This past week I have been working in Columbia’s sales department (営業 - pronounced egg-yoh in Japanese). Don’t worry, I still have more anime themed posts coming, however I wanted to give you all an update on what I’ve been up to. Right from the start, the atmosphere on the sales floor was completely different from my previous enka and anime sections. I arrived at 9:30 sharp in the morning on my first day (and everyday thereafter - long gone were my days of sleeping in) to meet Saito-san, the leader of the Tokyo sales division.
The Tokyo sales division as you might assume sends salesman to record shops of all shapes and sizes throughout the Tokyo area to collect orders for Columbia’s new releases each month. There is also a separate “mega store” sales division that deals directly with large chain stores within the country, such as Tower Records (American), HMV (British), and Yamano Music (Japanese).
On any given day, I shadowed a salesman so as to experience first hand his fast talking and even faster rejection. One salesman was Mr. “couldn’t keep his hands to himself” Ishigaki. Ishigaki-san would touch, stroke, pinch, or prod anything and anyone who came into his reach. He also asked me over lunch what type of Japanese girls I liked, and decided later to integrate my favorite physical qualities in a woman into his sales pitch for a pop singer’s new single.
Another salesman, Mr. “you can find me in the basement porn shop” Suzuki, told me exactly why he liked the summer. “You know, these days, you see all those middle school and high school girls walking around in short dresses because its hot. Sometimes you can even see their underwear. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that just the best?!” It was all I could do to clench my teeth and nod sympathetically. I figure the two of us can swap kiddie porn over our next sushi dinner.
Salesmen have to travel A LOT! My partner and I would routinely crisscross the city multiple times, using many different train lines to hit three, four, or even five stores in a day.
Once at the store, we would either be escorted to the janitor’s closet-sized office of the store’s manager, to sit on a bucket while pitching our records, or be forced to stand to one side of the front checkout counter and do the exact same thing. Because these marathon sales meetings routinely lasted over an hour, the occasions where we had to stand the entire time could have as well been a physical challenge from a season of Survivor.
The salesman would then pitch their products, moving page by page through a large catalog with descriptions of albums and glossy headshots. The salesmen would mostly say generic things like, “this music is easy to listen to” or “these guys look cool, so the album will sell well.” Occasionally, my guide would produce a sample disk out of his blue Columbia bag and give it to the store manager for a listen. The manager would listen to the first forty five seconds, frown, take the disk out, and finish by saying the equivalent of, “Yep, just as I thought” in Japanese.
More often than not, the store manager would refuse to order any of a given single or album, using the classically Japanese roundabout way of rejecting something. Often did I hear phrases such as, “this is very interesting…but…” or “You know how difficult this month has been for us…” How can this month have been “difficult?” You’re Tower Records, the number one record chain in Japan, not Tiny Tim’s father from A Christmas Carol.
Sometimes a store would order a single “pity disc.” I asked Suzuki-san what the purpose of buying only one disk was, but he couldn’t really give me an answer. He said that maybe they would put the case on display somewhere in the store. I think the display case is most likely a trash bin.
One noticeable difference about going to an event with salesman instead of record producers (as I did in my past two sections) is that you immediately become a peon with no respect and no access. Where before I was dinning and meeting the stars, now, I was relegated to standing behind a poll and listening to out of tune old men, or in the case of the enka concert, sleeping in a chair during down hours.
I had two events that I participated in with my sales coworkers; the first was an in-store event at Shinjuku Tower Records for a rock band named Carnation, and the second was pushing CDs and other assorted products at an enka concert. For both events, like my brothers handing out Kleenex packets on the street corners before me, I engaged in the age old Japanese tradition of the human side of advertising.
Carnation is three older Japanese guys (I’d say in their late 50s) who play light rock music with a guitar, bass, and drums. They also have a fan following comprised entirely of women in their 50s. The live event coordinator at Shinjuku Tower Records, a Japanese kid in his mid twenties, had actually heard of Stanford University, so he proceeded to say we should “be friends” because I am so smart and asked me repeatedly what my IQ was. I kept telling him my IQ was 15 points.
For Carnation, I stood at the top of the escalator that led to the entrance of the store with a stack of leaflets in my hand and proceeded to offer one to everyone who walked past me. During the enka show, I held a large poster in the lobby and yelled phrases in super-polite Japanese such as, “Please humbly use the staircase to the right and descend to the basement where we politely ask that you allow your valuable and honorable eyeballs to peruse or products.”
Most people would find the task of handing out leaflets or yelling the same three phrases over and over until you’re hoarse ridiculously boring, but I couldn’t get enough of it. Most of my enjoyment came from knowing how absurd it must have looked to have a short, fat white guy pushing Japanese products.
It is worth noting that there are those who will automatically take whatever you offer them, be it an explosive or a Pocky pack without so much as looking up. From the rest, however, I received three major reactions. The first reaction was one of disgust at my very presence. Some Japanese people would crunch their faces up into a mass of wrinkles or flutter their mouths open and shut so it looked like they were going to throw up when they saw me. These people would often walk away from my location almost backwards, staring at me as they left.
The second, most common reaction was that of laughter and curiosity. Most Japanese people would look at me, acknowledge that I was not Japanese, and produce a short laugh or giggle while taking my leaflet or looking at my poster. They would then proceed to begin gossiping furiously about me with their closest mate the minute they were out of my ear’s reach.
Finally, there were a select few Japanese people who watched me in awe as though I was an exhibit at the Smithsonian. I received several compliments from Japanese women who would walk away, only to rush back to my position and tell me how great I spoke Japanese or ask me something about the theater. Rather than the compliments, I was happiest when I could direct a Japanese woman to the bathroom or the staircase to the balcony - it was almost like I was a Japanese native.
There are always a few oddballs in any crowd too. At the enka concert, one older Japanese man stood in front of me, stared at the ground, and mumbled to himself for a good twenty seconds before walking away. Another lady came up to me and pointed at my poster of the enka star Funaki Kazuo. “He was my pupil in grade school. I used to teach him in grade school. In grade school, I would teach him,” she kept repeating. She then began rubbing the enlarged face of the enka singer on my poster as her friend behind her looked at me shaking her head. Finally, at Tower Records, one older guy with a long beard, sunglasses, and camouflage hat, stopped at the top of the escalator (blocking the people behind him), posed and said “peace brother” to me in English before walking off.
As I mentioned, I didn’t get to see the enka performance or meet the star performer, Funaki Kazuo. I slept in a chair in the basement of the theater during the performance. At Tower Records, Ishigaki-san stole my backstage pass and gave it to the wife of one of the performers. He then squeezed me in a corner behind a poll to watch Carnation perform. Maybe there was someone at the foot of the escalator handing out shots of sake so that all the middle aged women could actually enjoy the show. I didn’t meet the performers from Carnation, but after their event, I didn’t want to.
It honestly felt like they were making the songs up on the spot. The bassist and drummer were rendered useless in the live setup, and stood offstage for the entire show (only the main vocalist played an acoustic guitar hooked up to an amp and sang). He fingered through inharmonious, seemingly made up chord progressions while chirping at high notes with his face all puffed up like a blueberry. At one point the bassist came on stage to create harmonies with the lead vocalist that sounded about as good as the screeching banshee buzz of the cicadas outside.
The wife, wearing my backstage badge, stood up front, snapping pictures of her overweight husband while a good 150 housewives rocked back and forth, silently mouthing the words to their favorite hits. At that point my throat was really hurting, because my cold was just kicking in (I just have a lingering cough now).
Afterwards, Carnation was escorted to their private room. Ishigaki-san had to wait a good fifteen minutes to enter the room and get my backpack, which I had left in there before the band arrived. I quickly said goodbye and headed home. That was my week in the sales department in a nutshell.
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In an unrelated note, I went drinking with a mishmash of coworkers after my trip to the Columbia Digital Media factory on Friday. One of my friends, a 28-yer-old Japanese girl named Izumi, who went to college and grad school in America (so she can speak English almost fluently), told me I looked Japanese after she had drank about half a bottle of sake. So, I guess with enough booze in your belly I begin to look Japanese.
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Also, today I started work in my new section for this week; the rock / Jpop advertising section. I should be able to go to some neat live rock events in Tokyo. During my afternoon orientation meeting with advertising section head Tatsuki-san, the man inexplicably disappeared for a few minutes, leaving me in the conference room alone. He returned clutching print-outs of emails he had received in English. He placed them flat on the table and leaned in with a concerned look on his face. “Can you read these?” he said. “Sure,” I responded.
And so, I got to break the happy news to Tatsuki-san that he could save up to 70% if he refinanced his home loan with Sumitomo Bank. “It’s junk,” I said, flipping the page back to him. “Oh,” he replied, still looking conflicted, “And this one?”
I looked it over. “This one says you should take a pill to have better sex.” “Oh,” he replied with a long pause. “So this is junk too?” “Yeah,” I said nodding. “So it is okay to throw them out?”
“Sure, unless you want the pills” I told him.
B.E.W.
