Faux-cultural warriors abound.

It is interesting to watch how people apparently concerned with discrimination and rights are so quick to interpolate the full range of potential diversity of Japanese between their limited contact with the locals and then extrapolate these points into universal, homogenized cultural traits.

Let me relate a story via autobiography. Once upon a time I worked at an eikaiwa. Life was hard, I still knew very little Japanese and that little bubble world became my font of knowledge about all things Japanese. Individual student idiosyncrasies blossomed into national cultural behaviors, incomplete and often very rough, second language opinions on various topics became gospel and the OLs were the ultimate adjudicating authority about all things local…

Then my Japanese ability caught up. My world widened, opportunities increased and the pool of people I knew and could get to know expanded. Japan became a different country. The elementary level cultural diplomacy phrases complimenting my chopsticks use or my Japanese level were not the “micro-aggressive” annoyances that the subject of this article suggests. They were/are simply what they are – small talk between locals and someone who by appearances is not. Ice breakers equivalent to “Sure is nice weather today”. These exchanges are easily transcended when they no longer live in the abstract.

To that extent, even now when I occasionally get the old nicety about my chopsticks or Japanese, I simply say thanks in a manner consistent with local custom, complete with a little bit of self-deprecation for the sake of humility, humor and warmth. The utterer of such phrases doesn’t know me, how would s/he. Stands to reason that they’d want to break the ice, no?

Finally @ El Anon: what have you done to command status and respect? This is a bizarre habit of so many foreigners concerned with their position in local hierarchies. I say again: what have you done to deserve respect? Sure, there’s a seniority system in Japan, it’s more explicitly coded here as it is in other Asian cultures but it is also a phenomenon which occurs everywhere in the world. You want respect, you have to earn it. As a foreigner, whether expat or permanent resident, it is likely that you didn’t come up through the system, you don’t fit. No big deal, if you want in there are ways to do it but complaining in the community pages of the Japan times is not one of them.

There is unfortunately a cultural problem in Japan, in that many Japanese feel that a non-Japanese person can never be trusted when it comes to important matters. To these Japanese, it does not matter how sincere, loyal, hardworking, capable, accomplished or intelligent the non-Japanese person is. To them, the only litmus test of whether someone can be trusted or not is based on the binary notion of Japanese vs. non-Japanese.

In my home country of America, I often see people cross racial, ethnic, country of origin, and religious lines, etc., to defend, support each other and to develop long lasting productive relationships based on mutual respect and trust. In contrast to this, in my many years living and working in Japan, I have never seen a Japanese cross the line which they feel seperates them from the rest of humanity, which is all lumped into one big non-Japanese mass in their minds.

Well, yeah, if your going in position is that every social interaction is some kind of power play, and every question is a carefully laid trap designed to put you in your place, then naturally communicating on an equal footing is going to be somewhat challenged.

Conditioning people to distrust fear interacting with The Japanese (surely the very definition of xenophobia), to deceive each other (“Yes, lie about it,” because that’s what *they* all do) and to take umbrage over normal, get-to-know-you social small-talk (“What business was it of my friend’s coworkers to ask about his background?”), positions you to be part of the problem when you could smile, chat, enjoy the interaction your hard-won fluency has enabled, and be part of the solution.
Moreover, people are people; take them as such, foibles and all. Stop looking for the secret decoder ring. There isn’t one.

“I suggested he should not only say thank you and accept the accolades, but also claim the part-Japaneseness. Yes, lie about it.” – I would not. Why? So I can get a perceived “higher societal position” in Japan? Pfff…Not THAT important to me. I would just accept the accolades with a “Thank You – I studied very hard”.

It is very common for Japanese staff to ignore and not speak to non-Japanese staff at Japanese companies. I have seen this happen at many Japanese companies over the course of many years.

There can be various reasons for this in the mind of the Japanese staff. Some may think it’s too much trouble (menduksai) to have foreigners around, or they may be jealous about the good outcome of something the foreign worker was involved in, or they may not like the seat assigned to the foreigner, or they may not like that the foreigner does not wear only boring white shirts to the office everyday, or they may not like that the foreigner can speak clearly and confidently when it is called for in business settings, or they may not like that the foreigner is married to a Japanese woman, or thay may not like that the foreigner is tall, fat, white, black, brown, etc. The list goes on.

It could also simply be that the Japanese person was having a bad day and decided to take it out on anyone he perceives to be lower in status (this means women and foreigners in the office).

In short, the reasons the Japanese staff may ignore and not speak to the non-Japanese staff usually has nothing to do with something the non-Japanese person either did, or did not do.

It would also be unrealistic for the non-Japanese to speak up about his treatment, since he is the one who would be blamed for not understanding the Japanese business culture and for ruining the so called Wa and Japanese harmony in the workplace.

I really do try to find something good in these Just Be Cause columns. This one, however, is so downright strange that it defeats me.

Here’s what happened. A foreign-born resident speaks such good Japanese that someone Japanese asks if he is half Japanese – meaning, as everyone should be able to guess, that he was brought up by a Japanese speaker in a home where Japanese was spoken. To anyone who’s tried to learn a foreign language, this is a really nice compliment. Passing as “native” is a nice thing.

However, in Debito’s hands, this exchange is represented as a nasty skirmish in an unspoken race war against non-Japanese. As I said, downright strange.

Other people have written about the strange claims he makes that Japanese are offended by westerners trying to speak Japanese, and like others, I am rather surprised by his claim that Japanese is very easy to learn for English speakers. I have also never met a Japanese who has never tried to learn a foreign language, nor one that thinks learning Japanese is a walk in the park. Also, Debito overlooks that learning a language to a high level is more than learning vocabulary and grammar, but also the pragmatics. For example, reacting with modesty to a compliment in Japanese is not the same as reacting with modesty to a compliment in English. (One fears that Debito is using US conventions of social interaction as a universal and correct human standard. Again.)

I’d like to focus on a central fallacy in Debito’s argument, which involves his misuse of the word “power”. To begin with, it’s not just him, but sociology in general that recognises that all relationships can be viewed from the perspective of “power”, meaning that any two interacting individuals are of unequal status, authority, influence etc., and attempts to understand the meaning and impact of what each person says and does need to acknowledge this. This is not simply in obvious situations, such as a boss and an employee, a teacher and a student, a parent and a child. It also applies to situations such as between men and women, people of different ethnic groups, different sexualities, etc. depending on the context. Underlying a lot of it is the way that access to political/economic power varies between these different categories. Power in this sense is important to look at because imbalances in power in a relationship can lead to abuse.

The false and – as one or two others have pointed out here – disturbing move he makes is to say that because social interactions are power relationships, therefore social interactions are in essence direct attempts to assert power. They are attempts by one person to dominate, humiliate, and/or assert authority over, the other. He takes “power” to means “desire for power”. In this view, all interactions between Japanese and foreigners (which seems to be his constant fundamental binary category of human being) must be viewed as hostile.

That’s quite a scary idea for someone to express who has made it his business to tell foreigners how to live in Japan. With that in mind, I’d like to comment on this:

Critics of this column essentially believe that Japanese society can
never be satirized, i.e., using humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule
to criticize social stupidity and folly. That’s what this column has
done for years, raising howls of “cultural insensitivity” and so on.

I suppose I qualify as a critic of this column – but my problem is not that Japanese society should not be satirised. It’s just that the satire needs to be good before I’ll like it. It needs to hit the target, which is what this column frequently fails to do (instead it misidentifies, invents, or contorts abuses of power) Satire needs, obviously, to be funny. Most of all, and this is what I suspect provokes the critics, it should also be used to attack prejudice, not spread and reaffirm it.

The presumption that “henna gaijin” is necessarily derogatory is incorrect.

In fact, the opposite is generally the case, at least in my experience.

Foucault is obviously your mentor as far as your adherence to power relations as an organizing principle for your interpretations of social relations.