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Railway Workers Get Daily Smile Scans
More than 500 workers at Japan's, Keihin Electric Express Railway, must have their faces scanned each morning to determine their optimum smile. The "smile scan" analyzes a smile based on facial characteristics, from lip curves and eye movements to wrinkles. After the program scans you, it produces a smile rating that ranges from zero to 100 depending on the estimated potential of your biggest smile. If your number is sufficient, you can go about your day grinning like a maniac. If your smile number is too low the computer will give you a message such as, "lift up your mouth corners" or "you still look too serious." Every morning employees receive a printout of their daily smile which they are expected to keep with them throughout the day.
What the hell is wrong with the Japanese? What practical purpose does this serve?
Those employees about to be terminated receive the following critique:
"WHY SO SERIOUS?"
And be sure to wear some flair. That would be great.
Fuck. Right. Off.
I can be polite and professional without smiling.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
This may seem bizzare but scientists have long made a distinctinction betwen "fake smiles" and "genuine smiles".
See this and this.
For people who have to deal with members of the public on a daily basis, being able to produce a smile that seems genuine may make a difference in how their customers perceive their service.
The overcrowding, intense pressure to conform, the legacy of the 90's real estate bust, and now this? Well, at least they have a lot of robots.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sing along everybody...
"Happy happy. Joy joy!"
"Happy happy. Joy joy!"
"I don't think you're happy enough"
"I'll teach you to be happy. I'll teach your grandma to suck eggs!"
"and the little critters of nature. They don't know that they're ugly."
"I TOLD YOU I'D SHOOT, BUT YOU DIDN'T BELIEVE ME!!! WHYYYYY WOULDN'T YOU BELIEVE ME!!!???"
"Happy happy. Joy joy!"
"Happy happy. Joy joy!"
Beatings will continue until morale improves!
- The Management
ps Have a nice day!
(Seriously, have a nice day, you little piss-ants, OR ELSE.)
Constant smiling is bad for you:
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/wearing-smile-masks-all-day-at-work-may-lead-to-depression_10016884.html
I wear my scowl with pride.
Je me souviens.
I'm not a smiler. My wife gives me hell whenever we take pictures together because I don't smile. I don't like fake smiling. It's stupid and I can tell when someone is faking it. My "fake" smile is stupid looking.
They'd fire me after about a week. And you know what? I'd be cool with that.
Retarded policy, well done, Japanese company.
Sent from your iPad.
Here in Virginia, you're not supposed to smile in your DMV pictures any more because it supposedly messes up facial recognition software used by the state. Guess I have 4 years to find somewhere that doesn't do this before they start tracking my face all over town.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
as a followup, here is the OAKO Realtime Smile Recognition technology probably being employed in the worker scanning. according to the sparse sites the system can operate without calibration.
This is the perfect example of treating a symptom. Smiles represent good feelings and a positive attitude which can very very infectious and so desirable in customer service. However, if someone is "too serious" the response "still to serious" doesn't really help. Perhaps they should consider the root of the issue and try to make their employees genuinely happy.
:)
Another option is to have them all wear smiley face masks
Thought bubble over Yoshi's head:
"It is so easy to smile like this when I think about pulling out Boss-san's intestines with rusty fish knife and feeding them to my dog in front of his dying eyes. His time to visit honourable ancestors comes faster than he thinks.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
If the smile auditing machine told me I didn't look happy enough, prior to my first work coffee of the day, there's be a serious danger that I'd attack it with a fire axe.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
just dose the railway car's air supply with xanax
if you are going to ignore free will, you might as well go all the way
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The only first-world country with no laws about racial persecution. They are signatories to all of the applicable treaties, of course, but the national and prefecture governments have been playing hot potato with the blame for never ratifying any of them. Meanwhile you have employment, products and services that are unobtainable unless you are a Japanese citizen, born in Japan, pure-blooded Japanese, never lived outside of Japan and also fortunate enough for none of your ancestors to have butchered an animal or buried a dead body.
Mod parent up.
Strange, you think what Japanese conformity is doing is all that different from Western culture.
This has worked to organize armies of every country and every race for several thousand years. It has worked so well, companies started adopting it almost as soon as the idea of the company was developed. Yes, eliminating the individuals desires for increased productivity seems to work very well. The Asian cultures have been doing it for thousands of years. You know back when Europeans were still swinging wooden clubs in the caves.
Why do you think armies are built first at boot camp? It is not to teach people how to clean a gun. It is to teach them to conform.
Why do you think everyone at Wall Mart has the same colored clothing on. It is to make them conform, work as a group, comply.
The concept of the individual, with individual rights, is a fairly new invention even in the West. Like only the last few hundred years new (even the last few decades for many). The Individual is something for "citizens" in the Roman sense of citizen, kings, emperors, lords, but not for slaves, surfs, cogs, employees, and other low life's of society. There are owners and their are the owned. Most of the World, falls in to the owned catagory in spite of what mommy and daddy tried to convince you of regarding being an individuel (while also telling you not to be).
It still is something relatively unique in most of the World, and I might venture to most of you that think of yourself as "an individual with rights and freedoms" to stop for a second, check your delusion at the door, and think long and hard about just how free you really are. It might scare you to find out that you too had your individuality most likly beaten out of you one way or another. Right down to the way you put you select which words to put together has developed over thousands of years to force to you to conform to a cultural norm of what is correct and mistaken. Even your reaction to the oddity of Japanese culture, is in part the oddity of your own cultural conditioning. The Western has its own "smile machine" known as "freedom". If you use the word "freedom" sufficiently, you will get a good smiley report. Does not mean you actually ARE any more free or even any more aware of your condition than your average Japanese standing in front of the machine.
O.k. I am sure I am going to get an lot of shit for this. Please let the lashing begin. Still, there is nothing in what I said that is any less true, in spite of all our egos.
Living in Chile
One question: How is your Japanese?
Because every time--every time--I hear someone blathering on about how racist Japan is, it's someone who can barely carry on a conversation, and who is almost completely illiterate.
I'm just sayin'.
Now, let me temper that with this: Yes, there are some things that need to be worked on (piss-testing foreigners in Roppongi is really disturbing, but... Well, they wouldn't be piss-testing them if they thought that they wouldn't get a lot of them on drug violations), but over all my life is just fine. In fact, it's great. I have a well-paying job and a nice apartment and Japanese food is the best. I want for naught.
The foreigner community has just as much work ahead of them to more peacefully assimilate into the host community as the host community has to challenge some of their racist notions and policies. Just as a "driving while black" story loses much of its punch when it ends with "and then they found a little pot I was taking to the party," a "walking while foreign" story shouldn't end with "and then they found out that I forgot that my visa had expired." Foreigners are mistreated here, yes, but many of them mistreat the locals. They act like the Loyola researcher in this Slashdot story, and are similarly flummoxed when the absolutely predictable occurs.
To all the foreigners in Japan reading this, please, for all of us: