A JAPANESE SOCIAL DILEMMA (Part 2)

(The photo this time has nothing to do with the text, I just wanted to use it as a picture that I did recently.)

I had a chance to cover the Japanese communicative arts of tatemae and honne in the previous blog. To recap briefly, tatemae is the face you present to the outside world, or at least to your group members, unfailingly polite and self-deprecatory, the mask of social congress; while honne, real feelings, are more private, shared only with family members or close friends. I imagine honne developed because people needed an outlet, they couldn’t be polite all the time. So it is associated with negative feelings. Example: when being given a gift: (tatemae, to giver) “Oh, you shouldn’t have! It’s just what I wanted, how wonderful!” (later, honne expressed to close people in private “Yuck! I don’t want this.” etc. Part of the tatemae of receiving a gift is that you don’t open it right away, in case you might betray a little discontent and hurt the giver’s feelings… but afterward, when you actually open the gift, it’s OK to express your honne to family members, etc. Also, the giver is expected to deprecate themselves or the gift. “It is nothing, it is boring”, etc.

I remember being confused especially about the last – if the gift is so bad, why are you giving it to them? (I potentially got in trouble when I responded honestly to an aunt who came with a homemade delicacy. When she started in on how awful it tasted, etc. I just said, “Well why don’t you take it home then?” Fortunately she didn’t pick up on my comment.) Many other things about these social rituals were confusing until I learned about the tatemae-honne form of communication. Now I am back to being confused, and wondering if there might not be another way to communicate. Something in the middle?

Japanese has so many words, and like human beings everywhere, they love to put things in the boxes of words. Unfortunately, when combined with the above social communication construct, this can create problems and even obscure the meaning of what was said. What I have said has been labeled as “anger” (probably because of how they heard it, and they tried to defuse the situation with a well-known word), but they didn’t have to address the actual problem in any way. Anger (okotte iru), I have discovered, is for mothers who scold their children, etc. I suppose I just should have behaved like a good wife without saying anything.

Next door two little toy dachshunds live, and they often bark and get into my yard (they are not penned up). I don’t necessarily hate them, but there is a law in Japan that says dogs have to be penned or tied up. I did visit the owner to talk to them about it, and was horrified when it came out that the elder dog was not spayed, in spite of being over a year old. I happen to believe in this very strongly, and would never keep a pet that wasn’t spayed or fixed, to ensure a good temper and avoid fights and unwanted animals being born. The woman said her husband “wouldn’t hear” of this operation being performed on the dogs. I have since heard other people whose judgment I usually trust saying such things. Maybe it’s a matter of opinion. But the point is, that as I have cats (which are spayed) that are free to roam and sometimes get into yards and do mischief (apparently), according to my husband, I cannot say what I think to these people about their dogs. That’s the Japanese way.

I have a feeling I would get in trouble for my outspokenness in other cultures too. It seems that politeness is more important than honesty in many cultures, maybe in all of them. I am the person who points out the other side of any argument; I can’t understand why I have to “take sides” and this has gotten me in hot water in the past. Recently in India I had a chance to have an Ayurvedic astrological reading; before I had even sat down, the astrologer said to me, “You are all about justice”. Maybe so. I hold honesty to be more important than just about anything else in any relationship. When trust is eroded, that’s it for me, and it’s very difficult to trust that person again. This character trait has not made me particularly well liked, to say nothing of loved, in my life. But it’s mine and seems to be getting stronger.

If so, I am definitely in the wrong country, but it seems to me that honesty is a very good contender to be between tatemae and honne. Will I ever be able to say to my sister-in-law, “Actually, it’s fine, we don’t really need all these things that you no longer have room for in your freezer” -- why not? This is a problem in every culture. There is a loophole in Japanese culture for this, it is the phrase “Kimochi dake o itadakimasu” (I’ll just take the feeling, not the thing, with thanks). I like this phrase very much, it is invaluable when someone offers you something you don’t want, but it must be used sparingly or it starts to sound suspicious. Mostly you have to steel yourself and accept things even if you don’t want them – imagining the feelings of the giver helps a lot.

This makes me think of something that happened when I was a young wife. A neighbor gave birth, and wanting to show that I thought of her as a friend, I baked a loaf of bread and took it over. When I got home, my mother-in-law said that homemade things were not the proper gift at such a time, because the receiver didn’t know how much had been spent on the gift and thus was put into a quandary of how much to spend on a “return gift”. I was flabbergasted. Not only did I not want anything in return (it had been a gift), also I had been taught in my own country that homemade gifts, especially food, were best to give. This is a cultural gulf that cannot be bridged; one has to go all the way and accept the other’s cultural mores. It is also one of those times when proficiency in language does not prepare one for the cultural divide, though listeners might think that because a person understands the language, they understand all about the culture too. This is not true.

Language is like the small waves that wash up on a beach; the attendant culture is the ocean. Native speakers are used to swimming far out in their culture, but if you are not a native, never imagine that you are proficient in the culture just because you can get along in the language. The background of any language contains in-jokes, literary tags, vocabulary and many other things, especially if you include the written language. You can’t expect to be proficient in everything in one lifetime, especially when so many things rub you the wrong way.

But it is hard to give up something as basic as honesty for the sake of being proficient in a culture. The vary nature of “honesty” is up for grabs – why do I feel that I am being my most honest when I am angry?  I guess that will be the subject of my next learning spiral.