[November, 1995] Despite the limits on individuality that are so often criticized by the West, Japan lacks the dullness of the former Socialists states and still allows for enough individual expression in a personal appearance of its people that is generally comparable with any society, even France, in respect to the attention spent on everyday attire.
In general, I would say that Japan is also the most hygienic place I have visited which is surprising given it's close geographic proximity to China which would rank on the bottom of my list. While we were observing this close attention to hygiene, we were surprised by the seeming contradictory social rules that applied to the nose. It seemed strange to us that the Japanese don't approve of blowing your nose in public. We suffered from runny noses and sniffled until we could find a restroom or could bare the wait no longer and turned into an alleyway, if we could find one with no one close by which was surprisingly difficult. We couldn't figure out when people might ever use the free tissue packages that were used to disburse advertisements and were handed out throughout Japan, especially at subway stations, until I saw partially used packets in restroom stalls. I can only recall having heard someone blow their nose in a bathroom once which is quite surprising given the fact that we were constantly sightseeing or shopping and the sniffles due to the cold weather were on the rise. Despite this, it seems quite appropriate to pick your nose or stuff a wad of tissue paper up a nostril in public judging from the numerous times we witnessed people doing such things.
Dining in Japan for a Westerner can be a little surprising if only to hear the room filled with sounds of slurping. Whether it be soba or udon noodles, Japanese invariably slurp their noodles down. I was raised to think that you should make as little noise at the table while eating as possible and that something so rude as slurping during a meal is a sign of bad manners. I can only wonder what the Japanese around us thought when they saw us quietly eating our noodles as they cooled down, biting them when we got enough and to avoid that slurping sound. We had seen businessmen hurriedly slurping away steaming hot noodles in Osaka during lunchtime and couldn't realize how they avoided burning their mouths. My wife, Karen, had decided that it was better to learn how to slurp like the locals so we could better fit in, but never pressured me to do so. While adopting the slurping technique she learned that the people were slurping to cool down the noodles as they ate them hot, something like the way you might eat a bowl of hot soup a spoonful at a time only faster, much faster.
As I mentioned, Japan is an exceedingly polite place to visit. Albeit as genuine as the politeness may be it does not, nor could it, require the same amount of energy as politeness does in less polite societies. The politeness offered in Japan is often so routine that it has taken on mechanical form from mere words to a bow and smile. It doesn't really seem to matter though how mechanical it is because it's there, expected, and more important in Japan than anywhere else. We were eating in a small laundry facility and had to move out of the way of a college student who needed to fold his just-dried clothes. He said "sumimasen" when he needed us to move and when he left after finishing all his folding (literally "excuse me", but used in a variety of ways to express thanks for inconveniencing someone).
We entered a Japanese fast-food restaurant, called Yoshinoya, and all the crew that was visible to us greeted us with "irasshimase" ("welcome"). When one of the employees accidentally dropped a cutting board down on the counter two feet away from me, he said "sumimasen." In nearly every business we entered we were greeted and this was usually followed with more than one "arigato gozaimasu" (a polite form of "thank you").
I was in front of a police box, looking at a map when a police officer approached me and apologized, stating that his English was not very good, because he did not help me sooner. I had been looking at the police box sign and at some wanted posters a few minutes earlier, but otherwise had made no attempt to solicit help. He said that I looked lost and when I admitted I was, he told me where to take a bus to get where I needed to go. He apologized again when he was leaving because the bus announcement would be in Japanese!
Having worked in American businesses, I was familiar with the term "service" which, however, was typically talked about more than it was ever practiced (from either side of a business transaction). In Japan, a country that has a keen sense of aesthetic sensibility, service is practiced as an art. The Japanese art of service is undoubtedly related to the uncommon practice of politeness practiced in that country where there must exist a pressure for service to exceed the already high Japanese level of common courtesy.
We went to a Sumitomo Bank office in Kyoto after being told that this was the only bank in the area that could help us with a cash advance from our credit card. In Japanese banks you usually go to a window to have your transaction initiated, but then sit and wait until they call your name to complete the transaction. In the waiting area there was a uniformed attendant who acted as a custodian, greeter, and security guard. This man was later relieved by a woman who was also in uniform. They would welcome all customers and thank all customers who left. There was also a young male, probably a junior hire who worked behind the partition with the other bank branch workers, whose tasks included yelling out a greeting to customers entering the office.
Besides seeing the most modern gas stations in Japan, we were also impressed once again with the service offered there. One rainy day in Kyoto, I saw a couple of cars crossing an intersection before entering a gas station and then three young attendants came running out of the station office and yelled a greeting to the drivers. I was amazed, the attendants weren't competing with each other or making a joke, they were merely performing their jobs in a professional manner with all seriousness. When cars have been fuelled and the fuel paid for at a typical gas station, an attendant typically goes out into the street to make sure his customer can pull out into traffic safely as he waves him or her on. The attendant's job is only done when he bows and says "arigato gozaimasu" to the departing customer.
There was a comment in our guidebook that politeness in Japanese society becomes a device by which Japanese maintain there distance from gaijin (foreigners). While this negative by-product cannot be felt during a short-term visit to Japan, there was one occasion when the politeness of a merchant. On our first trip to Tokyo, we went into a small tea shop and liked a particular teacup but there wasn't a matching pair for sale. The only pairs that were for sale at this shop were of two different sizes. We naively thought it was pretty stupid that they would sell pairs of cups with odd sizes. When we told the merchant we wanted the cup she began to take both of them, but we told her that we only wanted the bigger one because the cups weren't matching sizes. On our second visit, we learned that traditional Japanese teacups were usually sold in such pairs because one was meant for a man and the other, smaller one, was meant for a woman. These teacups are called meoto-jawan. Either the merchant at the first tea shop we had visited did not want to offend us by explaining that it was not a mismatch at all or she wasn't confident in her English skills to convey the cultural lesson. Having learned about meoto-jawan in written form we instantly lost our dislike for differing size teacups, whatever the implications for gender egalitarianism, and became happy consumers once again.
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