Rosie the Town Planner

As many (or none, if you are reading this from outside of Yamaguchi) of you know, in March there is a merger between Hagi city and all the little outlying towns around Hagi to make one big super-sized Hagi region. Something about government reforms to streamline bureaucracy etc. So anyway, I was called to the Board of Ed this avo, my supervisor Obane-san (who we love) was away at the Yamaguchi Ed Office. Instead I had the wonderful Misugi (I think that is her name, argh, I was introduced to her at the very beginning ..) who is a cool young office lady and speaks the best English of them all I reckon. I had a meeting with a couple of officials from the Hagi City Office who are in charge of changing the town signs when the merger happens. They wanted me to help with making the signs bilingual. So there are 3 categories, the city office, the bigger town offices and the smaller town offices. I thought it was simple, City Office and (insert name of town) Branch Office. But no. It appears the Japanese want to use a different name for the branch offices depending on whether it is a big town or a small town. So we had a plethora of words being thrown around, we had Yamamoto-san using an online dictionary on his laptop, which he had hooked into the projector so that he could beam it up onto the wall for us all to see. The total contribution of that was to look up the translation for "deputy mayor" (?) and then he randomly said the word "comprehension" during one of the conversations (???). Oh dear.
In the end I decided that the clearest way to label the offices was to have the main City Office, bigger General Branch Offices and smaller Branch Offices. Apparently mayor Nomura-san had suggested having Regional Offices, which I said could be confusing, whereas General Branch Office both suggests something inferior to the main office and yet higher than the smaller town offices. Phew. I'm just glad that there's going to be so much less bureacracy from now on........ It's kinda scary to be responsible for the labelling of the signs put up next month. For all foreigners present and future to Hagi, I hope you get what the sign means!!!