The following stories, cultural anecdotes, and beliefs of modern Japanese people were related to me by Sayaka(not
her real name), a twenty year old college student from Japan, during her brief visit to the U.S. in 1995. I had met her
in Japan a few months previously.-John Shea O'Donnell
A Japanese affinity for certain Western goods and practices is constantly being interwoven with long held traditions. Women have learned by example that when they answer the phone at home it is proper to speak
with strangers a high pitched voice. A telephone conversation usually begins with a traditional "moshi, moshi" (hello), but the English "bye, bye" is used when ending a telephone conversation. Other English words that have found there way into common colloquial use in Japan are "okay" and "hi". It is common
to see Japanese men and women dressed in Western style clothes the Western business suit is now ubiquitous in Japan but it is still possible to see women dressed in kimonos which are worn by
geisha, some hostesses and are worn by the general populace for special occasions like Shichi, Go, San (7-5-3 Shinto ceremony); coming of age at twenty-years of age; graduation; and at weddings though less so due to the expense(in more expensive Japanese weddings the bride will wear both a white, Western dress, and a white kimono ). A trip to a Japanese department store will reveal the tastes of Japanese people more clearly than anywhere else. A department store usually consists of seven or eight floors with the top floor reserved for restaurants and/or entertainment for children, and one floor set aside for traditional Japanese kitchenware, and women's fashions. The five or six other floors are where people shop for electronics, kitchenware, and clothing that is indistinguishable from similar goods found in the West.
In seeming contradiction to the Japanese affinity for Western goods, the people do not like their kind to marry gaijin (foreigners), even Westerners. Sayaka's parents have told her that they will disown her if she marries a gaijin despite the fact that she is their only child. Their reasoning for this is to keep Japanese blood pure. Her parents also explained to her that they want to understand their daughter's husband, but if he is a gaijin hey cannot understand him. Sayaka told me that Japanese hold deep prejudices towards two other specific groups: Koreans and burakumin. Koreans are the largest, nonJapanese segment of Japan's population whose residence originates from the time of Japan's colonization of Korea at the beginning of the century. Many Koreans have returned to Korea, but others have chosen to stay in Japan because it is the land of their birth. When why Japanese dislike Koreans, Sayaka could not explain it. She said it is not something that her friends and her discuss and when she asked her father he would not explain why he dislikes Koreans.
One day when Sayaka was a young girl, she returned home from school and mentioned to her aunt the route she took. A look of concern fell over her aunt's face and speaking softly, she said that Sayaka should never pass through a particular neighborhood that she had that day. The young girl was never told why she should avoid the neighborhood the neighborhood, but Sayaka later learned that it was because burakumin lived there. Burakumin are Japanese, but are considered "polluted" or dirty in a society where ritual purity is an important tenet of Shintoism, a native Japanese religion, because of the professions that they have traditionally been relegated to entering. Characteristic of these polluted professions are: makers of tatami mats and shoes because the feet, which are unclean, touch them, and butchers of four-legged animals because traditionally this is also considered unclean. During the Edo era, burakumin could only reside in burakumin areas (the name buraku translates as "area" and min as "people"). Today the term burakumin has become more problematic because these traditionally defined professions are not solely restricted to burakumin so non-burakumin may live in burakumin neighborhoods. Parents in Japan often hire detectives to investigate the man their daughter may marry. Sayaka believes that if the parents of a woman found out that her prospective husband was descended from burakumin or lived in a burakumin neighborhood it is unlikely that they would agree to the marriage, but if he worked in one of these traditionally "unclean" professions and he was not a burakumin, they might still agree to the marriage. Often when I would ask Sayaka about Japanese attitudes, she would differentiate between older and younger Japanese. On the issue of discrimination towards burakumin and Koreans she did not make this differentiation. When I asked Sayaka to place a prospective burakumin-, gaijin of African descent-, gaijin of European descent-, and Korean- husband in the order that she believed her parents would find most reprehensible to least reprehensible she did so this way: burakumin, gaijin of African descent, Korean, and gaijin of European descent.
Sayaka's parents are both from Nagasaki, the sight where the second atomic bomb was dropped, and her childhood years were spent in the town of Sasebo where a U.S. naval base is located. I met Sayaka around the time three Americans were being tried as suspects in the rape of a twelve-year old Okinawan girl so her thoughts about American servicemen in Japan was of timely interest to me. Sayaka's father had told her how one time a U.S. serviceman was seen in one of Sasebo's downtown bars firing his gun into the air for his own amusement. She had also heard that one of these servicemen exploded a hand grenade in town. Because of events like these and a natural fear of an armed force of foreign people whose customs and language is different from their own, the citizens of Sasebo who do not believe there is any great justification or need for the American base to be in Japan are fearful of the servicemen and would like the base to close. When Sayaka returns to her parent's house during breaks from her school session, her father still reminds her not to go outside at night because of his concern that she may have some sort of bad encounter with a U.S. serviceman. When the newspaper reported the sentences given to the three American servicemen who had raped the Okinawan girl (two of the rapists were given seven year sentences and the third was given six and a half years which are considered neither to be short or long sentences), I asked Sayaka what she thought. She said she believed they should have been given ten or fifteen years each(the maximum sentence accorded such an offense in Japan is ten years). Sayaka thought that the Okinawa rape case was an important departure from previous incidents of rape or other incidents of violence by American servicemen in Japan, because it received more media attention and she now believes that Japanese law will be applied to the foreign soldiers more strictly in the future. --March, 1996
[The Daily Yomiuri, December 5, 1996: A U.S. sailor was sentenced Wednesday to 13 years in prison for the robbery and attempted murder of a Japanese woman in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, by the Sasebo branch of the Nagasaki District Court.
Terrence Swanson, 20, a crew member from the U.S. guided-missile frigate McClusky, assaulted the 20-year-old Sasebo bar employee in a parking lot July 16, slashing her throat with a knife and fleeing with her purse, which contained about 13,000 yen in cash (~US$130.00).
"The accused committed the brutal crime when the need for tighter discipline among U.S. military personnel stationed in Japan was strongly sought, after the rape of an Okinawan primary school girl by three U.S. servicement in September 1995," presiding Judge Kiyomi Yano said in handing down the sentence.]
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
