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.