My Research: Japanese Business Manner Training

The research I am conducting in Japan focuses on language ideologies and the language socialization of young adults as they move into the workforce. In Japan, the transition from college student to “new company employee” is seen as a major life stage which culminates in one’s development as a mature adult. Training in formal Japanese speech styles is an important aspect of this transition because college students are seen as ill-prepared for the behaviors and language use that are expected in the business world. Many companies provide new employees with several days of training in “business manners” covering everything from how to bow and present one’s business card to how to answer the telephone.

My research project is ethnographic study of such business manner and speech training. The methodology involves participant observation of one or two-day business manner training conducted by companies that specialize in workforce development training. I have participated in two of these courses as a student and have been able to observe and record three additional classes. Some of these training sessions are for employees of a specific company while others are “open seminars” attended by employees of a variety of different companies. I have also been able to interview several instructors and people responsible for course development. All together, I have been able to gather information on the courses offered by seven different training companies.

Despite the rhetoric of discontinuity between the roles of “student” and “member of society,” much of what is covered in these courses, from group greetings to the emphasis on proper attire, is grounded in the trainees’ prior educational experiences. Trainees are videotaped giving a one-minute self-introduction followed by a critique from the trainers on everything from hairstyles and posture to language use. Rather than learning entirely new speech patterns, the focus of the course is on eradicating forms viewed as slang, vulgar, or incorrect. Trainees are critiqued on their word choice, intonation, and use of incorrect honorific forms. As in traditional Japanese arts, the focus throughout is on learning and imitating the correct form. Awareness of deviations becomes the basis for setting individual self-improvement goals. The courses draw on and reproduce familiar cultural practices at the same time that they attempt to transform students into idealized company employees.

As another aspect of this study, I have also enrolled in a three-month public speaking class at a “Speech Center” that trains people in how to give effective speeches. This class has proved to be a rich source of data on Japanese ideologies of language and human relationships. For example, the first class was a lecture on how greetings contribute to good human relationships. The motto of the Speech Center is “Before there are words, there is the heart. After the words, there is action,” and their goal is not only to produce effective speakers, but to help participants develop a more “bright” and sincere heart.

Participants practice giving three-minute speeches in which they use their own observations and experiences to draw out a moral theme which becomes the thesis of the speech. They are assigned to prepare speeches describing how they have put the speech center’s teachings into practice through engaging in positive thinking, cheerfully greeting their coworkers and family members, and so on. In the process of learning and practicing effective speaking techniques, they also learn to produce a narrative of self-improvement showing how their behavior and attitudes have changed as a result of the speech center’s teachings.
One aspect that intrigues me about the teachings of both the speech center and the business manner classes is the relationship between form and feeling, kokoro (the heart) and kihon (the standard forms). In both types of training, a great deal of emphasis is placed on exact details of form such as how to bow correctly, and yet there is also a message in both contexts that the form is valueless unless it is suffused with feeling. It is no good simply saying the correct phrase unless you sound like you mean it. Rather than a tension between form and feeling , the idea is that using the correct form is what enables one to best express sincere feeling. Of course, this presumes that the feelings that one wants to express are the socially normative or approved ones, and it allows no avenue to critique or change existing social systems. I am interested in exploring the techniques used in both types of courses to motivate the students to put these teachings into practice.

A Weekend of Festivals

Last week was Golden Week, a series of three holidays in a row when virtually the entire country takes a vacation (except for those unlucky enough to work in hotels or other tourist industries). We went to visit our friends the Fujis in Kanazawa which is on the Japan Sea side of the islands. About eight years ago, the husband was transferred from Tokyo to Kanazawa, but the wife continued her job in Tokyo, and she flies out to visit him every weekend. This is a fairly common situation in Japan, except for the part about getting together every weekend which most of the Fujis’ co-workers feel is rather excessive.

The Fujis took us to spend the weekend on the Noto Peninsula. It’s a relatively undeveloped and less traveled area by Japanese standards and there were lots of picturesque farm houses and rice paddies tucked away in the mountains and scenic drives along the coast. The azaleas were in bloom and wisteria was growing wild in the mountains. This was particularly special because “Fuji” is the Japanese word for wisteria. Mrs. Fuji, who loves to wear kimono, wore a kimono with a wisteria design on it to fit the season.

We stayed at two different minshuku. A minshuku is sort of the equivalent of a Bed-and-Breakfast except that they generally serve dinner as well. Many of them are well known for their cuisine and it’s a good chance to sample regional dishes. It’s a very fun way to get a feel for traditional Japanese lifestyles, but you have to be prepared to eat and sleep on the floor, share your bath with strangers of the same sex, and eat fish, rice, and tofu for breakfast (both of the places we stayed at were very proud of their local, homemade tofu). My main problem as I get older is that my body just can’t take all of the sitting on cushions with no chairs.

We also got to see several small local festivals. The first minshuku we stayed at was in a tiny little village and the owner mentioned that they were having their local festival that night and would we like to attend? For a 250 yen donation (about $2.50) we could also buy a strip of paper to write a prayer to the god. So after dinner, we went down to a small, oddly shaped rock by the side of the road where they were doing the ritual. There were about thirty people there of whom probably about half were villagers and the rest were guests staying at various B&B’s nearby. The minshuku owner was there handing out red paper lanterns with candles inside and there was a priest standing in front of the altar and chanting something. After awhile, they lit a small bonfire, and then one of the priests stepped forward and started reading the prayers aloud from the strips of paper and then handing them to another man to place them on the fire to release the prayers to the gods. Most Japanese festivals have become tourist attractions and there was something special about this small group of people doing this unpretentious festival just for themselves (even if they did allow outsiders to attend).

The other two festivals we went to were bigger but still intimate enough to have a local feel to them. One was in Nanao City and consisted of three model ships being pulled through the streets with ropes. A number of the local businesses also displayed small models of the Tenjin god (see photo above). Tenjin was an eighth century scholar who was deified after his death and became the god of learning and scholarship. Every year thousands of Japanese visit his shrines to pray for success in getting into college. We asked about the history of this local Tenjin festival and were told that it had just started the year before! Apparently the tradition was to display the Tenjin god as part of the New Year’s celebrations, but then someone got the idea that since they had all these tourists coming into town for the boat festival, why not display the Tenjin gods as well (and maybe make some extra sales off of the tourists coming in to your store to see the Tenjin statues).

One of the shops sold Buddhist altars. Many Japanese homes have a Buddhist altar where they pray to the spirits of their deceased relatives (whom many Japanese believe become buddhas or gods after their death). The altars are like tall cupboards or wardrobes and they are truly works of art--covered with lacquer ware and carving and gold leaf. So we stepped inside just to admire the artwork, and the owner came over and started chatting with us. She said that she had heard that Americans don’t have the custom of having household altars to the dead and there was something she had always wondered about. “What do Americans do when they want to pray? How do they remember their dead?” I told her that Americans go to church to pray or sometimes visit the graves of their deceased relatives (which is something Japanese also do on an annual basis), but it was a question I’d never thought about before. Of course, many Americans do pray at home too, but we don’t usually have a dedicated religious space within the home the way Japanese do. It was one of those interesting cross-cultural moments.

So it was a lot of good food and fun festivals and we also got to sample some locally brewed sake and bought a small bottle to bring home.

March in Tsukuba

We went out for lunch today at the fancy hotel at the town center. You can see our two lunches above. When Americans think of Japanese food, they often think of things like sushi, but this is another form of traditional Japanese cuisine; lots of small bits of food carefully chosen and arranged to create a mélange of shape, color, taste, and texture. If you go at dinner time, this kind of food usually starts around US $50 and goes up from there, but for lunch these two meals cost about $18 and $23 respectively. I had the seasonal “cherry blossom special” and if you look at the picture you can see a twig with cherry blossoms arranged as part of the meal. Wes’s rice (in the other photo) was also arranged in the shape of a cherry blossom. Very elegant with all the waitresses in kimono.

As we were paying, the head waiter complimented me on my Japanese and asked how long I had been in Japan. I explained that I had previously spent two years living in Iwate Prefecture. He said that he himself was from Miyagi Prefecture (just south of Iwate). At that point I noticed something interesting. There are several different ways to say the pronoun “I” in Japanese with varying levels of politeness and familiarity. Up until that point, in his role as waiter, he had been using extremely polite Japanese. But when he said he was from Miyagi, he used a more informal pronoun, momentarily stepping out of his role as head waiter to converse on a more personal level. It was a perfect example of the kind of shifting between styles that I am here to study.

After lunch I went to the university to print out some things. (We didn’t bring a printer with us, so I have to go to campus whenever I want to print something.) As it turned out, it was graduation and the campus was filled with young men in suits and women wearing brightly colored kimonos and hakama. A hakama is a sort of a split, pleated skirt, usually in dark blue or maroon. In the US, they are used in some martial arts such as aikido. In Japan, they are associated with scholarship more generally and are the standard thing for women to wear at their graduation, sort of the equivalent of our cap and gown. So there were groups of graduates all around campus holding bouquets of flowers and having their picture taken together holding their diplomas. The odd thing was that there were no crowds of proud parents. But when I got to the bus stop to go home, I found all the parents apparently going home separately from the graduates.

Plum Blossom Season

It’s spring in Tsukuba. The crocuses and daffodils are coming out and the plum trees are blossoming in delicate clouds of pink and white. This is the season when the Japanese like to engage in “flower viewing,” having a picnic and getting drunk under the flowering trees.

Last week we went to see Kairakuen Park which is famous for its plum blossoms. On the weekends during the plum blossom season, the trains even make a special stop right in front of the garden. Since we went on a Thursday, we had to take a bus from the station, but at least the park was only moderately crowded rather than jam-packed. There is an area at the top of the bluffs with literally hundreds of different varieties of plum trees. In some ways it’s not that attractive because there’s too much of the same thing with no contrast, although it does have a spectacular impact from a distance. In the lower part of the park the plum trees are more mixed in with other trees and it was, to our minds, more attractive. There was also a nice bamboo grove, and there’s an area where they’ve planted beds of crocus in between the plum trees which makes a nice picnic area. We walked back to the train station along a small lake and saw a number of black swans resting on or preparing their nests.

After the plum blossoms come the cherry blossoms. They are a bit larger and showier, but also more fragile, easily lost in a strong wind. For the Japanese, cherry blossoms symbolize the bittersweet beauty of the ephemeral. During WWII, cherry blossoms were associated with the suicide pilots because their lives were cut short while they were still in the bloom of youth. Today, cherry blossoms are also associated with new beginnings. The Japanese school year ends in March and starts in April. So young children begin school and teenagers enter college in the season of the cherry blossoms. Because most college students are recruited during their senior year, cherry blossom season is also the time when new recruits are entering Japanese companies. Throughout the city one can see young adults dressed in black business suits. (Not navy blue. Not grey pinstripe. Only solid black will do for the company-entering rituals.) Even the retailers get into the spirit of the season with plastic displays of cherry blossoms advertising Coca-Cola or this week’s special. It’s spring in Tsukuba!

How to Bow

What's with the owls? The owl is the symbol or mascot for Tsukuba City. There's a park with lots of different owl statues.

In my discussion of the hazards of fieldwork, I forgot to mention the earthquakes. We've had several small tremblers since we've been here. They often wake us up at night. The whole apartment shakes for about 30 seconds, and then it's over.

I've been learning more about bowing. One of the first things a foreigner notices in Japan is the ubiquitous bowing. Pretty soon you find that you are also bowing at every opportunity, even on the telephone where no one can see you. But there are bows and there are bows. As I am learning in my Business Manners classes, even the Japanese, who have been bowing their whole lives, do not always bow “correctly”.

The first thing they tell you in these classes is that there are three levels of bow: the fifteen degree bow, the thirty degree bow, and the forty-five degree bow. Differing phrases and differing situations call for different degrees of bow and the lower the bow, the longer you should stay down. This has always been a problem for me. I would bow, come partway up, look around and realize that I was the only one standing up, and immediately go back down again, sort of bobbing up and down. It’s something of a relief to discover that it’s not just me; a lot of Japanese make exactly the same mistake. They taught us to go down and then count to three before coming back up.

Another mistake that people make is to start to bow before they have finished saying “thank you,” or “good morning,” etc. You should never bow until you have finished speaking.

The final mistake is that people have a tendency to look down at the floor so that their heads sag forward and ruin the smooth line of the bow. For a shallow, fifteen degree bow, you should look at the ground about three meters (yards) in front of you and that will keep your head in a line with your body. For a thirty degree bow, look two meters ahead, etc. If you feel like your rear end is sticking out and there’s a pole up your back, you’re doing it correctly.

"You Speak Japanese So Well"

One of the things that regularly happens shortly into my first conversation with anyone Japanese is that they will comment on how well I speak Japanese. Unfortunately this has less to do with my competence than with the low level of their expectations. For example, one day I was visiting a garden with a friend and I walked up to the gate and said, “Two tickets please.” The gate keeper immediately responded, “Oh, your Japanese is so good.” “Two tickets please” is not exactly War and Peace, but because people don’t expect foreigners to speak Japanese at all, even a minimal level of competence is considered astonishing. As the old saying puts it, “The amazing thing is not how well the bear dances, but that it can dance at all.”

The other part of this is that many Japanese are extremely insecure about their ability to speak English. Even though English is a required subject for six years, many Japanese have a very low level of speaking competence. When they see a white person, they immediately assume that they are going to have to produce some of the English that they haven’t studied since high school and go into a panic. When it turns out that the foreigner is in fact able to order a bowl of today’s special “chanko nabe” in Japanese, there is a huge flood of relief. I have actually had waitresses tell me how nervous they were when I walked into the restaurant and how relieved they were to find out I could speak Japanese.

I can’t help but notice the difference from the United States where people often assume that foreigners can and should speak flawless English. Even when I use English in public with Wes or other friends, I have never had anyone here say, “This is Japan. You should be speaking Japanese.” Both Japanese and Americans are (generally speaking) pretty bad about learning foreign languages, but at least the Japanese blame themselves rather than the foreigners.

The other thing that happens is that people tell me that my Japanese is “beautiful” or “correct.” Now this is simply ridiculous. I know that I still make mistakes, and I sometimes get so tangled up that my meaning doesn’t get across at all. Now that I am doing research on “business manner” courses , I think I understand it a bit better. One purpose of these courses is to eradicate from people’s speech certain common features that are viewed as slang, vulgar, or incorrect. Simply because I learned Japanese in an academic setting, I’m unlikely to use slang or whatever common patterns are currently arousing the ire of the language purists. To put it in American terms, you might expect foreigners to have an accent or be hard to understand, but they probably won’t pepper their speech with the word “like” every ten seconds. So, somewhat ironically, I end up being held up to young Japanese as a model for how they should speak. After all, if the foreigner can speak Japanese so beautifully, why can’t they?

The Hazards of Fieldwork

I have to admit that I have it easy compared to a lot of anthropologists. I don’t have to worry about malaria, clean drinking water, or getting bitten by a poisonous snake miles from the nearest hospital.

Instead the greatest hazard of my fieldwork is simply finding places in Tokyo. Most Japanese streets do not have names. And buildings are numbered in the order that they were built, so number 17 may be right next to number 67. As a result, addresses are pretty worthless (I’m actually amazed that the Japanese postal service manages to deliver mail so efficiently). Most people rely on maps and most businesses will have a map posted on their website showing how to get there from the nearest train or subway station. The catch, particularly at the larger stations, is to make sure you go out the correct exit. If you exit from the Shinjuku Station West Exit when you were supposed to go out the Central West Exit, you will never find the landmarks on the map. I got turned around like that one time and spent half an hour wandering around before I realized I was on completely the wrong end of the station. One of the landmarks on the map was a MacDonald’s, and I found a MacDonald’s. Only it turned out to be the wrong MacDonald’s. Luckily there are police boxes scattered throughout the city and a major part of their job is providing directions to people who are lost.

Unfortunately the research I’m doing now involves making lots of visits to businesses where I’ve never been before, and I’ve never had much of a sense of direction to begin with. So far I’ve only been late to one appointment, but the concern about whether I will be able to find where I’m going always adds just a little bit of extra nervousness. I usually end up either rushing to get there or arriving half an hour early and having to find a coffee shop or wander around window shopping until it’s time for the appointment. But at least there are no snakes.

P.S. on Valentine’s Chocolates

I just heard that nowadays some businessmen buy their own Valentine’s chocolates. I don’t know if that’s because they like chocolate or so that they can pile them up on their desks and pretend that they are gifts from their female co-workers!

Valentine's Day Japanese Style

Today is Valentine’s Day in Japan and they have borrowed from the U.S. the idea of giving chocolate to celebrate… but with a twist. In Japan, women give chocolate to men for Valentine’s Day, but not vice versa. And the women give chocolate, not to their husbands or sweethearts (though they may give it to them too for all I know), but to the men in their workplace. So you buy chocolate for your section head, department head, etc. The Japanese call it giri choco ‘duty chocolate’ (giri pronounced gear-y to rhyme with O’Leary).

Yuko Ogasawara has written a wonderful book called Office Ladies, Salaried Men looking at gender and power dynamics in the Japanese workplace. She has a whole chapter on the Valentine’s chocolates in which she points out that men’s workplace prestige is influenced by how much chocolate they get on Valentine’s Day. So low-ranking female office workers can punish superiors whom they dislike by giving them smaller boxes of chocolate than the other guys. She even describes one woman who hated her boss so much that she pounded on the chocolate to break it into pieces before she gave it to him.

The other irony of all this is that part of the image of Japanese masculinity is that they don’t like sweets—they like masculine things like whisky. So here are all these guys stuck with a bunch of chocolate they don’t even want. Or perhaps there are Japanese men who secretly, beneath that “tough guy” exterior, actually do like chocolate and get to indulge once a year.

So Happy Valentine’s Day and a reminder to all those American guys that your wife/girlfriend/significant other really does want you to buy her a box of chocolate. Maybe it’s giri choco in the U.S. too.

Nagoya

I just got back from a conference in Nagoya. This was actually a result of attending the International Pragmatics Conference in Sweden last summer where I met an Australian guy who is working at Nagoya University. He invited me to participate in a conference on “Identity and Text Interpretation in Everyday Life.” The university has a nice five-year grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education to examine textual interpretation, so they were able to invite a number of speakers from all over Japan as well as some people from Australia, Singapore, and MIT. We ended up with quite a range of interdisciplinary papers on everything from 12th century carvings in British cathedrals through interactive digital media like Second Life (where people interact using avatars). There was a lot of focus on “visual texts” including not only the two papers I just mentioned, but also a really nice presentation from the MIT guy. MIT has worked together with a number of museums and archives to create an online archive of images of Japan and Japan’s encounters with the outside world—everything from photographs to woodblock prints, drawings, and postcards—ranging from Perry’s “opening” of Japan to the West up through WWII. It’s all under a “Creative Commons” license meaning that anyone can freely download the images and use them however you want as long as it’s not for profit. It’s a wonderful research and teaching tool—check it out at http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027j/menu/

Linguistic anthropology was also well-represented. I presented some of my work on Japanese wedding speeches. Zane (the Australian guy who helped organize the conference) gave a nice talk looking at neighborhood interactions in a city in Indonesia and how people use a mix of two local languages (Indonesian and Javanese) to construct identities. My colleague Debra, who works down in Kyushu (the southern-most of the main islands) gave a talk about attitudes towards local dialects in Kyushu. It is a very timely topic, because Miyazaki Prefecture recently elected a governor who ran under the slogan “Things must change” pronounced in the local dialect. This is really radical, because local dialects are traditionally looked down on and avoided in public speaking. The really interesting thing, as Debra pointed out, is that the dialect boundaries run through the prefecture, so this particular slogan, spoken in that particular way, would only have actually been the “native dialect” of a fraction of the population, but now that it has become famous, even people from other parts of the prefecture are claiming it as their own. An interesting example of the revaluing of particular local language forms.

Sunday evening, after the conference was officially over, several speakers, one of the local organizers, and some local graduate students all went out to a local pub to relax and celebrate. Whenever Japanese drink or socialize together, they always start with a toast with everyone raising their glasses and saying, “Kanpai!” Then the grad students started ordering dish after dish, each of which was passed around for everyone to take a bit onto individual plates in front of us. Every half hour or so they would order a new round of food—salads, little pizzas (even smaller than a typical one-person pizza in the US), spaghetti, French fries, and various flavors of pilaf topped with a thin omelet as a sort of covering. We were pretty full by the end of the evening.

One of the speakers at the conference was a British professor of Russian language and literature who worked in Australia for many years and is now retired. He’s also done interesting work looking at sculpture and other visual arts as “texts” (he was the guy who talked about church carvings). In addition to all his other talents, he plays the guitar. So after an hour or two of socializing, he brought out his guitar and we sang folk songs for awhile. He started with “The Wild Rover” and then sang the Australian Barbecue song for Zane (http://artists.letssingit.com/eric-bogle-lyrics-aussie-bbq-song-pd1cxkw). Then, since one of the other professors is Russian, he played a number of songs and Russian dances for her. He finished it all off with a take-off on Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler” which substituted “linguist” for gambler and featured the sorts of in-jokes based on competing linguist theories that are absolutely hilarious if you’re a linguist and make no sense at all if you’re not. It was a very fun way to wind down from the conference.

Monday Wes and I went sightseeing with my colleague Debra who had given the paper on the Kyushu dialects. Monday was Constitution Day (which the Takezono House calendar rather confusingly translated as “National Institution Day”). This worked out well since the museums and attractions which are normally closed on Monday were open for the national holiday. We went to the Tokugawa Museum to see a collection of artifacts that had belonged to one of the famous aristocratic families in the area. We saw a number of nice examples of things like swords and tea implements. The tea implements in particular really brought me back to the last time I was in Japan (1993-4) because I had also studied tea ceremony for awhile. We also lucked out because they had a special exhibit of Girls’ Day dolls. Girls’ Day is a holiday where they set up special displays of dolls, doll furniture, etc. representing the aristocratic life. This exhibit displayed the Girls’ Day doll collections of three high-ranking samurai ladies, so it was very impressive. http://www.tokugawa-art-museum.jp/english/index.html

After the museum, we also wandered around a very nice, attached Japanese garden for awhile. It had actually snowed on Sunday (which is very unusual for Nagoya since it’s fairly far south), but there were still flowers blooming. I’m not sure what they were—sort of peony looking in various shades of white, pink and yellow. In order to protect them from the cold, they are covered with a sort of straw teepee, with one side left open so you can see the flower and it can get the sunlight (see photo at top).

We also had a chance to sample some of the local cuisine. Friday evening we found a noodle shop featuring the local specialty which is noodles in a red miso broth (miso is a type of paste made from soy beans) with various additions such as chicken, oysters, or pork. Monday night we found a place specializing in breaded and fried pork cutlets called “katsudon”. The entire (very small) restaurant was done in a theme of pigs wearing the sort of apron typically worn by sumo wrestlers. Pig curtains at the door, the waitstaff wearing pig sweatshirts, even the chairs had a cut-out design of pigs on them (see above). The pork cutlets weren’t bad either.

Yesterday we took the Shinkansen (bullet train) back home. We’ve only been here a month, but just going away and coming back makes it “coming home.” We also picked up our alien registration cards from City Hall the day before we left, so I guess we’re officially settled in now.

The Infamous Blizzard

Welp, we're caught in the infamous Tsukuba Blizzard of 2008...Trees flocked with snow and big fat flakes drifting from the sky. Otherwise, not a lot to report. But Tsukuba is not a very traditional town -- only existing for 40 years and all. We have a nice location with a parkway/walkway right behind the building -- once you circle around the International Relations Center that surrounds on us 3 sides. It goes several klicks each way and connects us to parks, the City Center (Train station, shopping, city buildings) and so on. 3 grocery stores within walking distance, but we're someone limited on cooking gear since we're only here 6 months and don't want to toss out a bunch of new stuff.

Japanese Food and How to Bow

Sunday we had dinner at my friend Risako’s house together with her husband Toshio-san and two-year-old son Ren-kun. (“san” and “kun” are titles. You never just call someone by name in Japan. “-san” is a sort of all-purpose Mr./Ms. that can be used with first or last name. “-kun” is more for boys and young men.)

Ren-kun was a very shy at first and kept staring with big eyes at these two big, strange (and foreign) people. But when I took out the toy John Deere tractor that we had brought for him, his whole face lit up in a big grin. His Dad was also pleased with the John Deere cap we brought him. “I can wear it when I go golfing,” he said. “If I ever go golfing.” But finally he decided to wear it to work instead. He works for Hitachi, and John Deere is one of their big customers.

Ren-kun decided after awhile that maybe Wes wasn’t so scary after all and they started playing hunt-the-eraser (Ren-kun would throw it somewhere and Wes would start looking in all sorts of unlikely places). Ren-kun currently speaks about 20 words of Japanese, so he and Wes are neck-in-neck. It was a fun, relaxing evening.

Monday I had another meeting at a company in Shinjuku, Tokyo at about one o’clock. So I arrived around noon and went to one of the Shinjuku department stores for lunch. All of the major train stations have big department stores attached, and the top floor of the department stores is always restaurants. The restaurants have plastic models of their food in the window, so you wander around until you find something that looks good. Then you spend awhile trying to memorize the kanji under the food so that you will be able to recognize it inside on the menu. Actually, when I first came to Japan, I would often just pull the poor servers out into the street and point at what I wanted in the window. It actually works pretty well.

I had an “oya-ko donburi”. Donburi is rice with something on top such as fried pork cutlet, tempura (deep fried vegetables) etc. An oya-ko donburi is a “parent-child” bowl of rice. It has stir-fried eggs and chicken (and soy sauce, onions), which is why it’s called “parent-child”—both the chicken and the egg. It cost about US $10, which is fairly cheap for Japan although the student cafeteria at the University has noodle bowls for 3-500 yen ($3-5). The basic idea is that most meals are built around some type of starch—rice or noodles. Or bread. The Japanese are convinced that Americans eat bread at every single meal. They sometimes ask, “Oh, do Americans eat rice too? Really?”

After lunch, I went to observe “business manner training” at a Japanese temp agency. This training is for college seniors who have decided to sign up with the agency. They receive three days of “manner training”, and I was allowed to observe three hours of this. There were ten trainees, all female, all wearing identical black suits, white blouses, and high heels. The training I observed included learning how to stand, how to sit, how to walk, how to bow. There are three levels of bowing: the 15 degree bow, 30 degree bow and 45 degree bow. Part of the trick is to keep your head in a straight line with your body rather than bent forward. They learned how to hand people something like documents or a pen. Always with both hands. If for some reason your other hand is full and you can only use one hand, apologize for handing something with only one hand. Then they practiced common greetings, reciting them over and over in unison in the same artificial, soft-sounding high pitched voice. “Good morning.” Bow. “Thank you.” Bow.

Foreigners coming to Japan are always struck by the stylized perfection of the service workers with their bowing and polite greetings. Now I had a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how this is accomplished. Yet when I interviewed the instructor afterwards, she said that although she teaches “standard forms,” what is really important is to have consideration for the other person. It’s not a surprising sentiment, and it’s one that sounds very familiar to me as an American. But it is interesting to have it combined with training that has such an emphasis on meticulous form.

Life in Japan

I had forgotten how small thing are here. There is no such thing as “large, economy size”. You buy meat or fish in packages of 400 grams (about half a pound). I bought a box of cereal that had 4 servings. The “plus size” tampons would be regular in the U.S., and hand lotion and toothpaste come in tubes almost small enough to legally carry on an airline. (Not everything is small—fruit is large and juicy and delicious and expensive.) Cars are also small and very boxy, with no cargo space and a fore-shortened hood to fit into small parking spaces. There would be no room on the road for American SUVs!

Some things have changed though. Cars used to almost all be white, and now you see lots of colors being driven on the road. They no longer sell beer in vending machines. And there are no more elevator girls—the women whose job it was to stand, immaculately coiffed, in elevators, and push the buttons and announce the floors in this incredibly artificial, high-pitched voice. “They might as well be recordings,” we used to say. Now they are.

Another thing that has changed is that the Liberal Democratic Party no longer controls both houses of the Diet. This is only the second time this has happened since 1955 (they got thrown out for about two years around 1994, but then got back into power). In the last election, they lost seats to one of the opposition parties in the Upper House, resulting in complete gridlock. It's true that the Lower House can override the Upper House with a 2/3 majority vote. But because that hasn't been done in 50 years, it's considered to be really playing hardball and something to be avoided at all costs. They may have to though to get the budget passed.

On a lighter note, we’ve been reading “Dave Barry does Japan” aloud to each other in the evenings. In amidsts all the silliness, he does make some fairly astute observations about Japan.

My research has been going well too. Thursday I met with the Executive Director of a company that provides classes in public speaking. We talked for over an hour and she was a wonderful informant—very knowledgeable and articulate. She asked me about my previous experiences in Japan and I explained that I had taught English in Iwate Prefecture for two years. “Where in Iwate?” she asked. “Taro,” I said, assuming that she would have no idea where that was. (It’s a town of 8000 people. NO ONE knows where Taro is.) To my surprise, she said that growing up she had lived for 5 years in an even smaller town between Taro and Miyako. And the receptionist who had been coming in and out and bowing and serving us tea, and bowing and serving us coffee, was from Morioka, which is the capital of Iwate. There must, she said be an “en” (fate) that had brought me, out of all of the speech training centers in Tokyo, to this one, where we shared a common Iwate bond. This is what all the fieldwork manuals describe as “building rapport.” Sometimes it just falls right into your lap.

So things are going well. Monday I will be visiting a temp agency to observe some of the "business manners" training that they provide their staff and interview one of the instructors.

On saying no in Japanese

My friend Renee asked me why the Japanese generally avoid saying no. Here is my best attempt at an explanation:

Basically, Japanese are trained to be very considerate and to think about other people’s needs and desires rather than their own. So if, for instance, someone asks them for a favor, they often feel obligated to comply, even if they would rather not. You may have felt the same way yourself sometimes—someone asks you for something, and even though you’d really rather not, you don’t feel like you can refuse, so you go along with it anyway. Take that feeling, multiply by about five, and that’s how the Japanese feel most of the time.

When the Japanese do say no, they often do so indirectly. Again, this isn’t totally foreign to Americans. If someone invites you to do something, you probably wouldn’t just say, “No thank you.” You’d say something like, “Gee, I’d love to, but I’m afraid we’re busy that Friday.” Similarly, if a Japanese person says something like, “Hmm, well, that’s a little…”, that means “no.”

Disagreeing with or contradicting someone is bad too, because either you’ve caused them to lose face (if they’re your superior) or you’ve destroyed the harmony of the group (if they’re your equal). In fact, the most common way to disagree politely is to say, “It differs.” So if, for example, someone were to ask me if I teach at the University of Iowa, rather than saying, “No, it’s the University of Northern Iowa,” I would say, “It differs. It’s the University of Northern Iowa.” That way I’m not directly contradicting them, just letting them know that the facts “differ” from what they thought.

All of this is sometimes very annoying to Americans who say, “I don’t care if the answer’s yes or no; just give me a straight answer.” And conversely, Americans often seem very rude and selfish to Japanese because we just come straight out and say “no” without considering other people’s feelings.

Note that the issue here is that the Japanese don’t like to refuse or contradict people. It’s not that they avoid the word “no” altogether. If you want to hear a Japanese person say “no”, try complimenting them. They’ll probably respond with something like, “No, no, I’m really not very good.”

Japanese also tend to say no when they offered something because they don’t want to put the other person to any trouble. So if you ask a Japanese guest if they’d like something to drink, they will probably say no even if they *do* want something, just to be polite. So of course a really polite Japanese host doesn’t ask; they just bring something out and offer it to the person (and often urge them to eat or drink several times before the guest finally does so). In fact, there’s a funny story about that. A Japanese man was in the States and was visiting an American family. His host asked if he would like some ice cream. Mr. Doi, being a polite Japanese, of course said no. So the American host went and got bowls of ice cream for himself and his son and they sat there and ate in front of their Japanese guest who really would have liked some ice cream, but hadn’t yet learned that in America you will only be asked once, and if you say no, they will take it at face value!

On the other hand, I sometimes got annoyed in Japan because people would bring out things I didn’t really want and then I would feel obliged to eat it since they’d gone to all the trouble. The point is, both sides are trying to be thoughtful and considerate. The American host wants to give people a choice. The Japanese host tries to be considerate by anticipating the other person’s wants. Both systems work fine as long as everyone’s playing by the same set of rules. It’s when people have differing expectations that it gets confusing and annoying.

So it’s not that Japanese never say no. It’s that in Japan, whether you say yes OR no is primarily based on what you think the other person wants, rather than on clearly communicating your own wants. Americans find this confusing, because we expect that each person will clearly communicate their own desires, and then if we disagree, we can negotiate a mutually agreeable solution. In Japan, everyone is so busy anticipating what the other person wants, that Americans sometimes wonder how anything gets decided at all.

The Challange of Living in Japan

Wes asked me a few days before we left why I was looking forward to being back in Japan, and I was thinking about the answer. Partly of course there are specific sights, sounds, tastes, experiences that I enjoy here. But it’s also that being here stretches and engages me mentally—not only in terms of my specific research, but just negotiating daily living and routines is challenging and gives a real feeling of accomplishment. For example, I’m incredibly proud that I was able to successfully open a bank account all by myself and all in Japanese with no help.

Just dealing with the language in and of itself is tiring—I don’t always understand and am often half guessing based on context. For example, when we were doing the alien registration, she asked if we needed a certificate showing that we had applied for our ID cards (since they won’t be ready for 3 weeks). She started listing things it would be needed for like ginkoo kooza. I had no idea what kooza was, but I recognized “ginkoo” as bank and knew we would be opening a bank account, so I said “yes”, and then later looked it up and verified that kooza does mean “account”. And so now I’ve learned another vocabulary word. It’s the same way with the kanji—Chinese characters. Some I recognize, some I guess, and some I just don’t know. It requires a certain amount of tolerance for ambiguity as well as a willingness to make mistakes and make a fool of yourself. But that’s all part of how one learns. And of course it’s tough on Wes since he not only can’t communicate verbally, but is completely illiterate—even for things like signs or the names of products in the grocery store.

It also makes one more sympathetic with some of the strange things the Japanese do with English. Yesterday we bought a sort of hanging clothes rank for drying our laundry. Here is what the label said: “Traditional laundry in japan are so soft as to calm down our minds.” Who knew that laundry could have such therapeutic effects!

Today (Sunday) we went over to see the Tsukuba Science Museum. First floor is various hands-on exhibits illustrating various physical principles and the second floor is devoted to space exploration. Unfortunately all of the explanations are entirely in Japanese, so it was of limited interest for us. We also stopped by the city library and verified that they do have two book cases of English language books. Also Chinese and Korean. In fact, looking at the names on the mail boxes at Takezono House, the majority are Chinese or Korean with a scattering of other nationalities.

Because Sunday is the one free day for a lot of people (many people still work a half day on Sat) and it was nice and sunny we also saw a lot of people out enjoying the parks, in the shopping malls, etc. There was even a group singing a cappella in one of the parks. And we found the “100 yen store” and picked up some cheap household goods. Tomorrow I think will be another quiet day at home, and then Tuesday I go into the University of Tsukuba to meet people.

Arrival in Japan

We arrived late Tuesday and checked in Wed. to Takezono House which is the apartments that Tsukuba University rents to foreign researchers. We are gradually figuring out all of the Japanese appliances. Everything is very piecemeal. For example, there are three separate heating/cooling units in the different rooms which have to be turned off when you’re not there, and each sink has a separate hot water heater that has to be turned on before you can get any hot water. This also means that the bathroom and hallway between the rooms has no heat at all. But at least my bathtub isn’t out in a shed attached to the house like it was in Taro! And we have a flush toilet—with a heated seat and bidet no less. (I haven’t gotten brave enough yet to try the bidet, but I suppose I will sometime before we leave). Tomorrow I will have to get out my kanji (Chinese character) dictionary and try to figure out the washing machine. The rooms are nice and spacious (huge by Tokyo standards) with lots of sunlight.

The next adventure was to go out and explore the neighborhood. We’re very centrally located with three supermarkets within a block of us and lots of shops and restaurants. It’s about a 10 minute walk to the town center where we can catch the train to Tokyo—leaves several times an hour and takes 45-60 minutes depending on the train. So it will be easy to access Tokyo for both my research and sightseeing. There are also several parks nearby including one just behind our building. Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day in the 40s, perfect for exploring. Today we woke up to snow, most of which had melted by about 10 am. So for those of you who were wondering whether Ibaraki Prefecture gets snow, the answer is yes!

Today we went and registered as alien residents and opened a bank account, so we’re getting all settled in and organized. The apartment is minimally furnished with linens and dishes, but we will probably buy a number of other items as times goes by to get more comfortable. Yesterday for dinner, we went to the supermarket and picked up $7 worth of fresh sushi to go. This is the life! I’ve also noticed another big change in Japan which is that I could use a credit card to buy groceries. That would have been impossible 20 years ago or even 10. We’ll have to see what else has changed!