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.