Nasty Conjugation

Hello friends. Holly is in Tokyo with her parents again, so here comes another update! There are thirty-six new pictures on the Flickr account for your perusal. They consist of our adventures in Tokyo on Monday and Tuesday. There are some fun things to look at in there! Since the last entry was about sadness, I figured I would try something a little more interesting this time around. Here are some thoughts I wrote about the pervasive sense of honor I’ve noticed in Japanese culture. Please enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions!

You know, Japan really is a society obsessed with honor. I know we’ve all heard it before and probably discounted it as a dirty stereotype, but it’s completely true. I don’t think even notice that they’re doing it, just like Americans don’t notice when they drive huge, inefficient cars. Honor is just in them, in their bones and language and delicious bowls of noodles. They drink glasses of steamy honor out of fine ceramic carafes at dinner; sometimes they wake up in the middle of the night and have to take a fierce honor. Or so I am told.

In many ways there’s nothing different about their honor-driven lives when compared to our own filthy Western ways. Take, for example, train etiquette. If an elderly person boards the train someone will usually give up their seat to them, just like we would (you would, wouldn’t you?). This natural and good, and I don’t see anything different about it than in my own hemisphere. What happens, though, when the elderly collide? Say that two elderly ladies happen to board the train and find just one seat available. Theoretically they each have an equal density of honor, according to social norms – that is, unless one of them has recently given a gift to a young child, but for the sake of argument we’ll assume a level field of play.

Well! Here’s where things start to get complicated. First, the ladies will bow to each other and simultaneously offer the seat to their opponent. They will, of course, also simultaneously decline. Then they will bow some more, usually for at least four repetitions or until interrupted by a train stop. This is all just an introductory ritual. The participants know that nothing is to be settled at this point, as that would result in a deduction of honor for each of them (which is unacceptable).

Once the introductions have been completed each woman must retreat to opposite ends of the train car. If there are no spare seats available, and after a count of at least thirty seconds, the women will once again approach the empty seat. The first person to bow will earn the honor of giving the seat to the loser, thus ending the competition. I’ve actually seen some combatants cheat by not taking an empty seat at the end of the train car, but for the most part everyone conducts themselves properly, as one would expect.

Honor is not always decided on in such an adversarial fashion, of course. The honor of those around you can be just as important, if not more important, than your own. As the saying goes, “Yappari kinjo no hito ga watashi no ankou,” which translates directly to, “After all, my neighbor is my monkfish.” I guess the idiom only makes sense in Japanese. Either way, it means a person in Japan is responsible for the wellbeing of those around him. Consider this common restaurant dilemma.

Japan has thousands of noodle shops, favorite places for businessmen to take a rushed dinner before heading back to his thirty-sixth consecutive hour of work. I’ve never seen someone inhale a bowl of noodles faster than these guys! It truly is fortunate that slurping your noodles is not considered impolite here, or these noodle shops would become genuine honor-catastrophes. Either way, it is quite a common sight to find two businessmen frantically sucking down bowls of ramen side by side.

You can be sure that they are each acutely aware of each other’s relative progress throughout the meal. You see, for one to finish significantly earlier than the other would cause a default of honor for the slow eater. While no honor stands to be gained in such a situation, there’s plenty to be lost. The faster eater, mindful of this, may employ a number of strategies to safeguard his neighbor’s pride. Though it may seem obvious for him just to slow down, that could actually be construed as an insult to the cook; therefore, certain forms must be followed.

The first and simplest tactic here is for the faster eater to cough between three and five times, as if a bit of pork has gotten caught in his throat. This maneuver should be used sparingly, since after a few repetitions it becomes pretty transparent. A good combo for him would be to cough and then spend a moment adjusting his tie – very natural, and considered a mark of experience for the frequent noodle diner.

So what if the slower eater is just abysmally slow? I haven’t seen it happen often, only two or three times, but it was strange enough that I asked one of my students to explain it to me. He was impressed that I asked, so I got a little more detail than I wanted. Here’s what it boils down to:

This tactic is actually kind of old-fashioned, dating back to roughly the turn-of-the-Century, so many young people don’t even use it anymore. Basically, once a faster eater has determined that his neighbor is just not going to keep up, he can take the rather drastic measure of balancing his chopsticks on the edge of his bowl to help retain the slower eater’s honor. Most cooks will recognize this gesture for what it is, but if they take offense – which they will show by taking a handful of bean sprouts and snapping off their heads – the fast eater will remark loudly, “O-Hashi dakara ankou,” or, “These chopsticks, therefore this monkfish.” This serves as both a rebuke for the inobservant cook and an encouragement for the slower eater.

There’s obviously a lot I still don’t understand, since I’ve only been here for three months and everything is so complicated. For example, why does an old man start walking backwards after he walks through a group of pigeons? Why do children carry bags full of dirt on Sundays? I’ll write it all down as I learn, and hopefully we can all learn about honor together.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 10:59 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.