A couple things I really hate about living in Japan

The other day I posted about one of the things I like about living in Japan:  childhood innocence and low crime rate.  Now, some things I really hate.

Why is Denny’s a curry house?  Why can’t I get a grand slam breakfast?  Where’s the skillet meals, the sausage, bacon, eggs any way I want?  Where’s the hash browns, the little glass of orange juice (okay, you can get that)?  Every once and a while I want a good, cheap American style diner breakfast, and Denny’s embodies that.  It’s the place you go to with your 80 year old grandma on a Saturday morning in January to have coffee, the place where you go with your college friends at 3 am for eggs and french toast, the place you go to eat with your new husband when you only have 12 dollars between you.  But here, it’s curry, curry and more curry.  I don’t find Japanese curries all that appetizing.  They’re sort of blander, less flavorful, boring bastardizations of the much better Indian or Thai curries.  Maybe they’re an acquired taste, but not a taste I ever actually want to acquire, really.  But it’s a great thing that I can find some of the best Indian and Thai curries I have ever eaten, and these restaurants are all over Tokyo.  Just close your eyes, point, and you’re good.  But I really would like Denny’s to serve the Grand Slam.

And another thing I hate about Japan are women who mistake generalized and often thoughtless politeness as a come-on.  Okay, so maybe it’s just a couple of them, but they annoy me to no end.  There are women who think if a Western man glances or makes any sort of eye contact or polite smile on the street then that man must find them really attractive.  Not true.  Fact in point, Western men are raised to be polite to women, even if they never intend to see that woman again, and even if that woman bears a striking resemblance to Quasimodo, which might likely induce more stares, glances or awkward smiles.  It’s sort of ingrained in them to politely glance and smile at women when they move over on a sidewalk or hold a door.  Again, even if the woman hit every branch of the ugly tree on her way to the ground, Western men still do this.  When I went back to America the last time, I couldn’t count the number of times a strange man said hello, nodded, glanced, smiled or merely gruffed when he glanced and moved over on a sidewalk or held a door for me.  It’s not that I am the most beautiful woman on the face of the planet – I am not of course – but it is that I am in fact a woman.  I could describe what I look like, but it is unique enough that my identity would be revealed to many people who know me, and yes, I can say that I used to be quite the looker in my former life, enough so to have attracted the eye of a current A-list movie star while sitting in a bar in NYC (I have witnesses, and I hope they don’t read this blog, because they could guess who I am based on that fact alone).  And I think there is something about how American men are trained by their fathers to do this that subconsciously sticks with them the rest of their lives.  I seriously doubt most of them even know that they’re doing it.  Japanese men are always nodding and smiling at me on the sidewalk, and I seriously doubt that every one who does this finds me attractive.  I have no illusions or delusions – what have you.  But of course, if I make mention of this to a Japanese woman, she would likely dismiss me as a liar.  No, it’s just that I look different than the others in the crowd.  I may actually be attractive, but it’s more likely that I simply bear no resemblance to the people around me, and that automatically will catch the eye. 

Another thing I have a hard time tolerating is the over-abundance of gossip.  For the most part, I am highly gossip-averse and change the subject when someone tries to either prod me for information or try to share something with me about another person.  I don’t care and certainly don’t want to hear about whether Joe in Accounting is interested in sleeping with Megumi in Marketing.  For all I know, poor Joe may have just been seen holding the elevator door for her (something poor Joe may not know is a clear indication that he is sexually attracted to Megumi).  But there are women out there who find it life’s ambition to smear Joe through the mud with all the girls in the office and besmirch poor Megumi’s character in the process.  And to make matters worse, Megumi, who probably knew the rumors would ensue, may actually think Joe is attracted to her now and may not be providing him the proper business support necessary to make his job easier, and may now be uncomfortable around him and may be avoiding him entirely.  Of course, pointing out that Western men will hold elevator doors for anyone coming in the direction of an elevator doesn’t go over well.  Something about the gossip’s mind can’t seem to get around that little fact.  And nobody has clued poor Joe into the fact that he should never hold the elevator door for any woman with whom he works.  Of course, the other problem is that the gossip never thinks that she has caused any great problem or made herself look worse in front of her Western colleagues, who now all presume that she is likewise spreading inappropriate innuendo about them in the office.  This sort of behaviour is condoned and expected in Japan.  While it occurs in the US as well, I’ve never seen anything quite as bad as here.  Apparently, the general practices of Japanese men in their relations to Japanese women are so kata-ized that to step outside of the unspoken boundaries that are not even known to Western men results in a lot of false crap being started by nosy and bored office ladies who really should get back to typing and setting up dinner reservations for their boss and his wife.  After having tried to make friends with some of the women in my husband’s office, I have decided that it’s a really bad idea, and I wouldn’t generally recommend it.  Of course, that is, unless the woman actually has some understanding of how Western men think and act around women in general.  They may be okay, but I’m still wary. 

I have a small handful of Japanese women friends.  All of them are married to Western men or Westernized Japanese men. It isn’t by any conscious choice that I’ve managed to only befriend these sort of women.  It’s just so far, I’ve liked these women and haven’t found any other Japanese women, either single or married to Japanese men, with whom I have anything in common or who won’t stop with the idiotic gossiping and prodding for personal information.  They tend to not want to be friends when they find out I am not going to give them any intimate details of my personal home life or to be very interested in the nasty gossip they want to share.  Maybe it’s just that I have really bad luck with only having met the worst possible potential friends, or that I am somehow afraid to step outside of my “enclave” as one such gossipy troublemaker recently told me in an unsolicited email.  I know there have to be friendly, kind, and genuinely likable Japanese women out there with whomI have enough in common to actually be friends.  But so far, I’m coming up snake-eyes.

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