Obligatory omiyage
Of course, being back in Japan, I am pretty well obliged to bring the people in the office something by way of omiyage—something small and edible and somehow representative of where I’d gone to.
Since I’d gone to Canada, the obvious candidate is maple cookies. However, cookies in Canada aren’t packaged quite like cookies in Japan are—instead of having each cookie individually wrapped in its own sterile wrapper, it was just a bunch of cookies in a tray in a box.
So when I gave the packages of cookies to the admin assistants, this happened:
The admin assistant made tiny little boxes, one for each cookie, for everyone in the entire department.