Cleaning Lady Ambush

This is kind of in the same vain as Samantha's Culture Shock post. To understand the cleaning lady ambush you have to have some background on our work environment. When schools are on break we come to the Board of Education. That's what it says in the contract at least.

What that really means is that we come to a room that is two buildings away from the Board of Education. The room is basically a closet of a closet. You have to walk through a closet to get to our room. The only other things in this building are a pre-school and a tax office. Our room is also fairly cluttered. We have 6 lockers meant for clothes, a fan, a kerosene heater, two tables, 5 chairs (2 of them broken), a metal desk, a sink, and our teaching materials. Now, notice what you don't have listed is a file cabinet or any other decent means of storing books and papers. All our materials are paper and books. The lockers have books in them, the desk is full of paper and lots of stuff is stacked on the tables. Oh and our sink doesn't work. I once found the cut off to turn in on and found out why it was off: because if drips a lot. Notice also that trash can was not on the list of things in the room. That's right they didn't provide us with a trash can. We bring in our own bags to keep in the room but with no can they just sit out on the floor. Before we started bringing the bags we would carry home the trash every day. Now I will admit our room was junky and disorganized, but its mostly because we don't have adequate storage for what we have.

So with that back ground the cleaning ladies come in here to clean once a week. Now when I say clean what I mean is sweep the floor... poorly. They don't take out the trash, clean the windows, mop, scrub the sink, or anything else, they just sweep. There is one cleaning lady who we are all afraid of called "the mean one" (that's our highly original nickname for her). When she comes to clean she always clucks at us disapprovingly in Japanese, picking up the least little piece of trash and shaking it at us. So if I had a gum wrapper next to my computer she would pick it up and say "This is trash." and shake it at me. Or if there was anything on the floor bigger than dust she would pick it up and ask if we wanted it and shake it. That's right, if ,for example, a used staple fell on the floor and we didn't see it she would not sweep it she would shake it at us. So we called her the mean one.

There are two other ladies who are nice and just sweep. Well this week all 3 of them came into our room. They went and stood by the sink and the mean one said, "Your sink is dirty." "There are tea bags in the sink and they smell bad." She repeats this about 3 times to me. Now, I get up and go over to her and say that the sink does not work and try unsuccessfully to explain the tea bags are drying. She then tells me that from now on we should put the bags in the trash bag not the sink. So I take them out and throw them away. Then she tries to turn on the sink at the wrong place. Explaining that the sink was turned off, I tell her that she is turning it on at the wrong place and it drips. Then without acknowledging my comment she stands up and goes over to the door. By the door is an electric heater belonging to Clarie that we used in our play. She points at it a says " heater, heater, heater".
I say "Yes, heater". She just keeps pointing at it and saying "heater". There are no verbs, adjectives, or sentences; just the word heater. Then she picks up a tea bag envelope next to Claire and begins her shaking routine. She then informs me "You don't speak Japanese" despite the fact that I had been speaking to her in Japanese. (Even thought she was talking at me, not to me.) She continues to inform me that I don't speak Japanese. Then she tells the other cleaning ladies that we are like children and that she will talk to the Board of Education. Then they leave.

Now, this is fairly rude behavior in America.

Their behavior is even ruder than it appears here for a couple of reasons. For example, in Japan only your boss can berate you. If someone from another office has a problem with you, they talk to your boss first, last, and only. Also, Japanese people frequently dry tea in the sink so we were doing something that they themselves do. Lastly, and I think most rudely, she acted like we couldn't understand her even though we clearly did. She mutters under her breath about how dirty everything is and how childlike we are. She would not talk to another Japanese person like this it would be social unacceptable and very taboo. Only because we were foreign did she think that she could get away with this behavior.