OUT OF WORK The first president of Nissho Iwai Seafoods resigned. The next president was a Mr. Sada who came from the fish trading division of Nissho Iwai. He fired many workers and employees of Nissho Iwai Seafoods. I heard from him that firing people is not an easy thing to do. l was also asked to resign by Mr. Sada in 1990. The reason was to "cut off excessive labour," I heard. Mr. Sada also said, "Please help us to save the company," bowing his head. So, there were no choices, since I had loved the company all the time, although things were not working out right. All I could do was accept the request. What would someone else have done? I said okay to Mr. Sada without looking into his face. Mr. Sada introduced me to another company to work for. That kind of thing is quite usual in Japan. It was a refrigerator company in the same Funabashi area. The company dealt with fish partly but the work was quite different than before. l thought that it wouldn't bother to check out what was going on in fields surrounding the fish business, so I decided to work there. The work I was assigned to do was to write invoice sheets of goods coming in and going out of the refrigerator and operating computers that had those data in. I didn't feel fit for that job, so I decided to quit. It was for only three months that I had worked there. I wanted to do something more directly connected to the fish business, which had then become the backbone of my career. And I still thought that I could do something for the weary fish business: some- thing that only I could do. My wife, who wasn't a worker at that point of time, started to worry about our future and decided to work again. l had no idea of the next move to make, but I was optimistic. I searched the want ads in newspapers, I read recruitment magazines. The whole Japanese economy was still active since the boom of the "bubble economy" was still present. Work was not so hard to find. A large wholesaler, which was a participant of the Tukiji Wholesale Market and had many fish shops inside supermarkets and department stores was searching for people to work. I went to the office close to the Tukiji Wholesale Market on the day of the entrance examination. The examination was an oral one. I was confident about the results, but against my expectations, I failed. I was quite shocked. I thought maybe it was because I didn't accept the requirement of working very early hours. About a week later, I again found in the newspaper, a want ad for Tomen Suisan, a subsidiary of a general trading corporation, Tomen. I applied for it. There was a brief interview with the president of Tomen Suisan himself. It didn't take much time to know the result. On the following day of the interview, there was a phone call telling me that I was hired. It was already November of 1990. The time when East and West Germany had been re-united. |