Four Hundred Days Til Re-entry

Why do you have such a downer on living in Japan, UTR?

OK, OK - I know I go on about being a bit tired of it all and really I do generally quite like it here. A few people were a bit interested in my philosophical asides on Japanese culture, so I thought I would go for another. Pehaps think of this as a cautionary note for future visitors to these green and brown shores.

The facts:

We were on our way to buy M a new Nintendo DS lite prior to heading off seaking thrills, spills and automobills in the mythic land of Mie. We were on a smallish suburban road perhaps two minutes from the town centre.

The road we were on meets a rail-line for the Omi-tetsudo (the most expensive railway in the country). There was a guy in his big boxy van in front. He slows down almost to a stop, looks both ways and then off he goes. All of a sudden a copper appeared out from behind a tree and hares off after him blowing on his whistle. The guy was rumbled.

The supposition:

We are off into the realms of possibilities now, but I very strongly suspect that this guy has been collared for not stopping at the crossing. Though he stopped, looked both ways and then went, he has probably been copped on a technicality. I suspect that either his wheels were still rotating minutely or that he didn't stop for some proscribed ammount of time. So he obeyed the law in intent and did nothing too seriously wrong, but he got done on the letter of the law.

This kind of thing is not unusual. This is part of Japanese life training, a basic part of their social education. Where there is a protocol it gets stuck to. The japanese are great masters of methodology and process. This is what fuelled the economic miracle of the 80's and the subsequent failure to predict that the bubble would burst. So the cops here have a manual and that is good enough for them.

I don't really ever have problems with the police, save one time when my friend Rob and I accidentally wandered into a hostess bar and got hit by a huge bill that we weren't willing to pay without making our displeasure felt. "Right then," I said, "call them!"

The same thinking is also there in the banks, the post office, the town hall, the schools, the trains, the whole works. The Japanese have grown up with these little bits of bureaucratic nonesense and so that is their benchmark. This drives me nuts because it wastes my time (I have the patience of a hung-over Rotweiler) and it means I get sidetracked into these crusades "to change things for the better".

The Japanese mentality extends into everyday life. Particularly into conversation, which is somethign I enjoy extremely. To put it simply, the Japanese talk in exasketch - basic objects connected by lines. Wheras, in comparison, westerners talk in picassos and sculptures. This means that despite a strong command of the language I still struggle to express more elaborate ideas because the Japanese do not use them very often. Japanese culture, and in particular spoken language, is really simple. I make no judgement about which is best I am just telling it the way I see it here.

So, as a language teacher you can imagine that this causes some problems at work. As opposed to somewhere like France or Spain, just teaching the units that make the sentences and pointing out the differences with the native language is not enough. The concientious teacher has to teach the student how to construct a conversation or paragraph in English. General Macarthur, the American put in charge of Japan after the second world war, was famously quoted as describing the Japanese as "a nation of twelve year olds". While I think this sentiment is trash, I think I can see how he might have come to this conclusion having talked to several Japanese people by this stage.

So if you want to know why I am so badly itching to leave Japan (as distinguished from getting back to my family and the UK) it is becuase of the evil menace of bureaucracy, it's fingers in every pie, and the lack of a good chat now and again.

Of course this all boils down to my view of bureaucracy and what a good chat is.

posted by Between daisies @ 09:14