“Only My Toilet Welcomes Me Warmly” Is Japanese White Collar Complaint

“Only My Toilet Welcomes Me Warmly” Is Japanese White Collar Complaint. May. 16, 2007 07:52. iam@donga.com.

‘Only a toilet stool/ welcomes me/ warmly’

This poem seems to describe shared feeling among Japanese white-collar workers who live under the threat of layoffs at work and are treated poorly at home by their children, wives, and pets.

On Monday, Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Company in Japan announced the winners of its “Senryu” contest in which white-collar workers participated. The results were voted on by 73,000 people in a popularity poll.

Senryu refers to a Japanese form of a short poetry like Haiku consisting of three lines of three lines in a 5-7-5 syllable format. However, unlike Haiku, which talks about nature and emotion, Senryu is cynical about human affairs and social conditions

The top 10 awarded poems can be categorized into three.

The first category describes a breadwinner who is marginalized both at work and home. The “toilet stool” poem ranked second, and the eighth-ranked one: “Is there a meal?/ there is when I prepare… why/ no, that’s ok,” fall into this category. The latter was a conversation between a husband who came back home and a wife who was watching a TV series while showing no interest in her husband.

‘I envy a dog/because they are rescued/ from the cliff’, read the third-ranked poem. It expressed the mind of self-devaluing white-collar workers who do not know when they will be laid off like a man standing near a cliff edge. To understand this Senryu, you need some background.

On November 17, 2006, there was an accident in Tokushima City in Tokushima Prefecture. People found a dog that was stuck atop a 100-meter wall erected to prevent landslides. The municipal fire authorities sent approximate 20 fire fighters to rescue the dog. The firefighters worked hard to save it by placing nets under the cliff and they finally rescued it only in two days.

The rescue scene was aired all over the country and the “cliff-dog” became a superstar overnight.

The second category is about rapidly deteriorating brain functions and loss of memory: “Brain age/ already enough/ to get a pension fund” was ranked first in this category, “Where is it/ whatsis whatchamacallit/that’s it” ranked fourth, and “Where did I put/ the note I wrote/ not to forget” ranked sixth.

The third category is about ever-thickening abdominal fat and ever-decreasing physical strength: “I put aside a lot/not of money/ but of fat” ranked 10th. “Before/ brain training/ do fat training” ranked ninth. It refers to the current ‘brain training’ craze that is popular in Japan. “Positioning/an Inna Bauer/ back pain” ranked seventh. This poem talks about an Inna Bauer move, which is a skill in figure skating where the skater slides on two parallel blades. Last year, Shizuka Arakawa who bent her back backwards until her head was upside down won the gold medal at the Turin Winter Olympics last year.

What do Japan’s worn-out white-collar workers have to look forward to?

‘Thank you/ that phrase is /a lubricant” ranked fifth.