East Meets West, Sort Of
I don't do it as often as I should,
but recently I was throwing out some very old papers from a shelf in my office and, as
usually happens, I was distracted into reading some of them. They weren't just any papers,
though. They were business cards from several visits to Japan years ago.
It's hard to scribble about audio and video for very long
without having some firsthand experience of the country where much of it originates, and I
have had the opportunity to travel to the Land of the Rising Sun on a number of occasions
over the years. What I always come away with is some sort of new insight.
Some of that has to do with technology, of course, and some
with the strange, yet familiar society of the country. But what always strikes me most is
the peculiar interplay between Japanese and Western culture.
For "Western" read "English language,"
and for "English" read "American." For most Japanese, the assumption
is always that if you are Western, you speak English. It's very common to see a group of
businessmen meeting in the cavernous lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo or another such
Western-style hostelry, and to hear a wide range of accents -- German, Italian, French, as
well as Japanese -- all speaking English, with greater or lesser facility. I've never
heard another language being spoken in such circumstances.
Because there are so few native English speakers to teach
the language in Japan (in spite of the "help wanted" ads that run ceaselessly in
Western newspapers), uniformed students think nothing of accosting non-Japanese strangers
in the street and trying out their English -- never Spanish or Norwegian. The first time
this happened to me, a young man sheepishly approached me in the Sony showroom in the
Ginza and asked with infinite care to be told the time. I hadn't yet cottoned to what was
happening, so I just pointed to my watch. I still remember the crestfallen look on his
face two decades later.
Then there are those business cards -- "name
cards," as they are universally called in Japan. There are strict rituals as to how
you exchange these, and sometimes they can conflict. Two Japanese businessmen will hand
over their cards to each other while bowing; with Westerners, they shake hands, but many
can't resist bowing as well. Trying to do all three at once can make for some awkward
moments.
The protocols are quite clear. Japanese who deal often with
Westerners will have two-sided cards: Japanese on one side, English on the other. Most
visitors learn to have them, too. The English versions are printed horizontally, the
Japanese vertically, and the correct way to deliver them is with the language of the other
person upward, and the card oriented so that he can read it easily. A Japanese person who
is comfortable with English will receive the card Japanese side up, and then turn it over;
if he doesn't, you'll probably need an interpreter.
It's only proper to hand over your card right side up, but
for Westerners dealing with the Japanese side of their cards, it's often hard to figure
out which way is up. In my case, it wasn't hard because my name has an initial
"G" in the middle of it, and the only way they can render that is by using the
Roman letter. All I had to do was make sure the G was the right way around, and I had no
difficulty. I told a colleague this, and he decided to do the same thing, even though he
never used his middle initial otherwise. Didn't work though -- his initial turned out to
be "N."
One thing that is common on the name cards of Japanese who
have a lot of contact with foreigners is that they often include an adopted Western given
name: Steve Shimizu, Robert Kojima, and the like. I always assumed that this was to make
it easier for Westerners to pronounce the names, but that's apparently not the case.
My publisher, Ron, and I were having dinner with an
executive of Luxman Electronics in Osaka, who boasted the unlikely adopted name of
Umberto, thanks to his years in Italy. His colleague called himself Fred. As the evening
wore on, we fell into an easy first-name basis, but eventually I pointed out to Umberto
that while they were addressing us as Ron and Ian, which were our real names, we were
calling them by their fake names. I proposed that we even the score by adopting assumed
Japanese names -- Shigeru and Toshiro, as it happens -- and this was agreed to.
At one point I asked Umberto if we were to revert to our
own names and call them by their real given names, would they be offended? Without
hesitation he said that they would. Japanese are very sparing about who is intimate enough
to address them by their given name, which is why so many adopt Western names: to make
social interaction with foreigners easier but without surrendering permission to address
them in a private fashion.
During the evening, we were accompanied by a member of our
Japanese staff, Mr. Nakayama. His name was Hideo, we knew, but he never used a Western
alias. Under the circumstances, we knew we couldn't address him by his real name so we
dubbed him George, and called him that for the rest of the dinner, to his great
discomfiture.
Mr. Nakayama was no stranger to name-awkwardness. He
confessed to us that he had once been posted to a country where people seemed to have
great difficulty with his name. Someone finally pointed out that, in their language,
"Naka" meant -- how you say? -- "Fornicate," and "Yama"
meant "Lots!"
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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