When I started my career in the late 1990s, my employer encouraged us to adopt a global mindset to cope with Japan’s recession, the so-called “lost decade.” By 2000, the words “global” or “globalization” were used as keywords—and sometimes as buzzwords—for surviving the upcoming millennium, followed by the dot-com bubble. My coworkers and I were pressured to raise TOEIC scores, learn SWOT analysis, MECE, and other terms of logical thinking, abandon the obsolete Japanese work style, and get accustomed to the global—in many cases, American—way of thinking.
Today falls on setsubun. On this day, we grill sardines, which means to drive out devils by their smoke. We eat an eho-maki roll as well. It has been our custom since the old days, biting into a big sushi roll looking at the annual lucky direction without speaking any words until the finish. Besides, we eat parched soybeans. We eat one more bean than our age counting in the old Japanese way according to our hometown’s rule.
