You've been in Japan a decade. What keeps you there?
More than a decade, actually. I've had two incidences of being back in America, each of them about two years long. So of the last 16 years, 12 of them have been spent in Japan.
What keeps me here? What can we call it? Stasis? Momentum? (a body at rest tends to remain at rest...) Force of habit? Plain old being stubborn?
Years ago a stubborn nature is part of what kept me here, in addition to liking the place. A great many foreigners come to Japan prepared to be completely enamored of it. And Japan is indeed a place of which it is easy to be fascinated and enamored at first. Especially so if you are a young Caucasian English speaker and will be working as an English teacher.
But as time goes on, people become increasingly aware of the idiosyncrasies of Japan and the impracticality of living here long term for most foreigners. A great many also come to disdain or actively despise Japan by the time they leave. To me, they have lost the game. They let Japan beat them. I was determined that I would not let Japan beat me. I would play it on its own terms and win. I would not go back to America having been overwhelmed and defeated by living in Japan.
To me, that meant being able to work and support my family on exactly the same basis the average Japanese does: using no English, for one thing. After several years of making my living working as a truck driver in Japan, I figured I had done that. My children weren't speaking English at all and my parents had no other grandchildren. So I decided to move us back to America in 1997.
It was an experiment which didn't last long. At that point I was 32 years old, and had been in Japan all except two years since turning 18. I really had no experience at being an adult in America. All my practical knowledge and experience was based on life somewhere else. I was once again an immigrant, of sorts. I spent two years trucking about America and being gone from home for often over a month at a time. All during this my wife was slowly but surely going nuts in my small hometown.
I found life to be too easy. Everybody spoke English, so communicating presented no particular challenge. There were things I missed about Japan, and things that my wife missed about it even more than I did. She wanted to move to a big city which had more Japanese people, stores which sold Japanese books and food, television stations which broadcast Japanese programs, schools which teach Japanese, etc.
I don't like American big cities and never want to live in one. I told her that it made no sense to me to move to a place I don't like, in search of a make-believe Japan. I would rather just move back to the real thing. So here I am again. And here it looks like I will be staying.
Can you share one of those "this could only happen to a truck driver in Japan" stories?
I'm afraid I've already used my best two examples in an earlier question.
Perhaps this will do instead...
Much of the truck traffic between the northern Kanto area (above Tokyo) and the Osaka area to the west passes through the mountains of Gunma and Nagano Prefectures. Until the recent Nagano Olympics spurred construction, there was no expressway along this route and a large portion of the Japanese domestic economy snaked its way along dark and treacherous narrow mountain roads each night. Due to the high tolls, much of it still does. There are curves so tight that trucks going opposite directions can't pass each other, instead flashing their high beams or blowing their horns to work out who is going to enter the tight curves. Curves so tight they can only accommodate one truck at a time, causing bumper-to-bumper backups in either direction.
From Gunma, the first real curves one reaches are those of the Usui Bypass, a series of about 48 curves wending their way up the side of a mountain and ending in the resort village of Karuizawa. This is a toll road, but large trucks have no choice other than to take it. The old road is now off limits to them. At times of heavy fog the Bypass is sometimes closed, and trucks used to back up along the two-lane highway for miles and miles, waiting for it to be reopened.
In the past, in a smaller truck and unable to wait due to time constraints, I have gone down the mountain on the old road. Like so many other things in my trucking experience, I am glad I have done it once, but hope I never have to do it again. I tried counting the hairpin curves and lost track at 180-something. I did, however, see a deer. Which brings us to the point of this pointless anecdote.....
One day while going down the Usui Bypass I rounded a curve to find sitting in my lane a rather large Japanese monkey. From the expression on his face one would think the monkey owned the whole highway.
In Louisiana I have peered off the edges of the causeways and seen alligators swimming about. And I have seen alligator roadkill, which is quite exotic for a boy raised in Tennessee. And one night in Pennsylvania I heard a man on the CB radio talking about seeing ostriches on the highway, though I suspect lack of sleep played rather a large factor in that sighting.
But I will never forget the experience of rounding that curve and finding the bad-attitude monkey of all times sitting there with a defiant look on his face, as much as if to say that if I knew what was good for me I would hunt me another lane to run in.
THE
BIG INDEX...
Who they are, what they do, how they think. Go
there now.
A TO Z ARCHIVE...
Everybody here, with quickie bios. Go there now.
Return to the main Seven Questions page
See the original Newsies 7Q project
Contact info@sevenquestions.com
Copyright 1999-2002, Thomas L. Mangan