"Something you don't have in America"

I'm trying to keep my posts in more or less chronological order, but more episodes are occurring to me the more I write.

My first day as a Canon intern was July 1, 1991, a day spent on orientation. I reported at 9:30 a.m., as requested, and was taken to meet Hiroshi Matsumoto. Matsumoto-san was a lifetime Canon employee in his fifties, short, pot-bellied, with a grey suit and greying hair surrounding his round face. He wore a Canon lapel pin. He had worked all over the Canon system, including in the U.S., where he had perfected his English. Like the other madogiwa-zoku -- "the ones with desks near the window," the middle managers -- Matsumoto-san's lifetime of hard work had been rewarded not by promotion to the highest echelons of power, but instead by a kind of pre-retirement involving several years of collecting a big paycheck while performing easy work like affixing his seal to documents that came across his desk and welcoming foreign interns. After a lifetime of overtime, Matsumoto-san's job ended promptly when a chime signalled the end of the work day at 5:15 pm -- a chime the younger workers ignored and the madogiwa-zoku took as their signal to dip into the mini fridge in the corner for a beer.

Matsumoto-san grabbed my hand flaccidly, the handshake of a man who learned the custom as an adult, not one whose adolescence was gripped by the fear that a less-than-firm handshake would convey the wrong impression. We sat down opposite one another in the conference room, arranged like so many other "western style" meeting rooms I would see in Japan, with two small sofas facing each other across a low table. Like many Japanese men of his generation, Matsumoto-san's eyes never quite met mine as we talked, always fixing on a spot on my forehead or above my left shoulder.

A young woman came in wearing the blue uniform that was mandatory for female employees. Matsumoto-san said something to her that I did not catch and she left the room. We chatted about my background and his time in the U.S., and the woman returned, bearing a tray with two glasses full of ice cubes and dark liquid.

Matsumoto-san looked directly me in the eye for the first time. "This," he said with a smile, "is something you don't have in the United States. I never found it in all the time I lived there."

I looked down at the glass in front of me. It looked like iced coffee. But, with this introduction, it had to be something else.

"A Japanese invention," he said with pride. "Iced coffee."

I thought back to the iced coffee my dad used to make by the pitcher and drink from yellow plastic glasses in the summertime when I was a kid. It would not be the last time I heard someone in Japan take credit for an American invention. "What a great idea," I said, diplomatically. I settled back and let Matsumoto-san tell me all about Canon.