I wrote my book ”Dave Barry Does Japan” to try, in some small way, to make this world a better place for people everywhere and for the generations to come.
I`m lying, of course! I wrote the book because I thought a trip to Japan might be pretty funny, especially since Random House had generously agreed to pay for the whole thing. This was a major factor, because I had heard that prices were pretty high in Japan. People who`d been there were always telling me horror stories.
”Oh yes,” they`d say, ”In Tokyo, Frank ordered two eggs over medium and the bill came to $16,500, plus $312 for the parsley sprig, and he wound up having to sell both of his corneas.”
So in the summer of 1991 I filled several large suitcases with traveler`s checks and went to Japan with my wife, Beth, and my 10-year-old son, Robert. We spent three weeks bumbling around in a disoriented, uncomprehending manner, The Three Cultural Stooges, because it turns out that Japan is an extremely foreign country, where you can never be sure whether the sign on the door you`re about to open says:
”Restaurant” or: ”enter here for express vasectomy service.” My book is an account of that trip. Please don`t misunderstand me: I don`t claim to have become an expert on Japan in three weeks. The Japanese culture is thousands of years old; to truly grasp its incredible complexity and infinite subtle nuance, you`d need at least a month.
Ha ha! Just kidding. I don`t know if an outsider can ever really understand Japan, but I know I never came close. When I arrived there, my major objectives immediately changed from things like ”try to determine attitude of average salaried worker toward government industrial policy” to things like ”try to find food without suckers on it.”
So this is not authoritative. If you want authoritative, go buy a real book. This is just a highly subjective account of our trip, with a lot of personal impressions, some of which may well have been influenced by beer, which by the way is another thing they do better than we do. In fact, they do quite a few things better than we do, and I`m not just talking about cars and radios. But it also turns out that we are way ahead of them in some important areas, such as pizza.
My most important finding, however, does not involve the differences between us and Japan; it involves the similarities. Because despite the gulf, physical and cultural, between the United States and Japan, both societies are, in the end, made up of people, and people everywhere-when you strip away their superficial differences-are crazy.
I attempted to learn Japanese by reading a book called ”Japanese at a Glance” in the plane from San Francisco to Tokyo. This is not the method recommended by experts. The method recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family in Japan.
The result of my language-training program was that I arrived in Tokyo speaking Japanese at essentially the same fluency level as cement. I never did get much better while I was there. The only word I got really good at saying was ”beer,” which is pronounced ”bee-roo,” unless you want a big beer, in which case it is pronounced ”big bee-roo.”
Many Japanese people know a little English. But it`s often very little. Japan is not like, for example, Germany, where everybody seems to speak English better than the average U.S. congressperson. In Japan, you will often find yourself in situations where nobody speaks any English. And the weird thing is, English pops up everywhere in Japan. You constantly see signs and advertisements with English words in them, and you constantly hear American rock music being played in stores and restaurants. But to the Japanese, the English doesn`t seem to mean anything. It`s there purely for decorative purposes, like a hood ornament or a ”SPEED LIMIT 55” sign.
This can be frustrating. I remember being in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant (of course, they have Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants here) in a small town called Beppu, trying to communicate the concept of ”ketchup” to the young man behind the counter, who, like virtually every other Japanese person we met, was extremely polite and diligent. He was trying hard to understand me, frowning with intense concentration as I used the Official United Nations International Gesture for ”ketchup,” which is to pound the bottom of an upside-down imaginary ketchup bottle while saying ”Ketch-up?
Ketch-up? Ketch-up?” like a person with a hiccups-related nerve disorder. But I wasn`t getting through, so the young man called two young women over, and all three of them solemnly watched me repeat ”Ketch-up? Ketch-up? Ketch- up?” for a while longer, none of them saying a word, and all the while the store`s music system was playing:
There she was, just a-walkin` down the street
Singin` do-wah diddy diddy dum diddy-do
And I wanted to scream, HOW CAN YOU NOT UNDERSTAND ENGLISH WHEN ALL DAY LONG YOU LISTEN TO DO-WAH DIDDY DIDDY DUM DIDDY-DO??
The important lesson for the English-speaking visitor to learn from all this is that in Japan, English words do not necessarily mean anything. Adding to the confusion is the fact that, even when English words do mean something, it may not be what you think. The Japanese are not big on saying things directly. Another way of putting this is, compared to the Japanese, the average American displays all the subtlety of Harpo hitting Zeppo with a dead chicken. The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they`re being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.
This difference in approach often leads to misunderstandings between the two cultures. One of the biggest problems-all the guidebooks warn you about this-is that the Japanese are extremely reluctant to come right out and say
”no,” a word they generally regard as impolite.
To the best of my knowledge, in the three weeks we traveled around Japan, nobody ever told us we couldn`t do anything, although it turned out that there were numerous things we couldn`t do. Life became easier for us once we learned to interpret certain key phrases, which I`ll summarize with the English statement a Japanese person will make, followed in parentheses by what the Japanese person actually means.
I see. (No.)
Ah. (No.)
Ah hah. (No.)
Yes. (No.)
That is difficult. (That is completely impossible.)
That is very interesting. (That is the stupidest thing I ever heard.)
We will study your proposal. (We will feed your proposal to a goat.)
But subtlety and protocol are not the strong suits of Americans, which is one reason the Japanese tend to view us as large, loud water buffalo, lumbering around without a clue, tromping and pooping all over their carefully arranged, exquisitely tended garden of a society.
I took an immediate liking to the Japanese culture, because it has a fascinating and wonderful quality that for want of a better term I will call: ”lack of height.” I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior high school students, only with fewer guns.
Throughout my adult life, I have described myself as being ”about 6 feet tall,” which is how American men describe themselves when they are about 5 foot 9. Growing up, I was always one of the smaller, punier boys, the kind of boy who could be easily lifted up by other boys and held upside down over the toilet. I was also a late bloomer (or, in modern terminology, Puberty Impaired). At parties in 8th grade, when the other kids were turning out the lights and necking, I was the dweeb who was putting the little plastic inserts into the 45 r.p.m. records.
But in Japan I was big. I started noticing as soon as we got off the plane. We were walking through a crowded airport concourse, and I realized that I could look over the top of everybody else`s head.
”Hey!” I remarked to my wife, Beth. ”I`m the tallest person in this concourse!”
This was a recurring observation of mine for the entire time we were in Japan. We`d be in some beautiful temple or an important museum, and Beth and Robby would be having significant cultural insights, and I`d be saying: ”Hey! I`m the tallest person in this temple or museum!”
I`ll get the bad news out of the way right up front: Tokyo is ugly. It looks like it was hit by an anti-charm missile. It had the bad fortune of being almost entirely rebuilt after World War II, during what architectural historians refer to as the ”Age of Making Everything Look Like a Municipal Parking Garage, But Without the Warmth.”
And it goes on for miles. Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and I would estimate that at any moment, 14.7 million of them are lost. This is because the Tokyo street system holds the world outdoor record for randomness. A map of Tokyo looks like a tub of hyperactive bait. There is virtually no street that goes directly from anywhere to anywhere.
Adding to the excitement: Almost none of the streets have names! You think I`m kidding, right? Look at a map of Tokyo. Look at a detailed map. Look for street names. There are hardly any. This is one of the biggest, busiest, most important cities in the world, and most of the streets don`t have names. Ha ha! That`s a good joke on you, Mr. or Mrs. Visitor!
But wait! There`s more! On these streets without names, there are buildings with meaningless numbers! Yes! No. 17 could be right next door to No. 341, which could be miles from No. 342!
So getting to an unfamiliar destination in Tokyo is basically a matter of going on the Treasure Hunt From Hell, especially if you don`t speak or read Japanese.
We couldn`t take many taxis in Tokyo because we had no way to tell the drivers where we wanted to go. We often rode the subways, which are, of course, clean and efficient, but sometimes very crowded. No doubt you`ve seen photos of Japanese subway workers shoving commuters into a subway car that`s already visibly bulging. Of course, subway workers would never try a crazy stunt like that in the United States. There would instantly be 57 commuters writhing on the platform, screaming ”WHIPLASH!” But the Japanese tend to be far more cooperative and docile and group-oriented. It would be easier to get the entire population of Tokyo to wear matching outfits than to get any two randomly selected Americans to agree on pizza toppings.
In fact, at times it seemed as though the entire population of Tokyo already was wearing matching outfits. All the men seemed to be wearing dark suits, white shirts and dark ties. All the women seemed to be wearing darkish conservative dresses, often with hats and high heels. All the children seemed to be wearing some kind of school uniform. It was like a giant funeral. We didn`t wear particularly casual clothes over there, but we always felt like The Hippie Tourists. Not that anybody ever said anything. Nobody ever hassled us about anything in Japan, where open confrontations about anything are considered horrendously embarrassing to everybody. But people always noticed us. Whenever I happened to glance up in the subway, I`d catch people staring at us, not in a hostile way, but frankly curious, because we were different, and I think the Japanese find being different fascinating, because it`s the one thing, above all, that they`re raised not to be.
I certainly would never say anything judgmental about another culture, but in certain food-related areas, the Japanese are clinically insane. The new culinary rage when we were in Japan was to eat fish that were still alive. I cannot imagine doing such a thing unless I were really desperate to get into a fraternity, but according to news reports, people pay top yen in fine Tokyo restaurants for live, gasping fish. The waiter brings you your fish, still gasping (the fish, although I suppose the waiter could be, too), then quickly slices it open right at your table. Then you`re supposed to eat it while the fish is staring at you with its nearer eyeball and a facial expression that says: ”Go ahead and enjoy yourself! Don`t mind me! I`ll be dead fairly soon!”
And that`s not the weirdest culinary activity that the Japanese engage in. There is also fugu. This is a kind of blowfish that the Japanese eat raw. So far, you are not surprised. You are saying: ”Big deal, the Japanese eat a lot of fish raw.” Well, what you are apparently not aware of, Mr. or Ms. Smarty Pants, is that fugu contains an extremely lethal poison. It`s the Blowfish of Doom. The liver of the male and the ovaries of the female contain one of the most toxic substances in nature, for which there is no antidote, which means that if your fugu is not prepared exactly right, with all of the dangerous organs removed, you are soon going to meet the Big Maitre d` in the Sky.
Clearly this is a fish that Mother Nature is telling us we should leave the hell underwater, but to the Japanese it is a great delicacy. Every year they eat tons of it. They`ll pay the equivalent of hundreds of dollars to eat it. And every year several people die because their fugu was prepared wrong.
I suppose it probably wouldn`t be so scary if you (notice I didn`t say I) ate fugu prepared by a trained professional chef, but suppose you were invited to dinner in somebody`s home and the host decided to pull out all the stops and really give you a treat?
HOSTESS: Guess what?
YOU: What?
HOSTESS: Roger`s making fugu!
YOU: WHAT??
ROGER (who has clearly had a few drinks, shouting from the kitchen): Yes! I picked this up today at a little place right next to the whale-uvula stand! (He waves a blowfish, which is a hideous greenish-black color and is puffed up with rage.) I`m going to prepare it now!
YOU (hastily): I hate to see you go to all that trouble. Maybe we should just….
ROGER (starting to whack the blowfish apart with a knife): Nonsense!
This`ll only take a second!
HOSTESS: Roger loves to cook.
ROGER (Holding up a fish part): Honey, does this look like an ovary?
I think one useful Japanese phrase they should include in the tourist guidebooks is: ”Does this particular dish kill you if prepared improperly?” Of course, at many Japanese restaurants, once you see your bill, you might wish you had consumed an improperly prepared blowfish because the prices, especially in Tokyo, are extremely high. I cannot overemphasize the importance, if you go there, of having Random House pay for everything.
