Simply shocking

Some of my friends who live in Japan tell me that when they first arrived, the culture shock was terrible. Some of them even became ill from the stress of it. I haven’t experienced anything like that. In fact, I had seen so many Japanese movies and TV shows that the landscape, the customs and rituals, even little things like the way the light fixtures look, all seemed familiar to me.

 Well, I still don’t feel shocked by the culture. But I do feel a little out of place.

Back home, I knew how to be serious, funny, sarcastic, cheerful, helpful, sassy, friendly, irascible, and any number of other things. Here, I’m never sure how I’m acting. I might think I’m being funny but actually I'm coming across as incoherent. I might think I’m being polite but to other people I seem rude. Some of this is due to the language change. A response that would come easily to mind in America takes a while to formulate in Japan, not because I have to translate a sentence in my head, but because I have to say something slightly different. For example, if someone brings you a cup of tea or coffee in America, you would say "Thanks!" and be done with it. But in Japan you might say "Thanks!" or you might say "Sumimasen!" which means something like, "Sorry for the inconvenience (and also, I'm grateful)." Another difficulty is that Japanese people can be very indirect. Let me give you an example.

The other day, it was raining. I went to the nearby Apita mall to buy some groceries. Now, usually at grocery stores or convenience stores, or really, any kind of store, there is a small stand outside the door for you to leave your umbrella. This is because Japanese people never bring their umbrellas inside. Umbrellas drip water on the floor and that is terrible. If it is acceptable to bring the umbrella into the store, they provide you with a long, thin bag to contain your umbrella and the offensive water droplets. But for some reason, at Apita on this particular day, they didn’t have any umbrella stands or plastic bags waiting for me at the door. Maybe it wasn’t raining hard enough, or maybe I was supposed to run from my car to the door without an umbrella, like everyone else. Whatever the case, I had my umbrella, and there wasn’t a place to leave it, so I brought it in the store with me.

The universe didn’t implode. Instead, when I got to the register, the checkout lady, who usually follows the standard script of “That’ll be 840 yen,” asked me politely, “Was it raining outside?”

“Yup,” I said. “Still raining.”

In Japan, this is how you give feedback. This is how you tell someone, “You’re doing something weird.” You make polite conversation about something tangentially related. If you want to give more direct feedback, you do it through a third party to soften the blow. I come from a place where people are very direct with each other. Sometimes complete strangers will give you unsolicited advice because they are God’s gift to mankind and you should really know what they think. To go from that to a place where I almost never get any feedback is very disconcerting.

In Japanese, there is a phrase, “空気よめない (kuuki yomenai).” Literally, it means, “Can’t read the air.” You use it to describe a person who can’t pick up on social cues and consequently blunders through life making other people angry and uncomfortable. In a world where most people are pretty indirect, reading the air is an important skill. If you can't do it, you force the people around you to either put up with your whacky behavior or else speak their mind, neither of which they want to do. 

I think I can read maybe 75% of the air particles in Japan. Figuring out how to respond is a little more difficult.