labour

Yoshiko tells us that her parents did not encourage her to work at the factory as many other families did, so she has worked five jobs already without working there, none of which she has remained at for longer than a year. However, even her brother began working in the factory offices in the city centre after graduation. 

She says that she wasn’t trying to avoid working at the factory, and if she was it was only because she did not see herself as worthy enough to work somewhere so important. 

The factory’s marketing to children through the education system has worked on Yoshiko, someone who did not even have parents coaxing her towards it. She sees the workplace as somewhere desirable - a place where only those worthy few can toil. The factory is seen as a ‘real job’, and Yoshiko frames herself slightly in this chapter as having idly taken other jobs that could not be considered beneficial careers in the way that the factory’s could. Not only does Yoshiko think this way, but we learn that society at large and the company does as well, for her qualifications and well-prepared interview do not guarantee her the employment she seeks. Her track record of short term jobs means that she is seen as unreliable.

Yoshiko is offered a different position than she interviewed for, a contract position rather than permanent. This job is in ‘Staff Support’. When she questions what her role will involve, she is only told ‘support’. She joins what is casually called the ‘Shredder Squad’ ‘at the end of the corridor’ where her role will be to destroy documents using an industrial shredding machine for three to seven and a half hours a day. The name of this position gives a much more favourable (and vague) impression than the actual role itself. It is clear that she is being given an inferior position involving pretty mindless work.

The protagonist is Ushiyama Yoshiko, a BA liberal arts graduate. We meet her immediately as she is interviewing for a permanent position in ‘the factory’ to a middle manager named Goto.

She speaks very eloquently in this interview about the interest she has in language used in print media due to the research on communication in Japanese that she conducted during her degree, and states how she would like to use that experience in this career.

She also relates this to a lifelong relationship to the factory and its products, saying how she has seen advertisements as a child that drew her to working for the technologically advanced and ethical company. This demonstrates to the interviewer that Yoshiko has conducted her own research about the company, as well as presenting an emotional argument for her desire to work there, and flattering the company and thus interviewer as she does so.

We haven’t known Yoshiko long enough to understand yet whether these claims are genuine, but we understand her to be intelligent enough to go about her interview in such a way regardless, using multiple persuasive tactics in a relatively short space of time. She is also able to pull this spiel from the top of her head, without any further prompting, so we understand that she has prepared well, irrespective of her actual interests or whether the factory really does have ‘famously high standards, both technologically and ethically speaking’.

Chapter Two begins with our narrator standing on a bridge watching a clump of black birds near the factory. They struggle to identify the birds or if such a bird should be living in the area. They are compared to ‘oil’, which can be potentially lethal to water birds (https://www.birdrescue.org/our-work/research-and-innovation/how-oil-affects-birds/), all leading us again to feel a sense of unease with the factory’s relationship to the nature, hinting that it is an unnatural and potentially harmful environment.