r/japanlife

My coworker got mad that I took half a day off to get my residence card last week. I got the letter saying my new residence card was ready, and I went to pick it up a few days later. I literally explained to my boss that I got the letter and had to go get it this Thursday, and he was like “yeah, okay, sure.” Just in case, before taking the day off, I even messaged the coworker I’m close with on LINE so they’d know where I was if anyone asked.

Then (Friday), I got my new residence card. We had a meeting to talk about problems at the company this week and how to solve them, and one of my coworkers who’s a senpai brought up my half day off. He said it was よく無いbecause it was so sudden and it was 迷惑 for him and the others since they had to do some of my paperwork.
(They barely did anything btw)

Apparently they were also saying stuff like when i came back after taking half the day off and worked only just 3 hours, that i didn’t seem guilty enough and there was no “謝罪してる気配がない”they also said that if I wanted to take a day off, I should’ve written it on theシフトボード a month in advance.

I literally told them I couldn’t do that because the notice for the residence card was only like a week and a half before. I had no way of knowing a month in advance when the letter would come.
Then he and another coworker started being passive-aggressive, saying stuff like 誤ってて言わないけどでも社員としてこれはよく無いだけ。そこだけわかって欲しい Basically saying “I’m not saying u should apologize but as a full time worker u should be more responsible”

Even one of my foreign coworkers defended me and said there wasn’t really anything I could do about it. Once you get that letter, it’s best to go get it within the week, and 入管can have a huge line where it sometimes takes hours just to get everything done. And I returned to the company to finish my days work But they didn’t really listen. To them, everything I said was just an excuse lol.

I didn’t want to escalate it so I just said I’ll be more careful next time. But honestly next time instead of telling them I have to go somewhere important I might just take the whole day off and say I have a headache
It’s honestly hard explaining to some people here that sometimes foreigners and Japanese people can have different circumstances when it comes to stuff like this.

I’m so sick of this Japanese workplace mentality where people seem to think they’re somehow more important or more committed just because they stay at the office later than everyone else.

I work my ass off and get through everything I’m assigned at breakneck speed. Then, when it’s finally time for me to leave, my senpai gives me the option of either staying a bit longer to keep working or just picking things up again tomorrow.

So I choose to continue tomorrow only to get chewed out afterwards for not choosing to stay and work overtime.

What makes it even more ridiculous is that, supposedly, at my company everyone is free to decide for themselves whether they want to stay past working hours or not. Apparently not, though, because if you actually choose to leave on time, you get judged for it anyway.

It honestly makes all the effort I put in during the day feel completely pointless. It seems like actually getting your work done efficiently matters less than simply being physically present at the office for as long as possible.

Is there any good way to stand your ground with people who try to boss you around or guilt-trip you just because you don’t share their work-yourself-to-death mentality?

Hello,

My wife and I are expecting our child to be born sometime around december and we've bought this air monitor to check the humidity, temperature and co2(ppm) of the room.

After doing some research about the co2 values it seems that less than 1000 is ideal for sleeping and from 1000~5000 can cause issues on sleep(this is why air feels like heavy sometimes when you go into a closed bedroom).

We noticed that we are reaching around 1800 ppm which is not ideal for us nor the baby so we need some ventilation in the room. The air conditioner doesn't do anything as it just recirculates the same air. We are both foreigners so we aren't sure if there's some unwritten rules on how to keep the house ventilated in Japan. We are living in a ZEH house so it's quite well insulated which is part of the reason I think we get this high level of co2 concentration. We have some air vents in the walls that we can open but am not sure if they are bringing in enough air.

So I have a few questions for those who have dealt with this situation.

1. What do you to improve air quality? Opening the window is possible but it can get kinda loud and am not sure this strategy will be possible during mid winter or next summer.

2. If anyone knows, what do you when you have a newborn, do you have to open the windows repeatedly to ensure it doesn't get to a high ppm level or is there an easier method to manage this.

From google the only reasonable answer is to open the window and run the heater during summer but I'm worried this might skyrocket our energy bill :( so hopefully there's another way.

Cheers!

Edit: We also have the kitchen exhaust, the toilet exhaust and one in the shower room. Our realtor said to keep the one in the toilet and shower running 24/7 so that's what we've done.

It's Monday! Did you do anything over the weekend? Go somewhere? Meet someone? Try something new?

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Post about your activities from the weekend here! Pictures are also welcome.