Photo Ops

So yesterday, my co-workers, manager, and I took a group picture together. I'm not sure what the photo is for. Could be for the website or it could be for some other purpose. Either way it's irrelevant. The thing is that we took a perfectly nice picture. Everyone looked rather presentable and the six of us were standing in rows of three: three kneeling in the front and three kneeling in the back. Each of our heads (within the row) were about a foot apart from each other. These details, however, are a little more noteworthy.

Today, I got to experience first hand what Japanese perfectionism is all about. I feel like Japan approaches perfectionism like the Taliban approaches extreme religious views. That it to say, it's extreme. My hunch is that most Japanese people aren't that perfectionist but that the people at the top of the corporate world really care about appearing perfect. When I arrived at work today, my manager notified myself and the rest of the Japanese staff that our picture had failed to meet the standards of Japanese perfection. Instead of having our heads be one foot apart from one another, we needed to be about an inch or two from each other. Basically, we needed to be able to smell one another's breaths. My manager even showed me our old picture with a little graph drawn on it to show just exactly how our heads should be placed.

So, yeah, no big deal right? Well, this new photo shoot took us about 20 minutes to complete. Here were some of the reasons why we had to retake the same picture a million time:

•  Our chins weren't in a straight line.
•  Our bodies weren't even with the company logo (on the wall)
• Our hair was hiding one another's faces.
• Our bodies were incorrectly rotated
• Our smiles weren't big enough
• Our eyes were closed
• The front row wasn't aligned properly with the back row

Honestly, I wouldn't have noticed any of these issues except for the having our eyes closed. Either way, it made for a fun experience. I'll never have the right to call my self a perfectionist about anything after having lived in Japan. The funny thing is that this isn't even the first time we've taken these exact same pictures. We've done these photo ops about 6 or 7 times since I've been here. Each time has been an unbelievably scrutinized exercise in perfectionism. It really doesn't bother me though. It's one of the things that makes living here all the more interesting.

And also, I don't want to pigeon hole every Japanese into being some kind of freakish robot. That couldn't be further from the truth. Their individuality often shines brightly but it just seems like Japan as a whole cares way more about these types of things than just about everywhere I've been (including Korea). But hey, I've hardly been anywhere, right?