Book Review: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Japan

Title: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Japan Before I Moved There: Practical Stuff 

Author: Steve Edwards

Publisher: Brilliant Crow

[Date, ISBN, and length: not shown in the e-book]

Quote: "[This book is] meant...to point you in the right direction; not a detailed list of how to do everything and who to contact or where to find them. Depending on where you are or end up in Japan, those details will be for you to find out."

This is a general, practical guide to living in a country that's only just gone full-bore, admitted socialist, rather than just dragging itself down with an appease-everybody model of "gradual progress in that direction, if that turns out to be the way people want to go," as in the US and UK. Japan has done that--but only recently, so although this book reflects a country newly stocked with angry, violent crooks, it still reflects a country where older people at least try to bring honor to their families, beat the competition by doing good work, and show courtesy to everyone (if only by leaving them alone). 

As an English teacher in Japan today, Edwards' experience has little in common with the one Elisabeth Bumiller described, in an out-of-print book about the year she spent observing the life of a volunteer selected for observation as being a good match for Bumiller in age, status, etc. Bumiller and her peer struggled with questions of etiquette: their contract called for Bumiller to observe and not help with any household task, however menial, so when it was obvious that her subject was overextending herself, would it be unbearably rude for Bumiller to help chop vegetables? (A highlight of the book that has stayed with me for more than 25 years: Bumiller sits in the kitchen, watching her peer chop veg, adjusting recording equipment, and dutifully asks the next quesiton on her list. "Do you believe Americans are lazy?" Hostess, chopping furiously, speaking blandly: "Some would say so.") Edwards describes business transactions in which nobody is bothering to try to act polite, or even honest, or even competitive any more. 

Some observers have always felt that a typical Japanese workplace atmosphere was cutthroat, with all the fuss about ethics and etiquette being the only thing that kept people from coming to blows. Edwards and his colleagues aren't in a position to see so much of that, though they do describe having to edge salesmen out the door by looming over them, outshouting them, but not physically touching the wretched pests. Modern Japanese business people do, however, stoop to all kinds of vulgar and disgraceful tricks for bamboozling, guilt-tripping, and even bullying people into paying for things they don't want and may not actually get. Gone are the days of trying to avoid actually saying "no." Today, Edwards says, it may be necessary to scream "NO!" Repeatedly, even.

It used to be obligatory for visitors to Japan to comment on the absence of the more artificial and sentimental forms of male-to-female chivalry in Japanese etiquette. Japanese men were not taught to rush ahead and hold doors open for women, and instead of automatically promoting all women one notch up a real or imagined hierarchy, Japanese husbands were free to promote themselves one notch above their wives. Language learners used always to be warned that men normally used the shorter forms of long Japanese words and phrases, except when speaking to older or superordinate men, but women were expected to use all the full-length forms. (Edwards reports that all language learners are now generally allowed to skip the elaborate keigo dialect; he does not mention whether those who still attempt the keigo or "polite, formal" words ever encounter any reduction of prejudice in socialist Japan.) Now, Edwards reports, on a more primal level chivalry can be observed: among his friends, women occasionally were able to talk their way out of displays of overt hostility where men had to be the bully or be the victim. (This included the high-pressure salesmen; apparently a TV service was notorious for sending out the most obnoxious salesmen, and one woman, Edwards says, was able to get rid of them by clumsily saying the Japanese equivalent of "I no...eat...television.") 

Another indicator of increasing economic insecurity is the reported attitude of Japanese people (on all levels of society) toward foreigners. Japan is an island nation and older, more rural, or more sheltered individuals have always been notoriously chilly toward foreigners, their body language making it clear that they saw Americans especially as big ugly clumsy slobs, but overt rudeness would have been a source of shame. "Begging ten thousand pardons, Sir, the room is reserved" has, Edwards reports, morphed into overt "No Foreigners" or "No Americans" policies even at banks. If his employers hadn't set up an account for him at one bank, he says, he never would have got one. The bank, and various landlords and other people with whom he had to do business, knew he was earning a decent salary on a legitimate job, but due to socialism they weren't dependent on individual customers' good will, and they just didn't like dealing with English teachers who did tacky American things like speaking English. (But what could he do, Edwards laments. Over his years in Japan he learned to understand the language on a basic level, but when he admitted understanding with a single "hai," he felt that the officials with whom he was dealing thought he'd be perfectly well able to speak Japanese if they just kept shouting at him in it. You always knew the delusion that everyone on Earth speaks your language if you speak it loudly and rudely enough has to be global, but the image of its occurrence in Japan...!) The process of applying for a license to drive even a motorbike in Japan seemed meant to keep exchange teachers paying application fees, taking road tests, and being flunked for no obvious reason. 

Not, of course, that Edwards and his colleagues found everyone in Japan to be prejudiced against them; as teachers they'd been invited to be there to serve a useful purpose, and some people actually liked them. Some of Edwards' co-workers married Japanese people. Some became legal, naturalized citizens of Japan. For those who wanted to get out, the primary reason was not the humidity nor the still only occasional crooks and bigots, but the lower standard of living offered by the Japanese version of Social Security, which still pensions off early retirees at what Edwards calculates as the equivalent of US$ 5,000 per year. Another of Edwards' tips for exchange teachers: If you fall in love with the place or the people, apply for permanent residency or citizenship early, before any traffic violations have been added to your social credit score. 

Japan has never been Paradise and Edwards documents a degree of cultural degeneration that may make some readers cry, but Japan has always had charm to spare. Even as its level of kawaii charm declines, Japan still has more people wanting to move in than people wanting to move out.