Complaining about Japan

I just had a bit of an embarrassing experience on the train ride home the other night. The train was really full, so I was standing near the door, reading a book. No problems. Until I heard the guy in front of and beside me chatting in English. It was a British guy and a Japanese guy, and I guess the British guy had been teaching some sort of intensive English workshop at Toyota. The Japanese guy was one of his students. From what I could gather, the course had just finished, and the teacher was on his way back to Tokyo, where he lived. And before you start thinking I was trying to eavesdrop on their conversation, they were pretty much standing in my lap, so I couldn't help but hear what they were saying. At first, the Japanese guy wanted the teacher to give him his contact details, so he could take more of his workshops when he came back to Nagoya. The teacher said yes, but then explained that he probably wouldn't be working for that same company after May. Instead of just leaving it at that, the teacher started going into this full-on rampage about his company. He was saying stuff like they can't even get it together enough to tell him if they want to renew his contract or not, and how they wouldn't pay him for travel expenses for one teaching gig (even though he pointed out they were all getting huge whacks of cash for that teaching assignment). He then started complaining about how talented and skilled he was in his field, and they just weren't appreciating him enough. He topped it off with a rampage about the Japanese way of doing things, how they were so inefficient and unprofessional, and couldn't give him a straight answer about anything.

Meanwhile, the poor student he was talking to got quieter, and quieter, and quieter during this little speech. I could see he was really uncomfortable - he probably didn't want to know that many details about the teacher, and certainly didn't want to hear his country being slammed by some whiny British guy. He tried to point out that maybe his boss didn't know what was happening with the contract renewal because she hadn't been told by her superiors what was going on. He also delicately tried to say that some companies put the travel allowance into the salary, instead of having it as a separate payment. Of course, whiny guy rejected these points outright, saying the student just didn't understand how things actually worked in his company. He then went back to the beginning of their conversation, and said he would email him his contact details, in case he was ever in Nagoya again to teach! I'm pretty sure by the look on the student's face, he was happy to see the back of that teacher!!

I just felt so uncomfortable listening to all this crap. I was actually trying to read my book, obviously unsuccessfully, but I could see the Japanese guy looking at me during all this. I bet he was thinking that I was just another dirty foreigner like the guy he was talking to. I felt like interrupting the British guy at one point, and apologizing to the Japanese guy, to try to explain that we all don't think like that. I have many issues with Japan, many things I don't like, but I am certainly not going to complain about them to a student, especially a Japanese student! Imagine how you would feel if you were back home, and some foreigner started ranting and raving about how crappy your country was. You'd feel like smacking them, and telling them to go back home!! I think this guy just forgot how lucky he is in Japan, how our lifestyle is usually a lot better than if we were back home working in some 9-5 $8/hour gig. I just felt really embarrassed to be a foreigner.