We have yet to eat a bad meal here. Our choices have run the gamut -- from Japanese to Chinese to Mexican to Spanish to Italian to Nepalese to Indian -- not to mention all the baked goods and ice cream. There have been a few service snafus which seem to have nothing to do with language barriers (my son is sufficiently fluent to articulate accurate orders) and everything to do with cultural differences. Like yesterday, when the item I ordered for lunch was, as it turned out, only available for dinner. Apparently, when our waiter discovered this, he chose not to make waves, just resigned himself to the fact that I would not be eating lunch. Don't even get me started on the shaved ice and noodles incident. Let's just say if my my son had not been there to remind me to be polite, a Japanese waitress at the top of a sacred temple mountain might have been wearing a syrupy ice cap on her head. A Shinto temple does nothing to ward off a Jewish mother's unholy thoughts.
We have discovered it is often helpful to a have a native Japanese person with us at meals, someone who can reassure the staff that though we look like typically American boors, we are essentially decent people and worthy of solicitous service. My son brought a Japanese friend last night to the Indian restaurant last night, so we had our buffer. Folks from the Asian sub-continent living in the Far East are generally less suspicious of us than the Japanese natives seem to be, but still, our guest helped us to let down our guard. And, much to our delight, she had the capacity to be as boorish and rude as we can be, which gave us a pretty wide berth. The food was great, and dinner was a blast.
Visiting Japan can be a lot trickier than popping into your average European country. Yes, there's more than enough preconception about the "ugly American" to go around the world over, but when East meets West it all escalates. We look different. Different in a far more fundamental way than the way I'd look different standing next to a six foot tall blond beauty in Iceland. Babies and young children stare at us, our Caucasian features not something they see every day. We behave differently. We hug instead of bow. We complain when something bothers us. We put our feet up on coffee tables, our elbows on dinner tables. The differences are superficial, but the superficial is often what gets noticed the most.
I have found that the discomfort and the suspicion can be mutual, no matter how unwarranted. And it often is, in fact, unwarranted. In my two visits to Japan, I have spent time with more than a few of my son's Japanese friends, and their friends, and so on. Like our dinner guest last night, they have been, as a rule -- after some initial awkwardness -- as goofy and flawed and as possessed of unique personalities as anybody. Maybe not as impolite, but I suppose that's not such a bad thing. It is my hope that they see the uniqueness in us as well. Lord knows my children would not want the Japanese thinking they have anything in common with me.
As we left the Indian restaurant last night, our waiter invited us each to ring a giant bell hanging over the bar. It would bring us good luck, he told us, something to do with the Hindu elephant faced deity Ganesh. I'm all about good luck, and I'll take it wherever I can get it. And I'm a yogini, which theoretically makes me all about Ganesh. I wheeled back and gave the heavy bell a good whack. The chiming seemed endless; it sounded like a royal baby had just been born or something. My children and our dinner guest were far more gentle and polite. I didn't really get that. If ringing the bell brings you luck, why not ring the crap out of it?
I apologized for offending, but I really didn't mean it. I have a feeling Ganesh, protector and supreme guard against obstacles, heard me loud and clear. There was no cultural divide, no suspicion, no misunderstanding. When I rang the crap out of that bell, there was nothing lost in translation.
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