Working In a Japanese Resturant

My study abroad program usually has a couple school visits a week, but it is summer break so now we suddenly have a lot more free days than we used to. I'm not the most social human so I was spending a lot of time laying on the floor in the downstairs sitting room either sleeping or watching YouTube. I think someone got worried about me or something and told the director of the program because suddenly I had a part time job. Kind of.

So last weekend was a major holiday weekend in Japan so this restaurant needed help because of either increased customers or decreased staff. Anyway, they needed help and have had exchange students work in the shop before. The owner speaks some English and I was assured that students with less knowledge of Japanese had worked there before. Some shenanigans happened the first day that made getting there a little challenging, but I did still get there on time and was ready to work.

This was not my first time working a restaurant type job. I worked at Chipotle to pay for my flights to Japan. Spent five months in that job, the first of which during the holiday season so it was incredibly busy, so I think I have at least some idea how restaurants work. I was just a cashier most of the time, but I also had to clean all the tables and change garbage cans and other lovely stuff. Got yelled at when I didn't do things right even if nobody had explained them to me in the first place. Oh fun times working in a minimum wage job.

Anyway, I arrive and am given a uniform thing to wear. It's just an apron with the name of the restaurant on it and a towel thing to wear on my head (it looked like a watermelon 😁). First thing I do is put stickers on some mini ice cream or pudding things (I can read the katakana but I still don't know what it is). After that, I was set on dish duty. This restaurant has many small dishes on trays so there are many tiny dishes you have to wash. Doing dishes is kind of relaxing in a way and gave me an opportunity to just listen to the other staff in the kitchen. The restaurant was busy that day, but it wasn't the insane atmosphere I remember from busy days at Chipotle. While I can't understand a lot of Japanese, I could still tell that the owner spoke very politely to her staff.

The dishes themselves were very delicate and each dish was meant for a different, well, dish. All very organized. Normally I think of dish washing as being a gross job because of all the leftover food bits, but in Japan people pretty much always finish all their food. I had a garbage can to throw the wet towels they have for people to wash their hands with away and other various garbage worthy things, but the garbage can never really got full. I remember having to change disgusting garbage cans at my old job because Americans tend to not finish their food. There was one dish that was something eggy baked in the dish so that was a little difficult to scrub out, but otherwise dishes was an easy and not gross job.

The staff there didn't really speak English, but they would still try to explain things to me by acting stuff out. I feel like Japanese people are actually pretty goofy so their acting things out was always quite entertaining even if I didn't get what they were trying to explain. Sometimes they would also talk to me like asking where I'm from, how old I am, or asking me to help them with something or laughing when I stood in front of the fan. Something I would also do even if I couldn't understand what people were saying is help carry out trays of food. People seemed to enjoy the clueless foreigner helping carry trays, so that was pretty cool.

Overall, it was a very nice experience. Got to eat ice cream at the end of my short shifts too 😁.

でも、所有者さんはもっと日本語を話してくださいと言っていました　😅