June 2004

Ceridwen Trinder

I recently spent two weeks on an intensive language course in Iwade. My sharpest memory of the whole experience is sitting round the table with my host mother's eikaiwa friends, everybody with a huge blob of whipped cream on the end of their nose, discussing differences between English and Japanese culture, me trying very hard to keep a straight face.

It all started when my host mother realized that the day I was scheduled to cook roast dinner for her eikaiwa friends was April the first. This smiley, genki, funny little lady got a wicked gleam in her eyes and came up with the idea that when dessert arrived I should tell her friends that 300 years ago, the king of England had a cream dessert - and thought that the cream was bad. In the process of smelling it, he got some on the end of his nose - so of course, the whole court put cream on their noses too. It is now very, very rude in England to eat cream cakes without first putting a great big dollop on the end of your nose. We pulled it off - and when we came clean we almost felt the ice breaking. All of a sudden, there weren't three gaijin and five Japanese; there were just eight people who had shared an experience. We talked past midnight, despite having school in the morning, and nobody wanted to go home. Brilliant.

When I arrived in Iwade, I remember going to school and telling everybody that my host mother and sister were two of the coolest Japanese people I had ever met. The daughter, for example, introduced herself in mock-katakana English, but after about two hours of Japanese conversation, when I was having difficulties expressing my ideas, said in perfect English with a New Zealand accent - "well, you could say it like this.….... but a preferable alternative would be this ……..". My jaw hit the floor. The daughter also loved the English version of "kampai" because her friend told her that some times we say, "chin-chin." The mother got drunk on sake and told me that there was no gap between face and heart in her house, (in other words, she speaks her mind and expects others to do the same). Two of the coolest Japanese I ever met - we talked for hours every night, were never stuck for something to say, and had so many experiences and views in common.

So, the question I ask myself is why I add the word "Japanese" to the sentence "two of the coolest (Japanese) people I have ever met," and it comes back to the gaijin / Japanese division that seems so marked over here. Which of us in Wakayama doesn't identify groups of friends / individual friends / girlfriends / co-workers by their nationality before anything else? Of course, I am not suggesting that we should ignore cultural issues, and treat everybody the same - but I am suggesting that in a country where the major identifying character of individual identity seems to be gaijin / Japanese, we treat people as individuals and realize that nationality and race are only two aspects of a complex, rich interweaving of personality and culture. In other words, the most important thing about me is certainly not that I am not Japanese!
I had a lesson about this from my host mother, as she was giving me a lift back to Gobo. We got out in Yuasa to get some water for her (like an idiot, I had agreed to carry the numerous five liter bottles to her car). There were a few Japanese people staring, as usual, at the gaijin, which is nothing out of the ordinary. My host mother seemed a bit miffed, and after we got into the car asked me why the people were staring. Did she have something stuck to her? I thought she was joking, and said "it's only because you're a nihon-jin, with a gaijin in tow." She looked shocked, and then laughed out loud. In fact, she had to stop the car she was laughing so much. Through her tears of laughter, she told me that she had totally forgotten that I was a gaijin – I was just Ceri to her.
I am writing my thank you letter to her for my homestay this afternoon, and I think I'll sign off saying that she and her daughter are two of the most wonderful, eye-opening people I have ever met. No "if"s, "but"s or "maybe"s - and definitely, without the word "Japanese" in the sentence!

Posted on June 2004 in the following categories: Opinions, Stories and Information