"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?