Business Card めいし　名刺


My impression of business cards when I was younger, growing up in the UK, is that only really important people at companies had them, or salespeople, and no one in between. They seem to have been divided almost equally between a status symbol, or people that the company would want you to be able to reach easily, so obviously, salespeople, not the complaints department... 

It also greatly varied depending on your industry.  When I started teaching, no one had business cards, probably because we didn't want anyone to be able to get hold of us - angry parents calling the school that their precious child couldn't possibly have changed the computer login screen to say "It is now safe to **** the computer" (despite eyewitnesses & being the only person using the computer) because he didn't know how to swear was quite sufficient, without being directly reachable...

When I started working in IT, all of the contractors at the company had business cards, and none of the permanent staff seemed to, no matter how high their level was.  This may have been that I just never saw them exchanged, or that the internet had already had an impact on how contacts were exchanged.  As for the contractors, regardless of their position in the company and individual expertise, they were all effectively salespeople, so it followed the pattern from when I was young.

I have had business cards personally a few times - the first time was shortly before I left a company, and was already looking for a new job.  I felt really pleased at having my first ever business cards, and simultaneously, appalled at the fact that there were 250 of them. I had no idea when I would ever use even one, and as I would be leaving soon, it was going to be even more of a waste.

The next time I had a business card, I was a permanent employee at HP, and a contractor at the client site.  I had been a contractor like that for about 5 years when I became a project manager, and suddenly, I had business cards again.  I have no idea if having the word "manager" in the job title automatically triggered the order, but I wasn't in a sales or contract negotiation line, so they were rarely used.

The times after that, I was going to be presenting at industry-related conferences and would actually need cards - they had to go through an approval process and be special ordered for me.  And between the two conferences, we went to a new phone system, and so new cards had to be ordered, despite nothing else having changed.

I can totally see why US and UK businesses are going to having electronic cards as much as possible, or having a physical card, but all the details barring the company name & the person's name being accessible via a QR code, so that you can update them and not waste so much money nor resources on something.

There is something nice about having and giving physical business cards, but even when we have them, there is no formality or ritual in the exchange of them, nor the correct storing of them.  

Most of the time, when I have really wanted a business card to exchange details quickly, it has been for my personal life - I produce two radio shows on 90.1 FM KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, and I also lead a support group for Significant Others, Friends, Family and Allies of Transgender and Nonbinary people (SOFFA for short).  I have a flier for the second one, but it isn't as portable and convenient as a business card, and they get tatty if you carry them around with you.  Cards are much easier to keep pristine in a little card case. So I have considered getting cards printed for those items, maybe even two-sided with both sets of contact details on. 

But my purpose there is very different from the way that business cards are used in Japanese society - I'm wanting to use them to speed up and give my contact details to people, and the context that they are relevant in.  In Japanese culture, much of the time, they are being exchanged at meetings where people already have each other's contact details, or they could not have set up the business meeting.  It's just a ritual of meeting face to face for the first time in a business context, an additional formality of はじめまして.

I was interested in the mix of character sets on most of the cards that we had as examples - of email being written in Roman characters, and often Telephone, although occasionally テ was used.  Because of this, I chose to write "email" and "Tel" in Roman characters, but then mixed things by putting "major" in Japanese.  This is why I am not a graphic designer, mixing styles like that... :D  I do love the kanji for telephone though - 電話 でんわ - they translate out as "electric talk" & it feels too perfect.  But that sort of discussion should be waiting for module 4, I believe...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hiragana Chart ひらがな

Image
  I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school.  I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet.  It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own.  It enforced discipline and practice.  It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.  Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound. When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”.  That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound.  Makes things much harder for children to grasp.  This...
Read more

What a Difference a Year Makes, Part 2...

 It was around this time last year that I was first considering learning Japanese... This year, I went to a ぼねんかい last week hosted by the Nijikaewa group, was cheerfully wishing people よいおとしを ＆あけましておめでとうございます( & 楽しいクリスマス・メリクリスマス a week earlier too), and yesterday, at a regular check up appointment at the doctor's office, was studying Kanji while I was waiting - which I assume is the reason that when they called my name, I automatically, loudly, called "はい!" in response - and why on my way hoping and trying to find the nearest branch, I typed "starba" into google maps, instead of "Starbucks"... 😵 Luckily, Google knew exactly what I meant (often, it suggests the right thing until you misspell it, then it disappears off the suggestions list.  That didn't happen this time, and when I automatically hit enter without thinking, Starbucks still popped up as the searched for item.  It is evidently used to people googling starba 😁).
Read more

Perfect…

Image
 I was playing a game on my tablet and I found that I already had the last of the five items I needed to level up… and when I saw it and as I dragged it across to merge it, my brain was going “あー、かんぺき！” And I thought “really brain?  That means perfect?  You’re just making things up now!” So I went and checked it in the dictionary and I owe my brain an apology 😳 I had a similar thing happen the other day with a crossword clue - I had just binged about 6 episodes of anime before deciding to do the crossword puzzle and the clue was “sufficient, nice, fine, pretty, quite” and my brain instantly said “けっこう” which I thought was highly implausible as I would have sworn we had never had it as a vocabulary word - despite all those hiragana (& more) being available in the answer candidate pool for the app.  But I entered it in anyway, and it was right…then realized that I had heard the word multiple times in the anime episodes that I had just binged and my brain must have...
Read more