At first, everything about day-to-day life in Japan was fresh and new, something different and interesting to be learned and absorbed. As the year wore on, however, things that at first seemed inconsequential gradually became focal points of irritation and frustration in my life. They were trivial bits of life that were like stones rubbing in my shoes, small bumps in the beginning but persistently rubbing at me until they turned my skin into irritable blisters. This is not to say that Japan is inherently intolerable due to these irritations, but what is life if not full of them? And what is a life overseas, if not full of new and different irritations with which to regale family and friends back home?
SLURPING
It is said that a major difference in manners between Japan and many other nations is the accepted ways in which one can appreciate the tastiness of food. Specifically, in Japan, it is considered not only polite but a compliment to the chef to slurp one's food - to enjoy it with the sense of texture as well as taste and smell. Foreign businessmen are warned not to cringe when their hosts take them to a noodle shop, as they are certain to hear loud slurping of noodles resonating up and down the bar. On the surface, this really sounded like a nice idea to me - why not appreciate our sensual pleasures with every sense? I am a great eater, and I appreciate food that varies in texture, smell, taste, presentation. I like to use all of my senses.
I would happily trade this purported appreciation for food and drink, though, to simply get people to quit slurping their tea. Bear with me. Slurping beverages, I have heard several people say while in Japan, enhances the ability to appreciate the taste and smell as one drinks. Slurping one's tea should enhance the fresh taste and scent of new tea leaves, the perfect temperature, the pure water - the calming and refreshing experience of sitting to appreciate a steaming cup of green tea.
Now, imagine this moment being broken by loud, obnoxious slurping. Pretty jarring, isn't it?
And now, imagine the real reason why I have had enough slurping to last the rest of my life - picture a hushed office, the teachers' room at a high school. Roughly half of the teachers and staff are left in the office, while the rest are off teaching classes. The only noises are one or two quiet conversations, the vice principal talking on the phone, and the turning of a page. A soft breeze is gently flowing in from the open windows on the courtyard. Then, it begins: from the far corner of the room, loud, slow slurping. Another slurp, from a different part of the room. As more teachers retrieve their tea or coffee from the kitchenette, the mix of slurps rises to a chorus, a harmony of tea appreciation.
This is not the way the slurping is meant, I think to myself. The slurping is for appreciating something special, some gourmet food or an expensive tea. Does one really need to have "extra appreciation" of instant coffee and $2/bag tea from the grocery store?
The slurping has finally died down, and I can relax again. I go back to my attempts to get work done. And then, there it is - the person next to me, his cup of cold coffee standing next to his open laptop. He reaches for it, picks it up so that it remains perfectly level with the tabletop as he draws it to his lips. He gets ready, and then - a real feat - without even actually ingesting any of the liquid, he purses his lips at the rim of the coffee cup and inhales carefully, for the loudest SLURP of all.
FISHY
I often took a short walk through my neighborhood in the evening, whether to run errands, clear my head, or enjoy the smell of newly budding flowers. A path ran behind my apartment building, between the houses, parallel to the main road through the town. Unlike the main road, the trail is free of traffic, and so I often took this quieter route. In the evening, one saw old men and women on evening strolls, high school students biking home, middle-aged housewives returning with armfuls of groceries, and children racing each other down the path. Insects chirped in the trees, a breeze rattled the flowers and twigs against fences. I heard cooking noises from the houses lining the path; their windows were all shaded, with old-fashioned wooden shutters and blinds, from the eyes of passerby, but the windows were open in the kitchen to let in a breeze. Evening sounds - television, talking on the phone, the rattle of dishes - wafted out from the homes.
Something else always wafted out, too, and I could hardly restrain myself from holding my nose on some evenings as I biked down the path to the grocery store. Each and every house - without variation, it seemed - was cooking fish. These families did not cook just any fish, and it certainly was not the delicious-smelling fish fry that always made my stomach rumble at home. No, it was smelly fish, the fishiest fish I could possibly imagine. Think about how salmon smells when being cooked - strong, pungent, and if you don't like salmon, nearly intolerable in an enclosed area. Now picture an entire neighborhood absolutely saturated with this kind of odor.
The fishy smell was not limited to the cooking scents in my neighborhood in the evening. A coworker that sat next to me in the teachers' room always brought the same lunch every day: rice, a few vegetables, and some kind of fish, all topped off with a pickled plum. I had not thought much about this until one day when he opened his lunch, got ready to eat, and was distracted by some students needing help with a project. This was on a half-day, so the students remained in school to work and study and meet with clubs, but there were no classes. Thus, the teacher was gone for over an hour with these students, and his lunch stayed there, open, for me to study.
I had been eating my own lunch at this point, but stopped when he opened his. I could not continue; my appetite had completely left me, and what remained was only a queasy feeling. Did he have fish heads in his lunch? Some beef tongue perhaps? No, these things would have been tolerable. They would not have had the utterly fishy stench that this bright orange grilled fish in his lunchbox did. He hadn't even heated up these leftovers - it stank like fish all on its own, infiltrating our entire area with the odor all with its own inherent power of smelliness.
This is not to even touch on the fact that nearly everything in Japan is made with fish broth or sprinkled liberally in dried fish flakes, even if it is not ostensibly a seafood dish. The pervasiveness of fish in the cuisine of Japan ensures that no matter where one goes to eat, the likelihood of at least a faint fish smell is extremely high. From organic nouveau cuisine to Italian fusion to street stands to the grocery store, one cannot escape it.
Japan is fishy.
(Aside: I realize that much of this "irritation" has to do with fish smell being one of the only things in the world I really can't stand. I can handle a lot, but fish smell is not one of those things. Therefore, on extra-cranky days, this basic aspect of Japanese culture ensured that I was trapped there in my own private fishy hell. As you can see, I had a great deal of free time to build up my seething resentment over it.)
MOTHBALLS
In spring, a strange smell suddenly penetrated the air of my office. Confused, I looked around, trying to spot some new addition to the room that could explain the difference in everyday air scent. It came to me suddenly: the men's jackets were all different. Gone were the heavy tweed and wool blazers of winter, when the heat in the office kept the room barely above freezing and the classrooms themselves had no heat at all. Here, in all their glory, were the spring blazers - thinner cheap material, fake brass buttons, all navy blue and gray and sometimes light green. They did not match the pants, and sometimes they did not match the shirts either. But on one appointed "spring" day, all of the men in Japan somehow knew to get their spring blazers out of storage and put them on.
In light of this, I would like to make a general broadcast to all Japanese men, everywhere. It is this: please, for the love of god, stop with the mothballs. Or at least have the decency to air out your clothes before wearing them, after you've plucked them directly from the tub of mothballs you must keep in your house. The stench of mothballs was overpowering in my office for weeks after that "it's spring now" day. I began to wonder if I would be embalmed where I sat, slowly breathing in more and more of the preservative chemicals every day. If it were only one man, I may never have even noticed that he'd kept all of his clothes in mothballs for the past four months; even several, we could all probably handle without complaint. But soak sixty men in strong mothballs and turn them loose on an enclosed office - and realize that every office in Japan is like this on the agreed-upon "spring" day - and we have a bit of an issue.
Since that spring, I have been entirely safe in the knowledge that - no matter what else happens in my life - I am certain to never harbor a moth infestation on my person. My lungs are still lined with mothball-powder to this very day. Thank you, men of Japan, for thinking of others' safety and comfort when you exposed them to your mothball smell for days, weeks, months. We could all be covered in flesh-eating moths now if it weren't for your foresight and generosity. Instead, we will rest assured that we are safe because we, too, now reek of mothballs.
SUGOI!
I thought I had escaped it when I took a vacation to the hinterlands of Hawai'i at Christmas; rather than be subjected to the illusion that I was still in Japan, in the more touristy spots, I decided that I needed a serious break from all things Japanese. I went to the island of Kaua'i and there, almost to my surprise, found absolutely no Japanese tourists. Everyone was American. Yes, most everyone was still a tourist, but I didn't see any Japanese fashion, I didn't see any mullets dyed orange, I didn't hear any muttering of standard expressions of surprise and delight.
Then, standing in a spot far off the main road to appreciate a tall waterfall, I heard it: "SUGOI! AA, SUGOI!"
This word, meaning "cool" or "awesome" or "great" (and also used adverbially, either "sugoku" or the gramatically-incorrect "sugoi" popular among young people, to mean "very"), is not so bad at first contact. In fact, it's easily learned and is so common that it makes Japanese seem much more understandable to the beginner who has just moved to the country. "Hey," one thinks, "I know that word, and I hear it all the time! I must be getting better." Smugly, one enjoys using the word around one's students, reveling in their shrieks of surprise and delight that the foreign teacher can call everything "cool."
Then, a month into using and hearing "sugoi" day in and day out, it begins to grate. One begins to wonder if Japanese does, after all, have any other words to describe something good. For such a complex and beautiful culture, it is awfully simplistic in how it appreciates good or clever concepts. Everything - from great feats of bravery to hair color, one's height to fireworks to a new cell phone, Mt. Fuji and a space shuttle - all of this is grouped under the single concept of SUGOI. Grand concepts, terrifying natural phenomena, and cute plastic items - do these need to share the same adjective?
Perhaps I'm being overly critical, but using a variety of adjectives for different concepts - and sparing me from ever hearing that word again - now that would be really, sugoku SUGOI.
EHHHH-TOH, NE.
Japanese, just like English, has its own varied lexicon of hesitation noises. For the uninitiated, these are things like "um", "hmmm", "welllll", "y'know", "like", and so on. They are what we unconsciously mutter when searching for other words, the words we are supposed to excise from our vocabularies during interviews and speeches and first dates.
To be perfectly honest, I love Japanese hesitation noises. They never felt unnatural to me as we were forced to use them rather than their English counterparts in language classes; they roll off the tongue in a distinct and delightful way.
They were never grating, that is, until I was subjected to the particularly irritating ways in which they can be used. Of course, English can be used this way too; it is not simply a problem of language. It is rather a problem of certain coworkers talking under their breath all day.
Specifically, one coworker who sat next to me used an unreasonable level of hesitation noises in his daily life. When he was not teaching, he sat at his desk and practiced his English reading and listening skills, mostly by reading newspaper articles and listening to news broadcasts. He read the articles under his breath, making exaggerated sighs and "hmmmmmm"ing sounds while doing so. Just when I thought I had managed to concentrate, he would begin hissing some other noise through pursed lips. This was not so bad, though, compared with his loud internal conversations that seemed to be necessary each time he stood up from his desk or prepared for what he would do next.
"sate TO!" (literally, "and NEXT!")
"sate TO, NAni o suru KA!" ("and next, WHAT am I going to DO!")
"eeeehto!" ("UM!")
"sore TO!" ("and THIS!" when stacking books and picking up his chalk)
Never had I met someone who so needed to accentuate his every move with staccato punctuation, random phrases and sounds. What used to be my favorite things about the language slowly transformed into fingernails on a chalkboard. To this day, every time a student answering a question, a teacher making an announcement at the morning meeting, or even a guest on a TV show hesitates - and invariably makes a long, drawn-out hesitation noise - I can't help but cringe.
KOSH KOSH KOSH
Cicadas - as well as numerous other large and hardy insects - might as well be the official bird of Kyushu. Just like Florida with its palmetto bugs, Kyushu is a hot, humid place that presents the perfect conditions for cicadas, or semi, to grow inches long, inches thick, with exoskeletons that look like they could armor a tank. They don't just cling onto trees and hum, like they did in my native New York - no, these bugs fly. You haven't lived until you've sat outside your apartment building, looked up into the two scrawny trees behind you, and seen dozens of three-inch cicadas flying back and forth between the trees like birds.
I'd venture to say they must make an annoying noise when they fly, too, but I can't hear it over the din of their belly-rubbing.
I once had a friend insist that cicadas "chirp," but I will still maintain that they scream. Any Kyushu native will probably not contest this point with me. After July, when they had come out in full force for the year, I had to move my alarm clock directly next to my ear. Why? I'd overslept a few days when their noise drowned out my alarm. I never heard the alarm, but I did always wake up with my ears ringing and my skin feeling vaguely fuzzy. I always blamed it on the vibrations the cicadas must be sending through the air.
One night, I was watching TV in my living room with the lights off when I heard a particularly loud bug screaming. I turned the lights on only to find the thing clinging to my screen door - all three inches of it trembling with the force of its yell. I had to get a stick to push it off. This is no place to find your mate, buddy. The only insects in my apartment were giant spiders.
Despite the fact that my ears rang for months, and my family would ask me "Oh my god, what's that noise?" when they called on weekend mornings and the bugs were at top volume, despite the cicadas sometimes coming inside with a free ride on my laundry - somehow, I still don't mind them. I wasn't to the point of my friends, who would loudly curse the insects' existence on a daily basis, and mimic their screams in frustration: KOSH KOSH KOSH. I didn't scream at the bugs to shut up at 2 am from my balcony. But I also can't pretend I miss their numbing buzz and I have to admit I prefer flying creatures that large to have feathers rather than antennae.
NOISE POLLUTION
Japan is supposed to be a quiet, orderly nation, filled with calm souls going about their work - perhaps even while walking in file. It wouldn't be out-of-place in our picture of it. Businessmen in suits, all alike, marching down to work, and schoolchildren doing the same. With all of the emphasis on being orderly and on the Zen calm and purity of traditional Japanese culture, one might imagine that the picture of Japan be accompanied only by silence, or maybe some plucking of koto strings.
One of the things that is least likely to come to mind, certainly, would be a high level of noice (and, let's face it, air) pollution. It's not just any noise pollution - cars, trains, airplanes, construction equipment, motorcycles, all of this seems like par for the course in a developed nation. The noise pollution of Japan is much more insidious: it's friendly and often it's musical. It's over the PA system.
My first exposure to the insane level of noise in Japan was in my own apartment. It was my first day there, and the junior high school directly behind my building had been making announcements for its after-school clubs. I could even hear the click of the outdoor PA system as it turned on, and then I was shocked by the loudest announcement I'd ever heard: "Mrs. So-and-So! You're needed in the gym! Kendo club meets at 4:00! To repeat: Mrs. So-and-So!" and so on. The announcement was preceded and followed by a loud mechanical beeping noise - was it meant to be a song? I was amazed at this and dismissed it as a special occasion. Surely the nation could not conduct its daily business by screaming into outdoor PA systems.
I was wrong.
Over the course of the year, I had learned to identify many sources of noise pollution - the junior high school that turned up the PA system so loud that I was woken up at 7 am on weekends and couldn't hear people on the other end of the phone while the announcements were on; the same song played over the PA each day at "cleaning time" at my school; the irritatingly chirpy bus announcement voice that tells me that the "stop is coming up soon! be careful! be prepared to stop! the stop is now! be careful!"; the trucks that circled my neighborhood for various reasons, advertising political candidates or just selling roasted sweet potatoes. There was the taped announcement played at full volume in stores - "Welcome! Welcome!" - and there was the mysterious van employed by a local day care. It was covered in cartoon drawings of children and had the day care name painted on the side, and was always driven by a surly guy about my age. And it played - over and over - a shrill, beepy children's song at top volume from the megaphone attached to the top. Why? There was never an explanation. It certainly explained the driver's attitude, though.
Despite this constant level of extreme - and often very irritating and repetitive - noise, I found that the people of Japan are, as expected, very quiet. Even as the bus announcement screamed out of the speakers, I could never eavesdrop on the cell phone conversation in the next seat over no matter how hard I tried. The loudest I ever heard anyone speak on public transit was at a normal "indoor voice" volume, and that was a group of people who were red-faced drunk, fresh out of a baseball game. It was jarring, incongruous, to have a Japanese person for once be louder than myself and my friends.
To be fair, I'm sure that with our unexpected and spontaneous talking and laughing on the bus, my friends and I made an awful lot of noise pollution for the Japanese as well. Somehow the repetitive messages are eventually tuned out - even by myself - but the sharp intrusion of conversation may have been the subject of any number of irritated text messages sent by tired commuters, seething in silence.
Still, when I wake up on a Saturday morning at 7:00 am after a late night, my body conditioned to wake up early after years of doing so, I can at least stretch and yawn and relax. I am safe in the knowledge that the moment I begin to fall back asleep, I will most likely not be jarred back out of my rest by the PA system: "The 18th Annual Sports Day will begin in one hour! I repeat....!"
MAYBE... IT'S TOO DIFFICULT. MAYBE.
Two phrases I heard much more often than I'd have liked to were innocuous, words that I'd never spent time thinking about before living in Japan. It would never have occurred to me to begin a sentence with "maybe" with the same tone of voice that I used when starting out with "however" or "on the other hand." Maybe, I'll go to the store. Maybe, it's too expensive. Maybe, she'll come to the party. Maybe maybe.
I chalk this misuse of the word up to common mistranslation; it took half a year for me to figure it out, but eventually I'd had enough of sentences being started with "maybe" and had come to feel like it was instigated by a conspiracy of people who knew how much it annoyed me. I finally found the presence of mind to call out a Japanese-speaking coworker when he began a sentence in this way, and ask him why he did it. I had just told him that I had a prior commitment and absolutely couldn't make it to the English teacher party in two days that he had just decided to inform me of. In response to this, he said carefully, "Maybe, you won't be able to come." Now, I tried throughout the year to remain very polite and uncritical of my Japanese coworkers, but on that day, it really was the last straw. I corrected him shortly. "No. I can't come. And by the way, are you aware of the specific meaning of what you just said?" I may have worded this more politely, or I may not have. That word makes my blood boil.
A short discussion later, I was enlightened on the Japanese translation of the word; according to my coworker - who had amazingly good and fluent English, I might add - it was a word that means "probably." I quickly drew a diagram to show that there is a spectrum of certainty on which "maybe" only falls halfway, while "probably" is most of the way to "yes." He seemed surprised, and we consulted the dictionary that our classes used to confirm that it was giving the wrong definition. What do you think it said in the dictionary? It gave the correct Japanese equivalent, along with a diagram of the varying degrees of certainty. Apparently, the dictionary's authors had read my mind and anticipated this problem, or maybe they were just as fed up with misuse of the word as I was.
You'd think that our discussion would curb my coworker's brazen misuse of the word, but no, he went right back to saying it. I suppose it's too hard to unlearn years of mistranslation that quickly, or perhaps it was just willful ignorance. Maybe he just liked to say it. What was even worse was that the use of "maybe" would correspond to situations in which the person using it didn't want to be inconvenienced by confronting something, whether it be an obligation or simply an answer to a question. Am I expected to come to school this Saturday for the PTA meeting? Do I have class this week? Are the students practicing outside for Sports Day? All of these questions met with the dreaded answer: MAYBE. And drawn out, as long and irritatingly as possible. Maaaayybe.
This word went hand-in-hand with my other secret pet peeve. Whenever I asked about anything that seemed potentially inconvenient or just somewhat unfamiliar for the person I was speaking to, they would shake their head, make a hissing noise by sucking air in through pursed lips, and utter that maddening word. Immediately, it would be followed up thus: well, it might be too difficult.
"Difficult" had a whole range of meanings here; depending on the situation, it could be cost, distance, or simply the bad luck of occurring on a busy day. It could be a transfer to another train. It could be a request for conducting a certain activity in class. Or it could simply be getting a ride from my apartment to somewhere else that I was required to be. Whatever it was, the "difficulty" came down to one thing: perceived inconvenience to the speaker.
Apparently, it must have been taboo for the person to simply tell me, "I don't really want to." No, they had to make a small production and hem and haw about how difficult it might be, maybe, but they weren't sure and it might be too difficult to find out. Instead of simply asking the right person - and I often did so myself after getting nowhere with the one I was speaking to - they would prefer to sit there and worry about how it might be difficult and maybe we should do it some other way that's been done before. Complaining about potential inconvenience - but never with any degree of certainty, mind you - must have been infinitely preferable to just asking and knowing.
Well, maybe.