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.