When I was in Aomori, I stayed at the Hotel Crown Palais, which undoubtedly lived up to its regal name when the property was in its prime a few decades ago. The staff, however, is still top-notch and, though their English is not as good as I encountered in cities where foreign tourism is more prevalent, they worked very hard to help me visit the sites I wanted to see. One night I noticed some posters on a wall outside of the lobby that were beautifully done, but were printed almost entirely in Japanese, so I couldn't tell if they were promotional posters for guests to view or motivational posters for the employees. The only words printed in English were in the lower right corner of each poster:
Love All
Serve All
Wow, I thought, what an incredible motto. I would probably have read it with a degree of cynicism if I weren't actually enjoying its effects: it truly was how the staff approached every interaction with me, even when those interactions were complicated by my inability to speak their language. In looking into the hotel's management group, I learned that it's not the company motto
—it's their
Rule of Service.
Everywhere I went in Japan, I felt this same attitude toward me, and I observed it in interactions with others, even when situations were complicated or difficult. For one thing, the Japanese are not afraid to apply people to whatever problem confronts them. Whereas the U.S. is trying to discover just how few people must be employed to deliver a product or service in order to minimize costs, the Japanese understand that people are their greatest resource, so the more they can employ, the better. This cultural understanding must account for at least some of the reason that Japan's unemployment rate has averaged less than half of that in the U.S. for the past 50 years, leading to what economists have termed "total employment" in Japan. I observed no evidence whatsoever of homelessness here, I encountered zero panhandlers, and, in talking to one hotel manager, it seemed the greater problem is that of finding sufficient numbers of people to hire, especially in seasonal occupations such as hospitality.
The word love is found everywhere all across Japan—in hotels, train stations, airports, and especially on t-shirts—but the context usually connotes agape or philia, rarely eros. I believe affection between family members is so strong here as to enable them to extend their love to encompass the whole of their own society and even beyond, to include the entire planet.
So, as I walked through Kyoto Station to board my final train on this journey, it seemed most fitting to see a woman holding the hands of two young children. Her t-shirt read:
WORK
HARD
LOVE
HARD
