Page 121 - WDT Winter 2018 japan

I took out a 10,000-yen note and she stopped me. The box
couldn’t take such a large size note. Ten thousand yen, for those
of you unfamiliar with the exchange rate, is roughly equivalent to
$100 US. Why, then, would I take out $100 for a $5 bowl of soup?
We had recently arrived from South Korea, where 10,000
won roughly equals $10 US. So $1.00 US is roughly 1,000 times
a single won, which is about one-tenth the value of a yen. Con-
fused? Of course. So you can see why I was. Let’s just say that
substituting won for yen could mean an error with a magnitude
of 10 in my favor – an error I unwittingly committed more times
than I care to confess. These errors prompted more than one
nasty look from Japa-
nese sales clerks too
savvy to fall for that
old trick. “This is not
yen,” one sales clerk
scowled.
So I put away my
10,000-yen note and
found something more
reasonable. We picked
our ramen dishes and
I put the money in the
respective slots. The
machine spit out a
ticket for each selec-
tion, plus change, and I
picked up the tickets.
Now this is where the ramen “vending machine” gets really
complicated. After the machine spit out our tickets, the greeter
took them from me, walked them over to the ramen cook and
showed him the tickets! This wasn’t a vending system; it was a
cash box with a human servant.
I know that in Himeji, one should do as Hemijians do, but I
still puzzle over why we went through all those steps of select-
ing our dish, confusing our money, finding and inserting the
correct money, watching the machine dispense our meal tickets,
handing the tickets to the greeter, and the greeter walking our
tickets to the counter to hand them to the chef. Surely there’s an
efficiency boost I’m missing here, because I didn’t see how this
enhanced ramen efficiency by a single noodle.

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