Foreign Exchanges

On my final day in Japan, I stood waiting at an intersection for about three minutes until the light turned green. It was five thirty on a Sunday morning. There were no cars, hardly even any people. To call it an intersection is a bit of an overstatement, since there really isn’t a cross street. But I waited, all the same.


Whoever said “rules are made to be broken” was not raised in Japan, at least not the Japan I have come to know in my short stay here. Rules of the road, other laws, even rules of basic moral conduct. So, for example, after spending the equivalent of about ten dollars trying to get a tiny (and worn looking) stuffed anime figure from one of those coin stealing machines that lure you in with the big claw that looks like it will actually grasp one of the thousands of toys piled below it, my son finally succeeded in snagging one for his sister. When he reached in to get it, he discovered another unclaimed stuffed figure, and left it there. Naturally, I reached over to grab it, which is when he looked horrified and shoved my arm away. “That would be stealing,” he told me, “and they just don’t do that here.”


Well I certainly don’t steal. Do I? I thought about the occasional extra candy bar I had taken from a vending machine over the years, feeling as if I had hit the jackpot when I reached in and found out the thing had malfunctioned and sent down two. Has it ever occurred to me to take the extra treat and return it to the person in charge of the particular machine? Not on your life, after all the times those damn machines have malfunctioned in the other direction, eating my quarters while I get to eat nothing. Will it occur to me now, now that I have experienced the wonderful feeling that washed over me when I returned the dirty little toy to the employee in the arcade full of money stealing machines? Not a chance. Unless, of course, I end up with some dirty little toy instead of a candy bar as my unexpected prize.

Then there are the unwritten rules, rules of conduct not to be found in any moral or legal code, rules that often defy logic. Like not crossing when there’s a red light. Even at five thirty in the morning when there are no cars and it’s not even a real intersection. Or like not even attempting to order off menu. The item is the item, and the picture shows exactly what it will look like, and whatever ingredients are in the picture are going to be on your plate, like it or not. Needless to say, dining in Japan with my daughter the vegetarian has been a bit of a challenge. Or like not making a face in Starbucks when the barrista realizes she gave you a vente intead of a grande and, instead of just turning the other cheek, takes the vente, spills it out, and pours a second, smaller cup of coffee. Because that is what you ordered. And modified orders are not allowed, whether you are the orderer or the order taker.

The rules can be infuriatingly arbitrary. In Himeji, when you ride an escalator at the train station, you stand on the right, making room for walkers and runners on the left. In Tokyo, you stand on the left, making room for the movers on the right. And then there’s the rule about being polite, which is probably why folks are so good about following the rules in the first place. If you are in Himeji and you are in a hurry to make your train and someone is blocking you because she is standing on the left, you say nothing. You stop dead behind her, but you don’t make a sound – no sighing, no exasperated breaths, not even so much as an “excuse me.” Certainly yelling “move your fat ass, fucker!” would be out of the question Not just because of the politeness thing, but because nobody even approaches being fat here; I have never seen so many tiny people in my life! Oh, and if you are one of my children, and mom is the one standing on the wrong side (of course I am; it's where all the elbow room is) the politeness rule does not apply.

So on our last evening in Japan – the evening before the morning on which I waited impatiently for the light at the non-intersection to turn green – my kids and I were quite shocked when we stepped into that same non-intersection and the two folks standing behind us yelled “NO! NO! NO!” Not just one “no;” three. Three loud ones. Almost knocked us over, which would not have happened otherwise since there were no cars in sight. I glanced back at them, possibly with a dirty look. I figured if they were going to break the politeness rule first, all bets were off. I took a closer look.

“Korean,” I whispered to my kids. “They’re Korean.” Okay, I may have been basing this on my own uneducated and baseless notion of how Koreans differ in appearance from the Japanese, but they had scared the living shit out of me. My son, who usually gets his knickers in a knot over racial stereotypes and other kinds of overgeneralizations, paused and listened for a moment.

“You’re right, they’re Korean.” I thought about asking him how he could possibly tell, since all Asian chatter sounds like the same brand of gibberish to me, but I thought better of it. Anyway, at least now it all made sense.

Damn foreigners.