The other day I ate soba noodles for lunch, and I was amused at a sign I saw above my head, which said narubeku kin’en, translatable as “No Smoking As Possible, Please.”
I found it quite amusing for the restaurant owners to ask customers not to smoke “if they can possibly avoid it.” Although smoking rates have been falling in recent years, the Japanese do smoke quite a lot, with 41% of males and 12% of females currently lighting up, which compares to 27% and 24% in the U.K. and 24% and 18% in the U.S., respectively.
Tobacco was introduced to Japan by the Portuguese during the 16th Century, and it took hold quickly, with a traditional pipe called a kiseru very popular throughout the Edo Period.
Today cigarettes enjoy a rather unique status, since the Japanese Ministry of Finance is the majority stockholder in the country’s largest tobacco company, and regional economies get 50% of the taxes collected on cigarettes by law.
One area where the industry here has shown vision has been preempting some of the negative feelings about cigarettes by promoting good smoking manners, as with the “Ah! Delight” and “Smokin’ Clean” campaigns that show smokers being considerate of others.
Japan often seems custom-built to confound Westerners, and it’s interesting that a country that smokes as much as it does still manages to enjoy long life spans, something that generally goes against expectations in the West.
What Japan Thinks has a report on an Internet survey about what Japanese people think are the greatest attributes of Japan and the Japanese people.
The top 10 responses. . .
1. A sense of the four seasons
2. Diligence
3. Kindness
4. Rich food culture
5. Ability to create cutting-edge technology
6. Courteousness
7. Strong sense of duty
8. Consideration of others
9. Flexibility in adopting new cultures
10. Manual dexterity
Other notables further down the list are “Ability to express things vaguely,” “Ability to distinguish between subtle differences in taste,” and “Good table manners.”
Straight from the Japanese Make the Best Tourists Department comes a report that students from Gifu City Women’s College are in hot water for defacing the Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy during an overseas study tour by writing the date, their names, and the names of their friends with an oil-based marker on the marble wall. The cathedral is included on the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage List.
A recent survey by online travel company Expedia.com reveals that Japanese tourists are ranked best overall by hoteliers. The Japanese were followed by the Germans and Britons who were tied for second place, followed by the Canadians and Swiss.
The survey ranked American tourists as the most generous, followed by Canadians and Russians, while the French, British and Dutch were the most “fiscally conservative.”
Britons, Italians and Americans were considered noisy, while the French and Germans were among the messiest hotel guests.
Americans were at the bottom of the list when it came to fashion sense, with Italians and French voted tops.
For some reason, there’s a lot of interesting culture to be found at the porcelain altar, between the seatless Japanese-style toilets that present foreign visitors with their first major culture shock in Japan to those wonderful “Washlet” toilet seats that clean and dry your rear end while you do your business.
Once I went to a restaurant with my daughter, who was about five years old at the time, and had an interesting experience. She excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, but came out a minute later saying she was too scared to go because there was a “strange sound” in the bathroom. She insisted I come in with her, so I ducked inside to see what this scary sound could be.
It turns out it was a device called Oto-hime (a play on the name of a goddess from Japanese mythology, Otohime、written with different characters that mean “Sound Princess”), which makes a chirping sound when ladies use the toilet, because Japanese women hate the idea of anyone being able to hear any sounds they make while they go. Before the device was introduced in the 1980s, it seems that female patrons in restraunts would flush the toilet multiple times to mask the sounds, which wasted an incredible amount of water. Since males don’t usually go into public ladies’ rooms, the existence of these strange sound-emitting devices is quite mysterious to men in Japan.
Here’s a video of how they work. Just wave your hand over the button and the sound of water will come out of the device, allowing you to do whatever you need to do with without nervousness of people listening to the sounds you make.
“It is prohibited to conduct any group demonstration, to carry flags, placards or wear group participation arm bands. It is also prohibited to assemble, hold group meetings, sitdowns, force interview, or use violence on visitors. In addition, the authorization of the management is necessary for the distribution of leaflets or notes, indoor and outdoor photography, peddling, street and stall vending, and all public activities.
Three days into a trip in Japan and my mother and I were sitting in a coffee shop in Kyoto. In came a foreigner (meaning, a white woman) with two kids. I knew they were trouble, the sort of children to whom everything–including bad behavior–is “explained,” which seems to be a trend in child-rearing these days. The younger child, a girl, had a tendency to scream, to which her mother said, “Now, do you think this is a place where it is okay to scream? If you scream, you will have to play outside.”
The girl kept screaming.
After the third screaming, my mother, ever the ferocious enforcer when she wants to be, turned around and said quite sharply (and in English) “Hey! Stop it! This is Japan. You do not scream in Japan. That is not acceptable.”
Everyone–including me–was stunned. The girl was stunned. Her older brother, her tormenter who had been the cause of the screaming, was stunned. He even tried to defend his sister, but my mother turned her steely eyes on him and said, “No. You do not scream here. That does not work. End of story.” And, really, even though Japan has seriously changes since the Showa era and I don’t get the dog-and-MILF-thing, at least the kids don’t scream.
I felt sorry for the foreign mother. She looked harried, like she was just looking for some place to rest for, oh, fifteen minutes so she could caffeine it up a bit. I thought that her kids looked mixed–like me–but that she was divorced or separated. She did not seem married. Her daughter looked wild. None of them apologized. They just ate as quickly as possible and departed. The Japanese in the coffee shop pretended to ignore the whole thing. I was embarrassed. I hate being the center of attention. I like observing. But . . . I was secretly and enormously proud of my mother. Very proud of her to try to battle social ills and try to set them straight. I love that about her.
At the same time, it can be so unsettling to see your own children publicly scolded like that by a stranger. There have been times in Japan when I’ve had the impulse to stop someone from doing something embarrassing. What are your experiences? What do you think?
CNN has an entertaining and revealing 2-minute video on Tokyo’s lost and found. In a city of 12-or-so million people, it’s staggering how much gets turned in. The piece discusses the 130,000 umbrellas, the change in policy of holding items from 6 months to 3 months due to storage issues, and cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan. Suffice it to say that in the U.S. if you lose something, most of the time you will never see it again.
The last time I took my husband to Japan, he was in the middle of training for the New York City marathon. It’s a rather rigorous schedule, involving numerous “short” runs during the week and long runs on the weekend.
I was a little bit nervous about him running around Japan in a pair of shorts. I explained that he wouldn’t exactly see anyone else doing this, and as I tend to worry about what other people are doing when I am in Japan, I didn’t really want him to stand out that much. Of course, when you are 6 foot 2 in Japan, and Caucasian, you are going to stand out, so it was a ridiculous exercise in anxiety.
My mother worried too. She pointed out that there had been kidnappings by North Koreans in recent years and it wasn’t good for my husband to go out by himself like this. He still likes to tell this story because he finds it so amusing.
He did get lost once in Tokyo, and only managed after much running around, to find the hotel. After that, I sent him out with a business card from the hotel and some money, though I wondered if a taxi would really stop to pick him up. He said that every now and then he passed some other jogger, who was very happy to see him–though said jogger was not in shorts. Once he got in trouble at the Meiji Jingu for running. The police even forced him to cross the street far away from the shrine grounds by barking, “Not park!” He got his revenge later when he went for a beautiful run (he says) in Nara, all the way up Wakamiya Jinja and back down past some deer.
So, exercise devotees, how and where do you work out in Japan? It occurs to me that all my exercise goes on hold while I am there, and though I am probably arguably eating very healthy food, I could use a little more cardio in my days.
On the heels of the other somewhat debated “Changing Mores” post, here is another photo for you Japanophiles to digest.
Now, I’m really, really sure that this is the kind of thing you rarely would have seen twenty years ago. And if I’m wrong, I know Ed will tell me (and so will all of you).
Twenty years ago, this is not really something you would have seen in Japan. Any of you long time Japanophiles notice what makes this photo (taken in Japan) a sample of changing manners and habits?
The Fiji Times recently ran an editorial urging taxi drivers to stop ripping off visitors, immigration officials to stop chewing gum and being so grumpy, and shop assistants to stop their rude hassling of customers. But mostly it encouraged its citizens to refrain from urinating on tourists.
The paper reported that an incident in March last year, in which a drunk Fijian soldier exposed himself on an airplane and urinated on a Japanese woman, has done untold damage to Fiji.
"This unforgivable offence has caused untold damage in Japan a market which Fiji has strived for decades to cultivate," the newspaper said.
"All it takes is one moment of stupidity to paint a black picture of this nation and her people in a lucrative market. The incident has generated widespread, negative publicity at a time when we need it the least."
The editorial went on to point out that urinating on tourists brings on “global notoriety” and “unwanted exposure” for the country.
The other day I ate soba noodles for lunch, and I was amused at a sign I saw above my head, which said narubeku kin’en, translatable as “No Smoking As Possible, Please.” 
