Gaijin Insecurities: The Japanese Language Proficiency Pecking Order

At the same touch-football game where I met Dave S., I also encountered a strange gaijin phenomenon for the first time: insecure gaijin who speak Japanese to each other to reassure themselves that their Japanese is better than the other guy's.

Back in 1991, the number of (Caucasian) foreigners who could speak decent Japanese was small. Rather than correctly attribute this to a general lack of interest in learning Japanese among non-Japanese, many Japanese, acting on a misguided national or ethnic pride, convinced themselves that Japanese blood was somehow required to learn Japanese. (Which is why I was frequently asked if I was part-Japanese.) Moreover, because the Japanese education system emphasizes reading and writing over speaking in foreign-language education, leaving most Japanese unable to speak English despite six years of mandatory English education (and more for those with college degrees), many believe that mastering a foreign language is not possible for people of normal intelligence.

These factors led many Japanese to believe that gaijin who could string together a sentence or two of Japanese were absolute Einsteins. And they fawningly told those gaijin so. After hearing this enough, many gaijin who spoke a little Japanese started to believe it.

However, a Japanese-speaking foreigner was no longer special if he wasn't the only one. Another foreigner was always a potential threat to one's ego, hence the need to learn where one stood in the Japanese-ability pecking order -- whether one could continue feeling superior to yet another gaijin who could not get past konnichiwa or would have to go home and sulk because someone else's Japanese was better.

After the game, as Dave and I prepared to head to "Oh, God!," I noticed two of the Yalies packing up their things. Their Japanese girlfriends were there, and they were each speaking Japanese to them. As each tried to make sure that the other knew he could also speak good Japanese, their voices grew louder and louder, until they both gave up the pretense and started speaking Japanese to each other, each trying to show that he was higher on the Japanese-ability scale.

I thought this was exceedingly silly. For me, speaking Japanese to another English speaker outside a classroom always had an "ick" factor to it. But it was not long before I started encountering people who wanted to reassure themselves that my Japanese wasn't as good as theirs by speaking Japanese to me. My icky feeling would instantly kick in. I'd answer their question in English and refuse to be sucked into their little self-affirmation game.

Even leaving Japan does not cure many ex-gaijin of their need to salve their egos by proving to themselves that they are the still the most specialist gaijin of all. It's still common for people I first meet, upon finding out that we both lived in Japan, to start speaking Japanese to see whether they are entitled to feel superior or must suck up to me.

Only two exceptions existed to my rule against speaking Japanese with another gaijin. One was when we were with a Japanese person who spoke no English. Then it was just a matter of courtesy and necessity and didn't give me the willies. The other was the rarer occasion where Japanese was actually our common language. For example, in 1991, I took Japanese lessons at a school that prepared foreigners for entrance into college. Most of the students were from Korea, and a few were from southeast Asia and the Middle East. Japanese was our common language.

You should have seen the faces of the people on the street when they saw us walking through Shibuya speaking Japanese to each other after class . . . .

Yale Loses the All-Yalie Harvard-Yale Game

In November 1991, a Look Japan colleague who had attended Yale told me that her friends were organizing a Harvard-Yale touch football game that Saturday in Yoyogi Park, in central Tokyo, in honor of the actual Harvard-Yale football game back in the US later that day. Thinking I might run into someone I knew, I decided to go.

Upon arriving, I found 25 people in Yale gear, one guy wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, and one guy from some other school. Seeing no one I knew, I introduced myself to the guy wearing the Harvard sweatshirt. His name was Dave S., and he was from the class of '90, one year ahead of me. We hadn't known each other at school. We threw a ball around a bit to warm up and then, with the third non-Yalie, formed the nucleus of the "Harvard" side when we divided up into teams. Our side won.

Afterwards, I remarked on the fact that so few Harvard people had shown up and asked him how he had learned about the game.

"You're shittin' me. This was a Harvard-Yale game?" he asked.

"Yeah, you didn't know?"

"No."

"You played this whole game without knowing?"

"I didn't know. Seriously."

"Then what were you doing here?" I asked him.

"I was just walking through Yoyogi Park, and I saw a bunch of gaijin playing football. I just decided I would join them." (Not ask if he could join, decided he would join. This, as I would later learn, was classic Dave S.)

"What about the Harvard sweatshirt?" I asked.

"This? I always wear this sweatshirt."

"You really didn't know?" I persisted.

"Really. I didn't know."

So, that was their plan! The Yalies had tried to win the Harvard-Yale touch football game by not inviting anyone from Harvard! And, yet, they still lost, their plot foiled by one of their own who spilled the beans about the game to a colleague from Harvard and a Harvard grad who decided to barge into a gaijin football game without invitation.

Afterwards, Dave and I decided to grab a drink. He suggested that he call his girlfriend, Chieko, and that we meet her at a nearby bar called "Oh, God!," off Omote-Sando street in Harajuku, where they had cheap food, a pool table, and American movies on the projection TV. Perfect for a couple of guys in their early 20s. Over the next year or so, Dave and Chieko became my close friends, and "Oh, God!" became one of our regular hangouts -- all because Dave had decided to insert himself into a football game he just happened to be passing by.

Oh, Those Drunken Yakitori Nights!

Yakitori -- chicken parts on sticks -- is a salaryman standby in Japan and one of my favorite feeds. Yakitori comes in many varieties, as all parts of the chicken are used, from the white breast meat that Americans eat to the exclusion of every other part of the chicken to the knee cartilege (hiza nankotsu), one of my favorite cuts of all. Yakitori places are as varied as yakitori itself, ranging from upscale restaurants to smoky open-air joints stuck under the tracks near railway stations. The latter were my favorite.

My way of finding a good yakitori joint was to look for a really grubby place that was very crowded with salarymen. If the place was packed despite having zero ambiance, then chances were good people were there for the food.

My favorite yakitori joint, Komatsu, was this kind of place. Located in Yurakucho, the Ginza's grubby neighbor, it stood near the entrance of a short tunnel under the Yamanote Line tracks, half-way between Yurakucho and Shimbashi stations, that contained about six yakitori places. Although the tunnel seemed to be pedestrianized, it was actually a city street, and a couple of times a night a car or truck would drive right through the middle of this yakitori bazaar. Komatsu was run by a middle-aged woman, the daughter of the founder, who was occasionally helped by one or the other of her two daughters. It held perhaps 12 seats -- two long tables and a small counter near the grill -- under the sloping barrel roof of the tunnel. If you didn't get there by 6:00 p.m. or so, you couldn't get in again until late. Komatsu would be packed even when the other places nearby were empty.

Soon after starting at Look Japan, my friends David Benjamin and Junko Yoshida, who had been going there for years, introduced me to Komatsu, and Benji and I developed a custom of going there once a month or so. One evening, we swung by on the back end of the rush. The place had emptied out except for a couple of salarymen. After we had been there for an hour or so, and the salarymen, who were already drunk when we got there, had become totally shitfaced, one of them worked up the courage to talk to the foreigners, probably to try to impress his friend with either his guts or his English ability.

When middle-aged Japanese men in the 1990s approached foreigners to practice or show of their English, they usually asked one or more of the following three questions. This is how the conversation usually went:

Question 1. "Are you a student?"

Answer: "No. I am working."

Follow-up question: "Are you teaching Ingurish?"

Answer: "No."

(No follow-up.)

Question 2. "Do you like Japanese sushi?" (It was always Japanese sushi, as if there were some other kind.)

Answer: "Yes."

Follow-up question: "Really?" (This was always asked in a tone of utter disbelief, as if what divided the Japanese from the rest of the world and maintained order in the universe was that Japanese ate raw fish and no one else could even think of eating it without gagging.)

Answer: "Yes, really." (Stunned silence. No follow up.)

Question 3. "Do you like Japanese gyaru (girls)?" (The previous questions were just warm-up for this, the most important question, loaded with unexpressed resentment that so many Japanese girls had foreign boyfriends, and asked only to confirm the asker's pre-existing belief: Of course he likes Japanese girls! They're only here to steal our women! )

Answer: "Some of them, yes." (This answer seemed to be sufficient confirmation of their pre-conceived explanation for my presence and led to no follow-up.)

Here the conversation would usually end.

At Komatsu that day, one of the two men leaned over from the next table, business cards in hand, and introduced himself to us in English. He immediately launched into the Three Questions. However, he was clearly struggling with his English, which was barely understandable. I thought I would cut him a break and speak Japanese.

He ignored me and continued to ask questions in barely intelligible English, worsened by a thick accent and way too much booze.

I continued to try to make conversation in Japanese. However, in those days Japanese-speaking foreigners were rare, and many Japanese people simply refused to believe that foreigners could learn their language. Because I spoke good Japanese, people often assumed that the only explanation was some hidden Japanese ancestry and would ask if my mother was Japanese. This guy's demeanor suggested that he just did not believe that I was speaking Japanese to him. Or, perhaps was concentrating so hard on formulating questions in English that he could not understand what I was saying to him. Whatever the reason, I gave up and let him continue to struggle along.

Eventually he finished the interrogation. Apparently I answered the Three Questions appropriately, because my friend then announced that he wanted to consummate our new friendship by giving me his business card -- the ultimate sign that the relationship was expected to continue.

The business card he had already given me was still sitting in front of me on the table.

"I already have your card," I said to him in English.

"Let me give you my card," he persisted.

"Meishi ha, mou itadakimashita yo," I said, repeating myself in Japanese, thinking that perhaps he had not understood me.

"No, no, let me give you my card," came the response in English.

"No, really," I said, holding my copy of his business card in front of his face, "I already have your card."

"No, let me give you my card," he said, drunkenly thrusting a second copy of his card into my hand.

The man and his buddy stood up to leave. They shook our hands and insisted that we get together again. They then stumbled out of Komatsu, to search for more booze or to catch the train home to deepest Yokohama, Chiba, suburban Tokyo, or perhaps beyond. Needless to say, Benji and I never saw our Komatsu friends again.

The Red Button Creeps Closer and Closer

Next to the office door at Look Japan was a white board containing the names of every employee, in their order of seniority, from Shacho down to lowly me, the newest employee. One of the names on the list always had a red button next to it, and each day the button would move to the next name on the list.

The button indicated whose turn it was to lead chorei (朝礼) that day. Chorei translates as "morning assembly," and every work day at Look Japan commenced with one. Chorei is customary in many Japanese companies, particularly the more traditional ones, and Shacho was very insistent on this custom being followed. In fact, Shacho was so fond of chorei, it was said that he believed that a company was not a company without it.

The rest of us hated chorei as much as Shacho loved it, especially when it was Shacho's turn to lead it, because while everyone else was anxious to get to the work piled on their desks, Shacho would drone on and on. I hated chorei because it meant that I would have to give a speech in Japanese, and each day as I saw the little red button getting closer and closer to my name on the white board, my sense of dread would increase.

Not that it really should have. The rule was that your speech could be about anything. Some people would talk about work. I tended to talk about some experience I had recently. The speech did not even have to been in Japanese, as we had English-speaking employees who spoke little or no Japanese. It didn't matter. We each had to do chorei when it was our turn. That was what made us a company.

Even though I dreaded chorei, I learned to live with it, and even to use it to my advantage. For example, do-yo no ushi-no-hi is a day in July that traditionally marks the height of summer and is thought to be the hottest day of the year -- a tradition that obviously predates the introduction of the thermometer. Japanese have a custom of eating eel that day, because it is loaded with iron and thought to help you withstand the heat on the hottest day. In July 1992, shortly before I left Look Japan, my turn to lead chorei happened to fall on that day. I wanted to eat eel, which is quite expensive, and I thought that, if I brought up the custom that morning, Shacho just might treat us to eel for lunch. So, for my chorei speech, I simply said, "今日は土用の丑の日です。うなぎを食べましょう" (Today is do-yo no ushi no hi, so I am going to eat eel").

It worked like a charm. Shacho immediately jumped in and said, "What a great idea! Let's eat eel today!" Not only did he treat the entire company, but we all got to leave the office for a few hours in the middle of the day to go to the eel restaurant down the street.

"Someday, You'll Be President of the United States"

"Someday, you'll be president of the United States."

This was the highest compliment that Shacho ("president") could think to pay me. As far as I know, it was based solely on one fact: I arrived in the office before Shacho arrived every day. I don't think that Shacho really knew whether I was a good employee or not. After all, he did not understand English, and I am sure that he never even tried to read the English-language news magazine, Look Japan, that he published every month.

I was so used to rising early to get to work on time at Canon, that even after I changed jobs and dormitory locations, I continued to rise early to go to work. Once I moved into Oshikawa-san's dormitory in Ohta-ku and began working at Look Japan, I took the Keihin-Tohoku line from Kamata Station in the south easternmost corner of Tokyo to Tokyo Station to get to work -- the busiest line in metropolitan Tokyo on the busiest stretch of its route. The Keihin-Tohoku line passed through Kamakura, Yokohama and Kawasaki and was already sardine-jammed when it finally reached the Tokyo city limits at Kamata.

Getting a seat was out of the question. I just wanted to get a strap to hang on, so that I could read a book or a newspaper over the heads of the exalted souls who could sit. Otherwise, I was condemned to riding in the open space between the doors, where -- even if I could raise my arms -- there was nothing to hold on to, and the only thing stopping me from falling to the floor when the train rounded a curve at speed was the other people jammed against me, arms also pinned to their sides, propping me up.

To avoid the crowded trains, I took to getting on the train at 7:00 a.m. and eating breakfast at my desk while I read the paper and otherwise killed time until work started at 9:00. My Japanese colleagues found my usual breakfast of covenience-store onigiri (rice balls) and coffee endlessly amusing. Everyone knows, they said, that you eat onigiri with green tea, not coffee. Mixing Japanese food with western drink apparently knocked the universe out of its delicate balance. As for me, green tea did not pack enough of a caffeine punch. I needed the hard stuff.

As a result of my early arrival, I was always there when Shacho arrived, and Shacho usually arrived before everyone else. My desk was directly in front of the office door, and when Shacho arrived, there I would be, reading the paper. He'd greet me with a robust Ohayo gozaimasu ("good morning") and a big grin, and it was clear he was happy to see me there, because it signaled my enthusiasm for my job and the company he had built from the ground up over the last 35 years.

I, however, felt like a fraud. I hated working at Look Japan. I never had enough work to do, and was always bored. The company was too uptight, with too many meaningless rules, and the photographers we used for stories used to laugh and tell us we weren't really journalists, because we had to wear suits. This was fine with Shacho, who loved to tell us that he wanted businessmen, not journalists, working for him -- part of the problem in my mind. Working there also made me uncomfortable because I felt that Shacho liked me for the wrong reason. While I am sure that our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san, reported to him that I was a good employee, Shacho himself never read a word I wrote or edited. But, because I was there every morning when he arrived, Shacho frequently told me that, one day, I'd be President.

Only one employee arrived earlier than I did, Kamiya-san, our accountant, whose responsibility it was to open the office and get the coffee started. Kamiya-san hated me as much as Shacho loved me, and for equally irrelevant reasons. Our magazine had 48 pages each month, and there was a set amount of work to do for each issue. I wrote one article and was responsible for editing half of the articles written by outside authors each month. However, I worked very efficiently and generally wound up editing more than half of the magazine each month. Still, I usually ran out of work part-way through the month and had nothing to do. After a while, I started passing the time by translating Japanese newspaper articles to increase my vocabulary.

Nishimura-san and the Japanese editors were extremely happy with me. I turned around the work quickly and there were no last-minute rushes, no missed deadlines, no end-of-month panic. But, Kamiya-san, who, like Shacho, did not speak English and probably never read the magazine, saw me sitting around for half the month, reading Japanese magazines and not "working." Every time she looked at me, her disapproval was written clearly on her face. She was convinced I was a slacker and a fraud, and I am sure it burned her up inside every time Shacho told me, "Someday, you're going to be President of the United States."

In a way, Shacho and Kamiya-san epitomized my Look Japan experience: I was bored out of my mind while two people who did not understand what my job entailed reached completely opposite conclusions about my value as an employee based on observations that had nothing to do with my work.

Look Japan

In September 1991, I finished my Canon internship and started a new job at Look Japan, Inc., an English-language magazine dedicated to explaining Japan to the outside world. A product of the free-wheeling post-Occupation days when independent entrepreneurial ventures sprouted like mushrooms after the rain, Look Japan was started as a newsletter by our president, Kimura-san (or shacho ("president"), as we called him), who neither spoke nor read English, but saw the value of getting Japanese business news to the outside world back in the 1950s.

By the time I arrived, 35 years later, Look Japan had developed a unique business model. We had a circulation of 50,000 copies per month, which later rose to 75,000. But we only had about 200 subscriptions. The remainder of the issue was purchased by the Foreign Ministry and then distributed for free to universities and libraries around the English-speaking world. When the company wanted to sell more copies, it went to the Foreign Ministry and lobbied for them to buy more.

Because of its connection with the government, Look Japan was hardly impartial. With an editorial staff of seven people, and a business side staff of about the same number of people, we had three separate editorial review panels consisting of 15 people each. All of the panel members were former government officials, university professors, and businessmen with a government connection or a pro-government agenda. Whenever we published any article giving that tried to balance the good with the bad of Japan, no matter how much more emphasis we gave to the good, we were criticized for being partial. In other words, any deviation from the Japan-is-great message was perceived as an attack. I would have been perfectly happy getting paid money to write Japanese government propaganda -- if that's how the job was presented to me. But the company maintained the fiction that we were completely independent journalists, so working under these constraints was irritating, to say the least.

Although we wrote a few regular columns in house, most of the articles were contributed by outside authors drawn from the same pool of pro-government academics and businessmen as our editorial review panels. The magazine paid very generously for articles -- a great way of lubricating relations with people who had influence with those who controlled the Foreign Ministry's budget. Some of these authors insisted in writing in English to show their erudition and sophistication. Others wrote in Japanese and had their articles translated by our staff. My job, in addition to writing a piece per issue of my own, was to turn these articles into coherent English. Sometimes this led to fights with a Japanese author who believed that, because he was a Tokyo University professor or government official and therefore outranked me in hierarchical Japanese society, he outranked me in deciding what constituted proper English grammar or vocabulary as well. Fortunately, since we edited the galleys of the magazine, we had the final say, and we were backed up by our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san. And, since the business staff, which had the relationships with these authors did not appear to read the magazine, we were almost never challenged on the text of the final edition.

I spent a year in total at Look Japan, which had its ups and downs, but which I mostly remember favorably two decades later. I made some good friends there, like Nishimura-san and my co-editor Seo-san. I also got to meet some interesting people as a result of working there, from a government economist with whom I am still friends, to foreign baseball players active in Japan, to Akebono, the first non-Japanese Grand Champion (yokozuna) in sumo. I'll be blogging on my experiences at Look Japan over the next few weeks, until I run out of stories. Stay tuned.

My Short-Lived Homestay

While I was at Canon, I convinced myself that I needed to do a year-long home stay in order to perfect my Japanese, picturing that I would find some welcoming family who would become my friends for life. One of my Canon colleagues volunteered to help find me a home stay, and did, in Itabashi-ku in northwestern Tokyo. I started the home stay in September 1991, after my internship at Canon ended, and I moved out of the Canon dorm that came with the internship.

When I arrived, it was not at all what I pictured. Instead of a welcoming family, who would take me in as their "adopted" American son for a year, what I got was a family that took in boarders to make some extra money. They had a college student, whom I don't remember ever talking to, and a five-year old, slightly retarded girl, who was attending a special school that was not available in her hometown.

The mother and older sister, who did not live there, but was at the house all the time, were both nutritionists, so my breakfast and dinner were always very healthy. As soon as I moved in, I began losing weight as a result of my healthier diet, which worried them very much because they thought I was not eating enough, but I was quite happy about this change in my appearance. The father was a coarse working stiff from Kyushu, with such a thick Kyushu accent that I was never able to understand what he was saying. Because I could never understand what he was saying, he thought I was stupid, and would use sign language to try to communicate with me, when all I wanted was for him to speak a little more slowly and more clearly.

The worst aspect of the home stay was that I had a 10:00 p.m. curfew. I am not sure whether eventually they would have given me a key once they got to know me, but they did not and I had to be home by 10:00 when they locked the front door. To make matters worse, where they lived in Itabashi-ku was near the very end of the Mita subway line, and it took me about 45 minutes to get home from central Tokyo, where I usually hung out with my friends, meaning that I had to leave the goings-on by 9:15 p.m. to get home on time. I found this quite insulting, given that I was an adult with a job and was used to keeping my own hours completely at college.

To make matters even worse, the Mita subway line, which traveled mostly through poorer parts of Tokyo, had not yet been updated and had subway cars without air-conditioning. Even in September, the subway was stiflingly hot, and I would arrive at work in the morning drenched in sweat.

After a few weeks of the home stay, I noticed that I was constantly sneezing and itchy-eyed. I finally realized I was having a bad allergic reaction to the family dog. I suffered horribly for a few weeks, but then realized that this was my face-saving ticket out of the home stay. I called my friend Kakurai-san at Canon and asked him if he would find out from Oshikawa-san whether the offer was still open for me to move into Oshikawa-san's dorm. He called me back almost immediately to tell me that it was. I moved out that weekend, closing one brief chapter of my life in Japan and opening a new one with the Oshikawa family.

Unrelated Japan Photo #8

Philosopher's Walk (Tetsugaku no michi), Kyoto (July 2006)

My Dad, the Kamikaze Pilot

A few years after I met Oshikawa-san at Canon, he told me something about himself.

During the war, he was a pilot. A kamikaze pilot.

This astonishing statement takes a little explaining. Oshikawa-san obviously never flew his one-way mission. In the last months of the war, when the Japanese army was conscripting every able-bodied man for the final, apocalyptic show-down with the United States, Oshikawa-san was drafted. He was 16. And whether he was pushed into kamikaze service or, more likely, was, as a high school student, so deeply indoctrinated with end-time emperor worship that he volunteered to make the ultimate show of patriotism, he never told me. It was enough for me to know that, in order to protect the homeland, he trained to fly his plane, specially designed to hold explosives rather than enough fuel for a return trip, into an American warship at the water-line. He never got the chance because -- fortunately for him, his family, me, and who knows how many American sailors and their families -- the war ended before his training did.

Oshikawa-san also told me another shocking fact about the war. He was stationed in Nagasaki. Suddenly, in early August 1945, the soldiers were suddenly mustered out of the city and into the surrounding hills without explanation. On August 9, 1945, with the soldiers safely outside the city, most of Nagasaki disappeared in a 1000-degree fireball in the second atomic bombing. News of the bombing of Hiroshima was as a state secret and the Japanese government kept it from the civilian population and low-level soldiers like Oshikawa-san alike. Oshikawa-san's story may have been repeated in hundreds of cities throughout Japan -- potential A-bomb targets all. The government evacuated soldiers to fight another day, but left millions of innocent Japanese civilians to their fate.

To bring the reality of the bombings even closer to home, Oshikawa-san's wife, Chisako, is from Hiroshima (although I believe she was born after the war). Her grandparents died in the atomic bomb blast.

I don't presume to think that meeting me led to some kind of epiphany of forgiveness on the part of the Oshikawa family. The Oshikawas were, like many Japanese of their generation, fascinated by the United States and had visited there as tourists. Any bitterness about the war had long since receded into the past for them. But, still, the fact that this family -- so deeply and directly touched by the horrendous conflict with the United States -- decided to call me their "son" is something I will never forget.

Punch Perms and Umeboshi -- My First Izakaya Experience

A week or so after I arrived at Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, Arai-san, the dormitory manager, prevailed upon my dorm mates to take me out and get to know me. They asked me if I had ever been to an izakaya, and when I asked what that was, they told me it was a "Japanese-style bar." Sounded good to me. We arranged to meet one day after work at the local izakaya, which was half-way between Fujigaoka Station and our dormitory. I knew the place they described from passing it twice a day on my walks uphill both ways to and from the station.

When I arrived, most of the other guys were already there, about six in total. Like every other izakaya I have been to since, it was noisy with the conversation of customers and the shouts of the waiters welcoming guest, thanking departing customers and conveying their orders to the cooks and beer-pullers. (I call them beer-pullers rather than bartenders because Izakaya don't have bars as we know them in the US and don't serve drinks that require bartenders. The drinks menu usually consists of beer, sake, shochu (a spirit made from either potatoes or wheat), chu-hai (shochu mixed in a highball glass with some kind of flavoring), and soft drinks.) I sat down at the table and someone gave me a small glass and poured me a beer from the shared bottle.

Our waiter was a middle-aged man with what looked like a short, neatly-trimmed Afro and much tanner skin than most Japanese. He looked like one of my sports coaches in high school, which is to say, he looked black, but he was clearly Japanese. I struggled to explain his looks to myself, and then came up with a story to make sense of them: he was part African-American, and his father had probably been a serviceman stationed at one of the U.S. military bases in Japan. I asked one of the guys whether he thought the waiter was half-black, and when he asked why, I explained my reasoning. No, he told me, the waiter's hair was curly because he had a panchi paamu ("punch perm"), a permanent wave hairstyle popular in the 1980s and early 1990s with gangsters and some members of the working class, who thought it made them look tough.

The conversation alternated between my dorm-mates peppering me with questions and talking amongst themselves about topics that quickly lost me. Whenever I did understand the conversation and attempted to contribute something, by the time I had translated my comment from English to Japanese inside my head, the conversation had moved on to another topic.

At some point in the evening, the conversation turned to what would become a familiar topic over the years, my level of knowledge and/or comfort with certain Japanese foods. They wanted to know if I ate "raw fish," sushi being considered the ultimate gross-out food for non-Japanese and the real test for how far a foreigner was willing to go in Japanese culture. I told them I did. They tried a few other foodstuffs they thought would be offputting to me, and I had eaten them all. Finally, they asked me if I had ever had an umeboshi. I did not know what an umeboshi was. They tried to explain to me what it was, and even looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary, to find the translation "pickled plum." A picked plum did not make any more sense to me, so finally they ordered one to see if I would eat it.

The waiter brought a tiny round dish, about two inches across, with a single, reddish shriveled round object that did not look like any plum I had ever seen. They warned me that it was very sour. Good, I said, I love sour foods.

For some reason, even though they knew that I did not know what an umeboshi was, for some reason, it did not occur to them that I would not know how to eat one properly. Evidently, they are considered too sour to eat as-is, and you are meant to take a small piece with chopsticks and use it to flavor something else, like rice. I, however, seeing a grape-sized piece of what they said was a plum, picked up the umeboshi and popped it into my mouth whole. It wasn't that sour.

Everyone at the table gasped.

Thinking I had breached some kind of etiquette, I spit the umeboshi back into the dish.

Then, realizing I had now definitely committed a faux pas, I popped the umeboshi back in my mouth and ate it. Only then did they tell me that it was considered too sour to eat whole and explained how it was supposed to be consumed. They ordered another and showed me.

So, this day featured my introduction to izakaya and umeboshi (and punch perms). I became a huge fan of izakaya dining and would travel across Tokyo to go to a good one.

And I still eat umeboshi whole.

Unrelated Japan Photo #7

19th century foreigner's house in Kobe, Japan (July 2006)

I Love the Smell of Filet o' Fish in the Morning

During my internship, I left my dorm at 7:00 a.m. to make it to work on time, and because eating before I left home would leave me hungry long before the noon lunch break, I took to eating after I arrived in the neighborhood of the office. After paying $18 for pancakes at a hotel restaurant one morning, I resolved to look for other options.

Near the end of my commute were several fast food chains, running from Morinaga to McDonald's. I soon discovered that McDonald's served reasonable pancakes at a reasonable price, and it became my regular stop each morning. Unlike in the U.S., the pancakes were cooked to order and brought to your table when they were done, which was never more than about 5 minutes. The pancakes always came with a deep bow and an apology for having made you wait so long.

Although McDonald's offered a full breakfast menu of pancakes, Egg McMuffins, etc., I noticed after a while that the only people who ordered breakfast items were me and the foreign tourists who wandered in from a nearby hotel -- probably after they saw the $18 pancakes in the hotel restaurant. The Japanese always bought items from the regular menu, like Filet o' Fish. I wondered whether this was just particular to McDonald's, but when I went to Morinaga, it didn't even have a breakfast menu. It just hawked the regular menu of burgers all day long.

The idea of fish -- especially Filet o' Fish -- in the morning made my stomach turn, and I thought the Japanese salarymen breakfasting on them to be utterly bizarre. It was only after some time in Japan that I realized that Japanese cuisine recognizes no distinction between breakfast and the other meals. A traditional Japanese breakfast, such as you might get in a ryokan inn, contains fish, pickles, rice, miso soup, and other things you'd eat during the rest of the day. Eventually, as a result of going to Korea and seeing kimchi in the breakfast buffet, it dawned on me that people throughout the world eat the same things all day long, and the idea that you don't eat breakfast for dinner and vice-versa (all-day breakfast at diners notwithstanding) may be a uniquely Western idea.

We were the weird ones, not the Japanese.

Nearly 20 years later, I love Japanese breakfast, especially the grilled fish. Since Japanese breakfasts are much more labor-intensive than Western ones, I rarely get to eat them, but I relish them every time.

The idea of a Filet o' Fish for breakfast, however, still turns my stomach.

Jona-san

Japanese people have a lot of trouble with the name Jonathan. It's the "th" that they find hard to pronounce, and, as a result, Jonathan usually comes out as Jonasan in Japanese.

But being called Jonasan in Japanese creates problems. "San" is the honorific that attaches to everyone's name in Japan -- usually translated as "Mr., Ms. or Mrs." in English -- and my name becomes Jonasan-san in polite situations. Oshikawa-san was the first to draw attention to how much trouble this caused for Japanese people. "Jonasan-san to iu no ha mendokusai yo!," he would say. "Jonasan-san-san-san -- kiri ga nai!" ("It's really annoying having to say Jonathan-san! Jonathan-san-san-san -- it never ends!")

Most people, like Oshikawa-san, adopted the solution of dropping the second "san" entirely in addressing me. Technically speaking, dropping the "san" is considered rude, except among family and close friends, and even between people who are close, it's still common to use a diminutive of "san," like "chan" or "kun," is used instead. (For example, we call our daughter "Emma-chan".) But, the minds of my friends, the san in Jonasan was honor enough for me.

Not being a particularly formal person, I didn't mind this so much. But, after a while, some people would forget that "san" was actually part of my name. Then, when they felt familiar enough to dispense with honorifics, they would call me "Jona." This I did mind.

Having the name Jonathan presented another problem. Even though it's common in the West to introduce oneself as Mr. or Dr. so-and-so, in Japan it's considered bad form to put "san" at the end of your own name. Foreigners introducing themselves as "Smith-san" is a commonly raised, "heartwarming" example of how non-Japanese can never really understand Japanese etiquette. When I introduced myself as Jonasan, people often thought I was introducing myself as "Mr. Jona," and I would get funny looks. After a while, I started introducing myself as "kamome no Jonasan no Jonasan" (Jonathan, as in Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a very famous book in Japan) or "resutoran no Jonasan no Jonasan" (Jonathan, as in "Jonathan's", a chain of "family" restaurants).

Even today, I still run into this problem.

Unrelated Japan Photo #5

Shimogamo Shrine, Kyoto (July 2006)

No Overtime Day

In the 1980s, the U.S. was trying to figure out how to compete with the Japanese. Rather than try to make American products better and more competitive, which should have been the natural reaction, the U.S. government tried to beat up on Japan and force them to do things less well. One of the things the U.S. frequently focused on was the Japanese work ethic. If the Japanese only worked less, the thinking went, they would have more leisure time and spend more money, driving up domestic demand for both Japanese and foreign goods, and making the Japanese less dependent on exports. Right.

I don't know if Canon was listening or not, but it did have a huge market for cameras and copiers in the U.S. and was probably very sensitive to "Japan bashing," as it came to be known. Coincidence or not, Canon tried to make its own little contribution to increased leisure time for its employees. Every Wednesday was "No zangyo day" ("no overtime day").

Every day, at 5:15 p.m., a chime rang at Canon to let everyone know that the official work day was over. On Wednesdays, however, the chime was followed with the announcement, "Today is no zangyo day."

There was no admonishment to leave the office and no managers came around telling people they should go home. More importantly, the managers kept on working, and as long as they were there, none of their subordinates were going home. It was also telling that No Overtime Day was on a Wednesday, rather than a Friday, when people might really take advantage of it.

No Overtime Day was purely for show. Not once did I see any Canon employee leave at 5:15 p.m. on No Overtime Day.

Oshikawa-san

I met Oshikawa Ken, my Japanese "dad," in 1991. Most gaijin who say they have a Japanese "family" usually mean their homestay family. I met my Japanese family at Canon.

Oshikawa-san was a middle-manager in the Internal Training Division, and pretty much every Canon employee knew him because he trained every new hire that came through the door. Oshikawa-san was short, chubby, balding, and wore coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes seem huge. He was a former kamikaze pilot (more on that in another post), Tokyo beat-cop, and most importantly, a Canon employee for more than 30 years. Canon recognized his special place at the company by keeping him on for 2 years beyond the mandatory retirement age of 63 and by appointing him manager of the Musashi-Nitta Dormitory. In true Canon fashion, he met his wife Chisako there. Oshikawa-san was a larger-than-life presence at Canon -- everyone's favorite uncle, who was always in the middle of whatever fun was going on.

According to my orientation at Harvard before leaving for Japan, one of my most important duties would be to give a proper self-introduction (jiko-shokai) on my first day. I arrived in Japan on a Friday and worked very hard over the weekend on my jiko-shokai, laboring intensively with a Japanese-English dictionary and my still-limited Japanese.

Like other points from the orientation, I misunderstood the point of the jiko-shokai as well. It needed only to be a brief introduction that told my new colleagues who I was and where I was from, but I treated the 30-odd assembled employees of the Internal Communications Division and the Internal Training Division to my whole life story to date. As I droned on, I could see some of the blue-uniformed women stifling yawns, and I tried to speed things up. But Oshikawa-san later told me that he had been touched by the obvious effort that I had made to make a speech in Japanese, and he liked me right away because of it. (I also later learned that at least one long, boring speech was an essential part of every Japanese gathering.)

One evening, there were plans for everyone in our office to go out after work. The closing chime rang at 5:15 pm, and while the younger workers didn't budge, Oshikawa-san and some of the other middle managers (the mado-giwa-zoku, or "ones who sit near the window") gathered in the corner meeting area and produced several bottles of beer from a small fridge.

Oshikawa-san suddenly bellowed across the room: Jonasan! Kotchi ni koi yo! Nome, nome! ("Jonathan, come over here! Drink, drink!) He waived at me with his palm facing me and his hand motioning towards the floor -- the Japanese way of waving someone over, which looks to an American as if they are waiving you away. I had intended to keep on working until it was time to leave like everyone around me, but because Oshikawa-san had never spoken to me before and was a manager, I figured I'd better go over. He sat me down and poured me some beer, and I drank with the older guys until 6:30, when it was time for the whole group to leave for the restaurant.

From there, a great friendship was born. When Oshikawa-san found out that, instead of returning to the US after my internship was over, I would be starting another job in Japan, he insisted that I come live at the Musashi-Nitta dorm. I initially turned him down, having arranged for a year-long homestay, but when the homestay became unbearable within a month, I contacted him and he immediately arranged everything with the powers that be at Canon. I was given one of the empty rooms across the hall from his family's apartment, where I lived until he retired from managing the dormitory a year later. Once or twice a month, both while I lived in the dormitory and afterwards, the Oshikawas invited me to dinner at their house. Shortly before I left Japan after three years, Oshikawa-san paid me the intense honor of telling me, Jonasan, omae wa uchi no musuko da yo ("Jonathan, you're our son").

Oshikawa-san died in 2002, a month after learning he had cancer. The family did not tell me until after the funeral because I was having a difficult time in Boston then and they did not want to trouble me. (So Japanese!) They knew I would have hopped on a plane right away had I known he was sick.

Oshikawa-san would have been happy to know that I married a Japanese woman and still return to Japan often. We are still close with the Oshikawa family, talk frequently with my "big sister" Keiko, and see them whenever we can. Keiko and her mother attended our wedding in Kyoto. I've visited Oshikawa-san's grave and helped wash it, and I always greet him at the family shrine whenever I visit the Oshikawas' apartment in Kawasaki. I only wish that he could have lived long enough to see his American "granddaughter," Emma, but I am sure he knows all about her.