WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY?

A few summers ago I went to the next-door neighbor (a carpenter) to complain that the smoke from their incinerator was blowing into our living room via the open windows. The carpenter, about my age, laughed and said to the other workmen, “Rebecca-san wa mata okotteru yo.” (Which means roughly, “Rebecca is angry again.”) My entirely legitimate complaint was laughed off and nothing was done.

Recently by husband confessed that my anger scares him. Well, to complete the picture, both of us had dads who, for differing reasons, brought PTSD (in those days called “shell shock”) home from WWII. They both had hair-trigger tempers and were often irritated, with resulting loudness and shouting. My husband and I discovered this common experience before we were married, and agreed that being angry wasn’t cool.

Now, in old age, I am loud and shouty a lot of the time, and he has become very quiet and passive. These are different reactions to past family anger – either to emulate it (me) or to eschew it (hubby). Both of us are irritating to each other for exactly opposite reasons. I can’t stand his passivity, his reluctance to “get into it” with neighbors. He can’t stand my hectoring (as he hears it) him in English for every little thing.

I should mention that he is Japanese, which would double his sensitivity to noise. I have heard from people of various nationalities that Japanese people are particularly quiet, compared to people like the Koreans and Chinese. This is indeed a pretty quiet place, until you start to notice that people in authority or people who have paid for the privilege are quite loud, for example sound trucks, or those who make announcements on the train. Stand on the Bullet Train platform in Tokyo Station if you think this place is quiet. You can hardly hear yourself think with all the bells, buzzers, announcements etc. going on.

But this isn’t a blog about noise (which I have done), except in the sense that those who are loud or aggressive in Japan are often interpreted as angry. In this blog I am trying to analyze “anger” and “okotte iru” and why it makes Japanese people so nervous; that is the real meaning of laughter which often greets anger here: it is a safety valve for the social nervousness created.

I researched this blog as follows: I asked several friends and students, some foreign, some Japanese, about this. I found out that Japanese people love quiet, and practice it consciously, compared to other cultures. To them it is considered rude and uncouth to raise your voice for any reason, even if it has nothing to do with anger, e.g. to call someone to dinner in the same house. Why? Because others might interpret it as anger and be afraid or uncomfortable.

So what is the bottom line? I used to think it was, in Japanese culture, the psychology of the group, or the Eye of the World which sees and judges everything you do, or the overriding imperative of “not causing trouble” to anyone, which is patently impossible. Nope.

I have concluded that, for the Japanese as for many other races, the bottom line is the emotions – but in Japan these are so deeply buried that one can observe and live among these people, and be unaware of the underlying emotions for years. Yet another layer of “the onion” has been revealed. (This is a reference to Max Danger, a columnist actually named Robert J. Collins, in the Tokyo Weekender, who before 1985 wrote, “Understanding Japan is like peeling an onion. When one layer is finished, there is a similar but different layer beneath. Tears aren’t mentioned, but someday someone will work that in.”) Living in another culture, to all intents and purposes alone, is just one lesson after another.

Westerners in many countries are louder than Japanese, and have a hard time understanding the need to be quiet in most places here. What is felt and interpreted as “anger” to a Japanese, when expressed by a Westerner, may be actual anger or irritation, but it equally may be high spirits, excess energy being blown off, or simple forceful talk which expects results. But in my experience it usually doesn’t get results, because the Japanese listener gets hung up on the “tone of voice” and doesn’t hear the content of the words.

Is this what happened with the carpenter? Faced with my forceful way of speaking, did he simply turn off and not hear what I was saying, but only the tone of voice it was couched in? Ditto my husband – he is afraid, so are things that may be very important that I say forgotten or ignored in favor of defending himself against the far greater threat of anger? And where does that leave me? Do I try to tone myself down or do I continue to uphold my own upbringing and personal bent, to the consternation of those around me? (I should say that for years, while I was under my mother-in-law’s thumb, I did try to tone myself down – but my unruly tongue got me in trouble every time.) Finally, I have come to the conclusion that it won’t hurt anyone for me to be myself, after so many years – but is it really not hurting anyone? In the culture I chose, maybe so.

I grew up with anger – in fact, the first chapter in my autobiography is called “The House of Anger” – and hated it. My Dad, whose philosophy was “Let it out” (he was, needless to say, never treated for PTSD) was by no means the only loud and angry person in our house. I know the feeling of walking on tenterhooks around an angry family member, and how it precludes any real talk and destroys trust. So what do I do? Go back to holding it all in, as I did in my first years here? It seems I can’t avoid making those around me uncomfortable.

It’s interesting, and probably for beyond the scope of my little blog, to wonder WHY Japanese interpret loudness as anger — pigeonholing it in a little box labelled “Okotte iru” to minimize the threat. (what threat? What exactly are they afraid of?) I also have to ask myself if this is common in all Japanese societies, or if it is a feature of where I live, sandwiched between ultra-polite and civilized Kyoto and the ravening hordes of samurai over the horizon in the Nagoya area. No wonder they opted for silence rather than loud self-expression, both then and in the generations that followed. Maybe it started as a survival mechanism.

What are your thoughts? Do you have a story of “anger” in Japan to tell?