The Company Dorm

In the early 1990s, a perk of working for a large company like Canon was the company dormitory. Given the high cost of housing in Tokyo, dormitories were a great benefit, offering small but clean accommodations for a fraction of what an apartment would cost. Employees could live in a dorm while they were single, and many were eligible to move to subsidized family housing when they got married. The only disadvantage of the dorms was that, in return for their low price, they tended to be very far away.

During my time in Japan, I lived in two Canon dormitories, the Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1 in deepest Yokohama, and the Mushashi-Nitta Dormitory in Ohta Ward, literally on the edge of Tokyo, near the Tamagawa River dividing Tokyo from Kawasaki. (More on Musashi-Nitta in a later post.)

A company dorm was usually overseen by a long-time company employee. A managership was a way of rewarding a valued employee who did not rise to senior management with a free apartment and a few additional years on the company payroll beyond the mandatory retirement age. The overseers of Fujigaoka No. 1 were Arai-san and his wife. Like many Japanese men in his late 40s or early 50s at the time, Arai-san stopped keeping up with popular fashions in the 1970s and favored tinted eyeglasses and shaggy hair. The Arais were extremely concerned about me adjusting to dorm life and made sure that the guys living there welcomed me too.

At the dorm's entrance, there was a concierge window where you could receive mail, pick up dry cleaning, and make pay phone calls in the days before cell phones. Next to the window was a board with a name plate for each person hanging on a hook according to room number. The red side meant you were out, the green side meant you were in, and you were supposed to turn it to the appropriate side when you came or left. I thought this was extremely paternalistic -- whose right is it for anyone to know where I am!, I thought -- but I eventually realized it was just practical. It saved the Arais the trouble of going all the way to your room when you got a phone call or had a guest, only to find that you were not there.

After flipping over your name plate, you turned left, into the shoe box area. Each person had their own box for keeping shoes and slippers in -- this being Japan where shoes were only worn outside and slippers were worn inside the dorm. Once you had changed your footwear, you stepped up from the genkan (entrance) into the dorm itself. For those of you who have never traveled to Japan but plan to go there someday, a step up is usually a signal that you need to take off your shoes, and the genkan is almost always a step or two lower than the floor of the house.

Most employees living in the dorm shared a room. As a foreign intern, I got a room to myself -- probably because Canon feared both that, as an American, I could not live in such a small room with someone else and that a Japanese employee would consider it a hardship to have to share such close quarters with an American, who was assumed not to speak Japanese and to have uncouth foreign habits. The dorm had no cafeteria, but it had a kitchen for us to use, along with a TV room. Each floor had a large common bathroom. Like a Japanese-style inn, the shower and o-furo (bath), a vital part of any Japanese living quarters, was on the first floor. The o-furo was communal, about two feet deep so that you could sit in it neck deep and soak, and the size of a small swimming pool. (I know from experienced that you can swim in some of these large o-furo, even though that's bad form.) My dorm-mates frequently invited me to join them in the o-furo after we'd been drinking together, but during my first months in Japan I was still not comfortable with the idea of sitting naked in a bathtub with a bunch of other men and always begged off. I eventually learned to love the o-furo and its relatives the sento (public bath) and onsen (hot spring bath) as much as the Japanese do. But it was several years in coming. Oh, think of all the o-furo time I missed!

The last thing to note about the dorm was the curfew. At 11:00 pm, the front gate closed and the door was locked. Again, having come from college dorms where I could come and go as I pleased, bring women into my room, etc., I thought a curfew was too paternalistic for grown men. However, I soon learned that the back door was unlocked all night. This was a perfect example of the Japanese concepts of honne (true feeling/intention) and tatemae (a person's facade). The front door -- the public face of the dorm -- was the tatemae that said everyone had to be home by 11:00 pm or suffer the consequences. The back door was the honne that recognized we were all adults.