Could You Hum A Few Bars?

I am finishing up my lesson and I make some joke about how bad I am at karaoke. Kaz, the young man with whom I drank and karaoke’d with last Friday night, laughs and says, “I don’t think so.” I make another joke about how he’s good--so good that he even sings in English. Everyone uuuhhhhn’s in surprise. I continue, “Can you imagine singing in English?” Everyone shakes their head. “Well he did it,” I tell the class.

Kaz says, “Because you ordered me to.”

Huh?

Okay. Here’s what I think the deal with that is:

A lot of stuff happens in Japan.

That is a completely inane statement, isn’t it? It is a statement entirely devoid of meaning. So let me try to breathe some life into it.

I’ll start by saying that I know that I don’t know anything about anything in Japan. Sure, I know that you pay your bills at conbini. Duh. I know that vending machines are ubiquitous and insistent in the everyday existence of all people here. Duh. I know that Tokyo is big. Duh. I know the obvious things. I know the things that outsiders know from reading books. I know a few things from having seen them with my own eyes, or having lived them with my own life, or having been pressed against them on the last train out of Ginza. But I also know that I don’t know most things Japanese. I don’t know what outsiders can’t know because they’re things that aren’t in books or especially because the Japanese know them from years of training and consequently feel no need to explain them.

Aaron, when he and April were here, said something like, “This is just a big Western city.” We happened to all be sitting in a Watami, a Japanese Appleby’s, with Seth. Seth’s been here almost two years. I’ve been here four months. April and Aaron had been here for about a week. Seth and I goggled. Yeah, okay, we finally admitted. Yeah, there’s a Gap in Ginza. There are 7/11’s and McDonalds everywhere. You want your S’bux mocha? You can have your S’bux mocha. You see Japanese on the street and they’re not in kimono or yukata. They’re in blue jeans and tennis shoes or three piece suits. They’re carrying their briefcases and their messenger bags and talking on their cell phones. Yeah, they look Western. Yeah, on the surface Tokyo looks like a Western city. Spend a week or two here and you can leave still believing that it actually is just another big Western city. Spend a month here and you might start to suspect otherwise. Spend four months or a year or two years here, and you begin to experience what you had only suspected. Because Tokyo? Is not a Western city. And the Japanese? Are not Westerners. Japanese people wear Levi’s and drink Coca-cola, but they’re not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners and they don’t act like Westerners because they’re not Westerners.

Furthermore, in Japan there are are a great many things that no one explains because it’s the kind of stuff that no one would explain anywhere. These things that require no explanation are the ideas that arise from a nation’s collective conscience. These are the ideas that we take for granted. We don’t (and generally don’t have to or can’t or don’t want to have to) explain the ideas (and the behaviors that arise from these ideas) to others. Let me give you an obvious example. In America, we like to believe that we are all equal. We really, really like to think this. We like to think, for example, that anyone can grow up to be president. We shake hands with superiors as equals, hand to hand. We believe further in a mano-a-mano existence. We feel confident expressing and defending our ideas on an individual basis. We are comfortable arguing and demanding our rights. No one has to tell you why you do these things, we just all believe that these are the right things to do and we do them.

In Japan? Nai. No. These things, these American ideas about rights and equality, are not part of the everyday experience of the Japanese. People here don’t like to (and don’t like it when others) demand their rights. You do have rights and they do ask for and receive them, but these rights are expected, given and received through a system of reciprocity that is alien to most Americans. (Yeah, we Americans like to believe that you get what you deserve, but in America, that tends to be a negative statement, a statement that expresses a desire to see someone receive their comeuppance.) I’ve tried to think of an easy example of this, but I can’t. Gomen nasai.

Instead I’ll tell you about respect in Japan.

In Japan there is an enormous amount of respect shown to superiors. (This is, admittedly changing quite rapidly.) Showing respect in the Japanese way includes engaging in behavior that many Americans would balk at. For example, I asked the handsome businessman, while we were in a karaoke booth in Ginza, “What was the first karaoke song you ever sang?” He said he didn’t remember the exact song, but he told me that it had been a song that he wasn’t familiar with. I asked him why he had chosen an unfamiliar song, and he replied that he hadn’t chosen it. Rather, he explained, his sempai had chosen it by opening the karaoke catalogue and pointing to a random song and saying, “Sing.” He sang. He asked if I knew the word sempai. I told him I did and I added, “There is no equivalent in English.”

What is a sempai? A sempai is a kind of superior. It’s used for school and work relationships and it can (but doesn’t necessarily) include considerations about age differences or work positions. Anyone who was hired or began before you is your sempai. (Anyone who was hired after you is your kohai. Anyone who was hired at the same time as you is your doki. Each of these relationships has their own rules.) One does what one’s sempai tells him to do and likes it. If your sempai says sing, you don’t ask a question. You don’t think. You sing. That is how respect works in one kind of relationship, a sempai-kohai relationship, in Japan.

Yes, a sempai is a kind of superior. Another kind of superior is a sensei. The relationship between a sensei and a gakusei is not the Western relationship between a teacher and a student. Where I am from we have teachers also, but we rarely have sensei. (I was a student for years, but I was rarely a gakusei.) I am from the American side of the American-Japan equation and I went to school in America, so if, say, a professor were to say to me, “Sing,” and I didn’t want to, I’d laugh. Maybe I’d be polite about refusing. Maybe I’d say, “Forget it” rather than “Go to hell.” Maybe. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that I’d be perfectly within my rights to refuse. I wouldn’t feel any misgivings about refusing. That is an American custom. In Japan, however, one wouldn’t refuse the request of a sensei without a great deal of careful thought. One certainly wouldn’t refuse it on the sole basis of it’s being a silly request or even an unsavory one. One certainly wouldn’t refuse it just because it was difficult.

Here, I am a sensei. I am a sensei who’d forgotten that she is a sensei. As his sensei, I was making a difficult request. I was saying to Kazu, “Sing.” I furthermore added, ”In English.” Did I realize that that this was a request that he couldn’t easily refuse? No. I didn’t even realize that I was making a request. Kazu, however, did realize it and so he sang. In English.