The Invisible Culture (Behind the Façade)
One of the most interesting aspects of the Japanese paradox—i.e. the de facto dichotomy between “Japanese people” and “everyone else”—is that it’s virtually impossible to pick up on it when you first set foot in the country. Japanese culture is as much centralized around service as it is on its geographic isolation from the rest of the world, which is why a lot of tourists come away from the country with glowing praises of how nice everyone was to them and about the unprecedented hospitality they received. Not to mention that like any other average citizen of any country, Japanese people want to give off a positive impression to the world.
Now, the tourists that visit Japan for the first time are indeed going to so see a lot the same things my Japanese friend saw afresh coming back from Canada—the homogeneity of appearance, the flashy cell phones, the swarming crowds, the exhausted faces. What they aren’t going to see are the real Japanese people behind the daily charade of politeness and simple smiles. I’ll be the first to admit that I bought into it the first time coming here as an exchange student a couple of years ago; when I returned to the States a few months later, I thought that Americans in comparison were clearly the rudest, most insensitive people on God’s green earth.
It’s amazing how things change, however, when your status in a foreign country switches from exchange “student/tourist” to “long-term resident”. What you find out when you spend enough time in any country is a simple, unchanging truth: people are people, and the Japanese are no exception. I don’t mean to criticize, but the Japanese are not nearly as warm as they would make out to be at face value.
If anything, Japan is the one I country I know of where it is possible to tell someone to “f— off” completely in formal, polite dialogue. The genius aspect of such a phenomenon is that because the message was conveyed through the use of polite language, it is impossible for the receiver of such words to legitimately get angry because the person who said it “technically” wasn’t being rude. That is why there really aren’t any particularly juicy swear words in Japanese like there are in other languages like English; offense in Japanese is always conveyed subtly. In other words, just because someone is really polite to you here doesn’t mean that that person actually likes you at all. It’s “how” they are polite to you that really matters.
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