Malcolm's Memories: My American Family Tries to Decipher Life in Japan

In my life I have been blessed – and sometimes plagued – by an intense curiosity. I’ve always been intrigued by how things work; my father was an industrial engineer. And foreign countries; every night, he asked me to imagine where the bottles were that we had thrown in the ocean with messages inside. 

I suspect those were major hidden reasons why, from tenth grade, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

It took me 15 years to achieve that, as I wrote here in a previous Memory. But that inquisitiveness served me well when I landed on my first permanent assignment in Japan many years ago, a country whose opposites and habits bewilder many, but fascinated me.

During my years there, I kept a list of observations that struck me. Here are some: 

When you give a gift in Japan, the rudest thing the recipient can do is open it right away; that’s checking to see if it’s any good.

When a strange man appears at the front door with a large, unexpected box of cookies, that’s a kind thing. His workers are starting a construction project nearby tomorrow. He’s apologizing in advance for any inconvenience.

Store bargain basements are on the roof. The emergency phone number was 119. On Valentine’s Day, women give the gifts. Taxi drivers protested increasing fares. Papers get stapled in the upper-right corner. Women apply lipstick to the bottom lip first. Romantic moments are not moonlit; they come with the rising sun. 

After punching item prices into a cash register, a local storekeeper routinely pulled out a weathered abacus to check the machine's total.

Chop-sticking plates of noodles into our mouths at a Japanese baseball game, my sons and I were excited when a home-run ball bounced right to us. Minutes later, an usher showed up to reclaim it. In Japanese baseball, a full count is two and three. 

In Japan, stand-up comedians sat cross-legged on the stage. Or knelt. If a child is misbehaving, the scolding mother will threaten him with going outside to play, away from her side.

Caught in a rainstorm one day, an acquaintance of a few moments phoned a nearby store that delivered a new umbrella in minutes. Ordering a purchase delivery at one store, the owner noticed I had a heavy bag. “Leave it,” he said. “We’ll deliver that too.” And he did – on time.

Three days after an appointment, the dentist himself called to check that the new crown was fine.

Pulling into a gas station, I’m startled by three men in spotless shirts running out to pump gas, clean the windows, vacuum the inside, and polish the hubcaps.

You better not be claustrophobic there. Crowds are everywhere. Japan has three times the population of California in the same area, but 80 percent of the country’s 3,937 islands are mountains.

Movie theaters can be in the third sub-basement of a Ginza skyscraper. Unable to read the package labels at the concession stand, I bought random bags of crispy family snacks. We learned later, they were squid chips.

Watching a movie there in English one Sunday, the father on the screen told his children the nearest neighbor was 25 miles away. The Japanese subtitles scrolled down the right side and put the distance at 40 kilometers.

The audience reaction: Loud laughter. Forty centimeters perhaps, but 40 kilometers was hilarious.

Stairs are steeper in Japan to save space. Same for household doors that don’t swing; they slide open. To buy a car, you must document your off-street parking. Subway cars can be literally jammed, body hard against body. Station agents may push hard to enable doors to close. But if there’s no eye contact, there’s no problem.

Japan is wary of too many foreigners; a lesson we might take to heart in the U.S. Shortly after our arrival, three police officers appeared at the door. They wanted to see each passport, inspect the house (shoes off, of course), and note who slept in which room. The cover story was for safety in case of an earthquake.

Blunt speech and rejection are to be avoided at all costs. Instead of saying a forthright “No” or “No, thank you,” the polite phrase is, “That is not necessary.”

In Japan, implication is often more important than what is actually said. During one winter evening language lesson in the living room, my elderly Japanese tutor remarked twice that my children must be cold. I said, "I think they’re fine. They can get a jacket if they want."

It wasn’t until the tutor donned her own sweater that I realized the real reason for her professed concern.

Most Japanese toilets back then were holes in a tiled floor. Seeking a new toilet seat for our Western-style house, I took drawings and measurements to a local hardware. The clerk called his boss, who called his supervisor. Some quick chatter and I was led to the bathroom.

Some things are inexplicable to a Western mind. Foreign things were deemed fashionable. The sign, in English, for a beauty salon in our neighborhood was, "Hello Have a Nice Weather." 

I bought my boys t-shirts with a picture of our 16th president that said, in English, "Rinconil's Birthday."

We were riding along a familiar Tokyo expressway one day when I noticed a sign that read: “R 450.5.” I asked the office driver what it meant. He said, “That's the radius of the next curve.”

I was interviewing two officials in the Justice Ministry about the country’s death penalty. One man went to get some statistics. I asked the other what his colleague’s first name was. They had worked together 20 years. He did not know.

In an underground mega-mall in Osaka, my interpreter and I found a payphone to check in with our Tokyo office. There, on the counter, was a 10-yen coin (about three cents) used to initiate all calls. 

I pointed to it. The interpreter said, "Not mine." I wouldn't be surprised if it was still there.

Driving through rural Japan, the interpreter and I stopped to talk with two women in large straw hats working in a rice paddy. I was asking about their lives and families. At one point, they asked the interpreter a lengthy question. What did they ask? I said.

"Uh," he replied, "they wondered if all your hair was red."

As a newcomer to the neighborhood, I dutifully put out the garbage and recycle bins on Wednesday like everyone else. That afternoon, they were empty. But one soda can was left on the curb. That was an unspoken public rebuke for putting it in the wrong bin. Someone had sorted my garbage. Now, the whole neighborhood knew. I think you call that crowd-shaming.

I suppose some people might find much of this annoying or bewildering. I found the process totally fascinating, like working on an entertaining puzzle, knowing I would never complete it but enjoying the stimulating process of observing and questioning. 

It made me see many things in a different way. I realized the ancient society and its intricate language were ultimately indecipherable to my foreign mind; the same word, for instance, can mean “tie your shoes” or “vomit,” depending on the context.

The challenging language is a point of real national pride, like a secret handshake that screens aliens. Fluent foreigners going on TV have been requested to insert a few errors in Japanese; to speak too well was disturbing.

An American friend phoned my Tokyo office one afternoon. Perfectly fluent in Japanese, he chatted with the office assistant briefly before asking for me. The assistant later asked who it was. When told, he looked genuinely frightened to realize the gaijin (outside person) spoke such perfect Japanese he had failed to recognize it.

At times, living in Japan seemed like watching a thunderstorm at midnight. Complete cloaking darkness. Then, every once in a while, a flash of lightning illuminated the whole place for a few seconds, and you got an inkling of hidden things.

The Ryoanji Temple in the ancient capital of Kyoto has a flowerless garden of white stones with 15 large rocks partially buried and carefully arranged. Thousands of people go regularly to walk around it. From nowhere in the garden can you see all 15 stones at the same time. 

The temple has some gutters not on the roof but in the ground, filled with stones that give a gentle gurgle sound to the runoff. 

In the same city, there’s a beautiful waterfall completely obscured by trees and bushes. I’ve been there a few times, heard its delicate gushing. I’ve never actually seen it. But like everyone else who’s ever stood there, I know exactly what it looks like in my imagination.

I decided upon arrival in Japan that I would try the foods without asking. I even tried the ice-cream bars; the inside was packed with bean curd.

Probably 80 percent of the time, however, I liked the foods. 

One exception was the weekend I took my family to a little inn in Kagoshima. The appetizers were delicious. Then, the owner proudly served the main course, a sea slug for each of us.

They were basically snails the size of a child’s fist. Everyone said “Arigato” and smiled, until she left. Then, terror gripped our faces.

One by one, I flushed the disgusting delicacies down the room toilet.

But I did that a little too quickly. 

The hostess returned to check on her guests’ dining satisfaction. She was mightily delighted that the family of foreigners had consumed her meal so quickly and offered to serve us more sea slugs.

In a flash, I pulled out that useful Japanese phrase: ”That is not necessary.”

This is the 43rd in an ongoing series of personal memories. Links to all the others are below.

Malcolm's Memories: They Don't Seem to Make July Fourths Like They Used To

Malcolm's Memories: The Joy of My Father's Joy

Malcolm's Memories: Me and Huck Down by the River

Malcolm's Memories: Making Oscars & Johnny's Toilet Paper Joke

Malcolm's Memories: She Loved Books So Much She Opened a Little Library

Malcolm's Memories: The Day Bill Buckley Asked My Help; Small Town Etiquette 

Behind Johnny's Desk, Before Ford Was POTUS, and a Dog Makes Her Rounds

A Hooker in the House, Whistle War, and Ann Landers' Worst Mistake

More Neat People and a Nuclear Sub I've Met Along the Way

Malcolm's Memories: A Toddler's First Fourth  

Malcolm's Memories: Train, Streetcars, and Grandma  

The True Story of an Unusual Wolf, a Pioneer in the Wild

That Time I Wore $15K in Cash Into a War Zone 

I Fell in Love With the South, Despite That One Scary Afternoon

Wildfires I've Known 

More Memories: Neat People I've Met Along the Way 

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