Assumptions that gaijin cannot speak Japanese (at all)

[Mike Cash]

But have you lived in Japan for several years and lived with a Japanese ?

Let's be fair, now. You haven't done that first bit yourself yet.

[mad pierrot]

What really troubles me are the types of questions Japanese people ask foreigners. As Mikawa Ossan said, I'm sure some of these dumb questions are directed at making conversation. Then again, you can make conversation about anything, why make it about foreigner's deficiencies?

So why the hell do they ask them? (A.K.A., Can you use chopsticks, speak Japanese, sit seiza, eat nattou, drink tea, whatever.)

I think the reason is cultural identity. It's all about securing their cultural ID. Think about it. All those questions have something to do with Japanese culture. From a very young age it's instilled that Japanese culture is very unique. They're raised being taught how special Japan is. And of course they're right. Japan is special. I think the problem is in emphasizing how special it is they go way overboard. (I've observed this from working at 14 schools over 2 years.) Quite frankly, many of the things that made Japan so unique 50 years ago don't apply anymore today, but they're still being taught them. In order to make Japan seem more special, alot of stereotypes about foreign countries are perpetuated. So you get kids in grade school being taught something like this:

In Japan people love sushi, and eat fish.
In America people eat hamburgers, and eat beef.

The problem is they go overboard and you get people thinking all Americans eat beef and never eat fish, let alone sushi. No joke. I don't know how many times I get a surprised reaction when I tell people I love fish and ate it everyday in America. The list goes on:

Japan has a rainy season. Japan is very humid.
So.....
America doesn't have a rainy season. America is very dry.

And so on and so forth.

Since they get this kind of thinking programmed into their brains at a very young age, they have all kind of bizarre expectations about foreigners. Worst still, I think some people actually get insulted when foreigners fail to live up to their expectations. The was a great story in Kansai Time Out a few years ago about a man living in Kobe. He had been living in Japan for over ten years and quite naturally spoke Japanese well. One day outside of a store, he was stopped by a Japanese man who wanted to speak English with him. He declined politely in Japanese. The Japanese man failed repeatedly attempting to draw him into converstion, getting angrier as time went on. The episode ended with the Japanese guy storming off, yelling at the foreigner to "go home" and such.

This sort of thing has nevered happened to me. However, I did have a similar experiences with co-workers. A fellow teacher liked to repeatedly ask me what "Japanese" things I could do. Yes, I know a little about tea ceremony. Yes, I've tried Judo and Aikido. Yes, I know about the legend of Yoshitsune, etc, etc. He would come up with a different question everyday. Every time I answered "yes," he would walk away disappointedly. When I finally answered "no" to one of his questions, he smiled broadly and annouced it to the entire room. I'm not making this up.

In a nutshell, I disagree with this line of thinking.

Because for every one good Japanese speaker I meet, I come across fifty who struggle to even make basic conversation. And that includes people who have been here for several years.

Why? I agree there are quite a few people who come to Japan not being able to speak Japanese and never bother to learn. But, from my two years in the JET programme, my time with ECC and with private students, and my time at Kansai University, and with friends and family who have come to visit me, I have found gaijin overwhelmingly able to use chopsticks, eat raw fish, etc. Even my grouchy old obasan from the Mid-West could eat nattou. Which is why I scoff whenever a Japanese person tells me it's "rare" that a foreigner can eat sushi....

In sum, I think their own warped perceptions about Japan that color their behavior.


Damn that was long.

[Maciamo]

I completely agree and emphatize with everything you said, Mad Pierrot.

The problem is they go overboard and you get people thinking all Americans eat beef and never eat fish, let alone sushi. No joke. I don't know how many times I get a surprised reaction when I tell people I love fish and ate it everyday in America. The list goes on:

Yesterday again, as I told one of the students that I had been to Shanghai, he asked me what kind of food people ate there (typical question from a Japanese) and when I told him that there were, among others, Japanese restaurants, including sushi, his reaction was "But the Chinese don't like raw fish. I saw on TV that the Chinese never eat raw fish". (sic !) And he seemed really confused and in disbelief that there could indeed be sushi restaurants in a 13-million people metropolis like Shanghai, just across the sea from Japan.

I come across this kind of heavily stereotypical reactions, I lie not, several times a week. Sometimes to make them understand, I have to tell them things like "but don't Japanese people also eat Chinese, French, Italian or American food ?", "Isn't it true that some Japanese people do not like sushi or natto ?", "Out of 1.3 billion Chinese, why is it surprising that some people may like sushi ?". I think that people who haven't lived in Japan and do not meet a variety of Japanese people all the time (as language teachers do), probably cannot imagine how widespread this phenomenon is. It's not something you hear once in a while; it's a national phenomenon caused by the education system, as Mad Pierrot as explained so well.

This sort of thing has nevered happened to me. However, I did have a similar experiences with co-workers. A fellow teacher liked to repeatedly ask me what "Japanese" things I could do. Yes, I know a little about tea ceremony. Yes, I've tried Judo and Aikido. Yes, I know about the legend of Yoshitsune, etc, etc. He would come up with a different question everyday. Every time I answered "yes," he would walk away disappointedly. When I finally answered "no" to one of his questions, he smiled broadly and annouced it to the entire room. I'm not making this up.

Everytime I meet my mother-in-law's boyfriend, it's like that.

The last time we went to the restaurant together (with the family), he again tried to find things that I couldn't do like the Japanese, didn't know about Japan or that didn't exist in Europe. It was a kaiseki restaurant, and at the end of the meal came a strange kind of tiny potato (about the size of a blueberry). He asked me whether I knew this or if we had this in Europe. I answered that I had never seen that before to his utter rejoicement. But then my wife and her mother also said that they also didn't know such a potato existed !

But, from my two years in the JET programme, my time with ECC and with private students, and my time at Kansai University, and with friends and family who have come to visit me, I have found gaijin overwhelmingly able to use chopsticks, eat raw fish, etc. Even my grouchy old obasan from the Mid-West could eat nattou. Which is why I scoff whenever a Japanese person tells me it's "rare" that a foreigner can eat sushi....

I usually illustrate this to my Japanese acquaintances (almost all of them on the topic of "sushi and natto", as I can't remembered not being asked about it by someone) by giving them the statistics from JREF (this poll and that one, with respectively 43% and 55% of the respondants choosing sushi as their favourite Japanese dish). Maybe I should carry a print of the polls all the time with me.


EDIT : as I was watching the weather forecast on NHK 10 min ago, they exceptionally showed the weather for the world. It only lasted 3 seconds though. I was shocked to hear that the guy just said "yo-roppa wa hare", as it was possible to have the same weather all over Europe (what's more, the map showed clouds almost everywhere). This, I think, summarise well the Japanese way of seeing the rest of the world as a series of homogenous continent. The way they think that all Europeans are alike, they don't even make an effort to distinguish the main regions for the weather. If they had little time to review the world's weather on BBC or CNN, they would say something like "15 degree and cloudy in London, 21 degree and sunny in New York..." giving city names, but never a whole continent as it's just senseless.

Indeed, I realised that the weather was always only about Japan, contrarily to other Asian countries, where they normally show the weather for all East Asia too (e.g. on China's CCTV). They could at least show the weather for Korea and China, as thousands of Japanese business people and tourists fly there everyday. They just don't. Nice proof of ethno-centrism.

[Mikawa Ossan]

Thank you Mad Pierrot for your thoughts! I'll try to respond in the next day or so. (If you can't tell, I love this topic!)

Everytime they say that (or any other pseudo-compliment), I am at a loss to what to respond.

Well, I don't know what makes you comfortable, but I usually make a joke about how I've forgotten how to use a knife and fork. (Which is a lie, by the way. I've NEVER known how to properly use them. ) It usually gets a good reaction.

As far as the conversations that can come, let me try to remember some of my own...
How I first learned how to use them. Leading to talking about study-abroad.
How Japanese youth can't seem to use chopsticks "properly", leading to general talk of the youth.
How I was too stubborn to listen to my parents as a child, so now I still hold knives and forks like a 3 year old child.
What Japanese restaurants are like in the USA.
Why do we call them "chopsticks" in English anyway?
(The post I made some time ago about) how sushi is not "really supposed" to be eaten by chopsticks.
The difference among Japanese, Korean, and Chinese chopsticks.
I'm sure there's more.

Reference is made to my chopstick ability less and less as time moves on. Every so often, I'll be eating with someone, and after a while they'll suddenly seem to notice. It's kind of like, "Oh yeah, that's right, you're a foreigner..." At any rate, I've noticed that once it's been used, it rarely if ever gets recycled on a later date as a conversation starter. Truly, I think it's not important enough to get offended over.

For the "can you eat sushi" question, on the rare instances I get that, I always like to say how popular sushi actually is among certain sections of the US population.

For the "does your country have 4 seasons" question...I'm sure I've been asked before, but I honestly can't think of any instances at the moment.

But seriously, why not ask these questions, even if they are meaningless? In English, we often ask, "how are you?" even when we don't REALLY want to know. We ask other equally meaningless questions on numerous occasions. It's just a part of human interaction. Japanese do it among themselves all the time, too. I'm sure you'll agree with me on that. Why is it any worse when they do the same thing to us?

This is hard for me to argue, because I really honestly don't think it's important enough to get upset about. Even though I sometimes used to get upset, somehow, it all just "bounces off of me" nowadays.

Do you mean that the Japanese feel above the law and social conventions because they believe in universal ethics ?

No, I mean that I think it's silly point to try to make. To put it more bluntly, are you trying to imply that your sense of morality is superior to general Japanese morality just because in your opinion your own morality ranks "higher" on some arbitrary scale that (seems to me) is based entirely on a Western mind-set? It was my way of trying to defuse the indignation I felt at your remarks. I'm sorry I wasn't more direct. I'll stop here.

They care so much about not going astray from the well-harmonised social conventions that they often have a hard time expressing what they really think...

I can see how you think this, but it's not my experience. I don't it any different in essence from life where I come from originally. There's something call the "Minnesota nice" that's strikingly similar to the "honne/tatemae" dichotomy, at least in my mind. Where I come from, it's generally understood that there are times when you just don't say what you really think because it's just not worth the consequences. I see a lot of the same reasoning in Japan.

In the Japanese society, there are fixed expressions for almost every social situation, and almost everyone uses exactly in the same situation...

I'm sorry, I don't see the problem. As far as the "routine of conventions" being susceptible to change is concerned, I agree with you in essence, but I don't think we should hope to see it in our lifetimes. Also, I feel that although we can and do influence this change ever so slightly in our daily interactions, I think that it is wrong for any of us to try to impose our own personal beliefs on another culture as a whole. For any of us to think that our ideas are inherently better than the Japanese is extremely egocentric. On a smaller scale, you and I are both foreigners, but we have difference in opinions, too. For example, the right to vote. I believe in universal human rights, too, but I apply them differently than you. Who's to say who's right? You? Why are you more qualified than me? Me? Why am I more qualified than you?

Like Mad Pierrot said, typical Japanese teachers will tell pupils exactly the same thing about foreigners, even if they should know better from their personal experience.

So your beef is with the teachers, and not the Japanese as a whole then, right? I find it hard to logically get upset with someone who's merely confirming whether what they've been taught is true or not. This is in reference to the first point I addressed in this post.

The 3 examples you listed are interesting.

-4 seasons. I don't think that it's so much that children are taught that Japan is unique (i.e. the only place in the world where this happens) in this respect, but rather that not every place on Earth has 4 four distinct seasons, so it's one thing (of several) that makes Japan special.

-Westerners=English
I think it's more of a "everyone everywhere learns English at least to a limited extent" kind of thing. As far as Westerners are concerned, I would say that as the overwhelming majority of us here in Japan seem to be able to speak English, I think it's very reasonable to come to this conclusion and gloss over the facts a little.

-blood type
This struck me as funny because just last week my co-workers were trying to convince me that the majority of Americans had in fact type A blood as I do. That was the first time I'd heard of that, so I can't comment further.

It is very possible to get angry because someone you discuss with won't argue logically (it is typically the case of blinded religious believers).

I'll grant you this, but is it more logical to get angry or to stop trying to argue with someone who won't listen to you anyway?

So I really don't think that my pronuciation was the issue when the many Japanese who "froze" when I talked to them.

Well, respectfully, I'm not convinced. However,it may well be that your pronunciation had nothing to do with anything. How about your intonation? Your manner of speach? Do you use words and phrases that are not common? How about your body language? Something about the way you dress? There are any number of possible contributing factors.

I also want to say that it happens from time to time that people do not look surprised that I speak Japanese. Sometimes they do not look surprise but still try to talk back in English to me, until they see that communication is easier in Japanese.

Yes, but understand that the people I mentioned in my previous post didn't even bother trying to use English. Not a single word.

I think there's something else going on there, and I'm truly curious as to what it is. Maybe I'm a freak of nature in my experiences, but I have had my share of exeriences similar to yours. I think you might find that the less you try to mould Japan into your ideal, the less the Japanese will treat you as a foreigner. This is my theory.

I just looked at the Post Preview...wow, long!