Everyday tea ceremonies

Japan is very famous for its hospitality. I'd go as far as saying that once you've experienced Japanese customer service, you can't go back.

This hospitality manifests itself even in an office environment. Back home, people don't enjoy business at the town council for various reasons. There are queues, and employees tend to be unhappy and unhelpful. I'm not sure how much Japanese people enjoy a visit at Town Hall, but the way they are treated is completely different.

Whenever somebody walks into our office, they are greeted with a chorus of KONNICHIWA and immediately are referred to the person in charge of their matter or even straight to the boss. If they feel like they have something to say, the town worker has to sit down with them and pretend to listen to them until they're finished. We have this old crazy in our town who'll come in and just unleash a flow of unrelated and sometimes offensive information at whomever it may concern. Whoever it may concern keeps quiet, nods occasionally and daydreams of tropical beaches and delicious pastry until it's over.

Also, visitors are usually served tea. This is very important, especially in the case of high-ranking visitors. As soon as they sit down they have to be served tea. The serving of the tea usually has to be performed by the lowest-ranking woman in the department, although there are different 'unwritten rules' about this depending on the workplace. As a foreigner (and a low-ranking woman), it is sometimes hard to figure out when you might be expected to serve tea. If you are from the west, it's often safe to ignore the issue and just pretend that you are too unfamiliar with the alien oriental concept of putting hot water into a cup.

However, sometimes you're called out on it. Today we had a group of 35 people from Korea visit our convention centre. I helped with the setup for the meeting - tables, chairs, etc. Then, when everything was done, my boss remarked in horror that the tea had been forgotten. Usually, when we have a group visiting, we get a bunch of plastic bottles filled with green tea from the supermarket and put them on the desks reserved for the visitors - but alas, this time somebody had forgotten.

I was charged with the task of fetching some tea - pronto - and walked the five minutes back to Town Hall where I consulted with our OL (office lady; woman who is very good ad serving tea). She had a look in the fridge and found that all of the little plastic bottles had been used up.
"Oh well, do we have a budget to buy some at the supermarket across the street?" I asked.
"Nah, too complicated," she said and started rummaging for glasses. Glasses.
"Errrr, you wanna carry 35 glasses to the convention centre?" I enquired helplessly.
"Yeah, since there aren't any bottles left over, we'll have to make do with glasses," she said in a matter-of-fact kind of tone.
For a minute I was tempted to ask myself how this was less complicated than just getting a bunch of bottles at the supermarket, but I decided to just suck it up and grab a tray of glasses to carry the five minutes to the convention centre (which has its own supply of glasses, but this was another matter I wasn't going to point out for fear of being called complicated again).

There were four of us now - more having joined in the heroic quest for the Serving of the Tea by their own free choice. Two of us carried glasses, two of us carried iced tea in plastic containers. We set up camp in the convention centre's kitchen, carefully put the tea inside the 35 tiny glasses, put them on 35 tiny bamboo coasters we had especially brought for the purpose and gracefully set them down in front of each and every Korean visitor. Then we packed the whole affair up and trekked back to work.
Two hours later they phoned us to come clean up our glasses and we went through the whole procedure again - backwards.

Yep, hospitality is very important, but you don't wanna be at the wrong end of it.