"Someday, You'll Be President of the United States"

"Someday, you'll be president of the United States."

This was the highest compliment that Shacho ("president") could think to pay me. As far as I know, it was based solely on one fact: I arrived in the office before Shacho arrived every day. I don't think that Shacho really knew whether I was a good employee or not. After all, he did not understand English, and I am sure that he never even tried to read the English-language news magazine, Look Japan, that he published every month.

I was so used to rising early to get to work on time at Canon, that even after I changed jobs and dormitory locations, I continued to rise early to go to work. Once I moved into Oshikawa-san's dormitory in Ohta-ku and began working at Look Japan, I took the Keihin-Tohoku line from Kamata Station in the south easternmost corner of Tokyo to Tokyo Station to get to work -- the busiest line in metropolitan Tokyo on the busiest stretch of its route. The Keihin-Tohoku line passed through Kamakura, Yokohama and Kawasaki and was already sardine-jammed when it finally reached the Tokyo city limits at Kamata.

Getting a seat was out of the question. I just wanted to get a strap to hang on, so that I could read a book or a newspaper over the heads of the exalted souls who could sit. Otherwise, I was condemned to riding in the open space between the doors, where -- even if I could raise my arms -- there was nothing to hold on to, and the only thing stopping me from falling to the floor when the train rounded a curve at speed was the other people jammed against me, arms also pinned to their sides, propping me up.

To avoid the crowded trains, I took to getting on the train at 7:00 a.m. and eating breakfast at my desk while I read the paper and otherwise killed time until work started at 9:00. My Japanese colleagues found my usual breakfast of covenience-store onigiri (rice balls) and coffee endlessly amusing. Everyone knows, they said, that you eat onigiri with green tea, not coffee. Mixing Japanese food with western drink apparently knocked the universe out of its delicate balance. As for me, green tea did not pack enough of a caffeine punch. I needed the hard stuff.

As a result of my early arrival, I was always there when Shacho arrived, and Shacho usually arrived before everyone else. My desk was directly in front of the office door, and when Shacho arrived, there I would be, reading the paper. He'd greet me with a robust Ohayo gozaimasu ("good morning") and a big grin, and it was clear he was happy to see me there, because it signaled my enthusiasm for my job and the company he had built from the ground up over the last 35 years.

I, however, felt like a fraud. I hated working at Look Japan. I never had enough work to do, and was always bored. The company was too uptight, with too many meaningless rules, and the photographers we used for stories used to laugh and tell us we weren't really journalists, because we had to wear suits. This was fine with Shacho, who loved to tell us that he wanted businessmen, not journalists, working for him -- part of the problem in my mind. Working there also made me uncomfortable because I felt that Shacho liked me for the wrong reason. While I am sure that our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san, reported to him that I was a good employee, Shacho himself never read a word I wrote or edited. But, because I was there every morning when he arrived, Shacho frequently told me that, one day, I'd be President.

Only one employee arrived earlier than I did, Kamiya-san, our accountant, whose responsibility it was to open the office and get the coffee started. Kamiya-san hated me as much as Shacho loved me, and for equally irrelevant reasons. Our magazine had 48 pages each month, and there was a set amount of work to do for each issue. I wrote one article and was responsible for editing half of the articles written by outside authors each month. However, I worked very efficiently and generally wound up editing more than half of the magazine each month. Still, I usually ran out of work part-way through the month and had nothing to do. After a while, I started passing the time by translating Japanese newspaper articles to increase my vocabulary.

Nishimura-san and the Japanese editors were extremely happy with me. I turned around the work quickly and there were no last-minute rushes, no missed deadlines, no end-of-month panic. But, Kamiya-san, who, like Shacho, did not speak English and probably never read the magazine, saw me sitting around for half the month, reading Japanese magazines and not "working." Every time she looked at me, her disapproval was written clearly on her face. She was convinced I was a slacker and a fraud, and I am sure it burned her up inside every time Shacho told me, "Someday, you're going to be President of the United States."

In a way, Shacho and Kamiya-san epitomized my Look Japan experience: I was bored out of my mind while two people who did not understand what my job entailed reached completely opposite conclusions about my value as an employee based on observations that had nothing to do with my work.