Politeness

(Big Danger in Little Osaka #24, 2009)

A big deal is often made about how ridiculously polite Japan is: “I ate at a restaurant and they apologised even though the food came really fast!”; “Man, I was at a business meeting with some Japanese guys and those cats would not stop bowing!” While many of the things you hear are true, I think people get a false impression of what Japan is like because they are only exposed to situations where there is a high emphasis on politeness. Spend some decent time in Japan, though, and you’ll realise that while there are a lot of rules regarding politeness and respect, the way people are supposed to act isn’t always the way they do. I’ve seen people cut into line at restaurants, barge their way on to trains, heckle mercilessly and yell obscenities at strangers. I’ve had bad service and seen barmen casually talk shit with their customers. You often hear of the respectful relationship between Japanese students and teachers, but somehow I don’t think calling teachers “chubby” and “hamster-like” or having a prolonged shouting match with them during class falls within those bounds.

Much is also made of how Japanese has a whole separate way of talking if you want to humble yourself or honour the person you are speaking to. This often scares people who are learning Japanese, until they realise that most Japanese people don’t actually know how to do this either. Because we don’t have this honorific system in English, a lot of the language sounds clumsy and excessively polite when people attempt to translate it: Japanese people don’t really say things like “I humbly request your time, o honourable one”, even though that may be the closest English approximation. And while the differences may not be as extreme, we too vary how respectful our language is depending on if we’re talking to our friends, our boss or our hoes, do we not?

Think of all the polite things we are taught to do as children, the way we are supposed to act in formal situations, all the social niceities we follow: “No, honestly, you have the last piece. No… no, seriously, I don’t need it. No, you take it…” We don’t really think about them that much because, y’know, it’s just the way things are done, but if we compiled a list of all these things and sent it to Japan I’m sure they’d think we were nuts too. Everyone follows these rules to different degrees, anyway: some people are polite to the point of awkwardness, while others are utter bastards. And while the idea of what constitutes ‘politeness’ may be different, Japan is more or less the same: officially, everyone is supposed to be respectful and inoffensive (sometimes to an extreme degree), but ultimately the individual decides how much they actually do these things. Perhaps there are broader social consequences of breaking these rules that I don’t see (probably worth asking a sociologist about this one), but on the day-to-day level things really aren’t so different.