The Japanese Are Different From You and Me

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BY JAMES FALLOWS

JAPAN IS TURNING ME INTO MRS. TROLLOPE. She was the huffy Englishwoman who viewed the woolly Ameriean society of the 1820s and found it insufficiently refined. (“The total and universal want of good, or even pleasing, manners, both in males and females, is so remarkable, that I was constantly endeavoring to account for it,” and so forth.) Her mistake, as seems obvious in retrospect, was her failure to distinguish between things about America that were merely different from the ways of her beloved England and things that were truly wrong. The vulgar American diction that so offended her belongs in the first category, slavery in the second.

I will confess that this distinction—between different and wrong—sometimes eludes me in Japan. Much of the time I do keep it in mind. I observe aspects of Japanese life, note their difference from standard practice in the West, and serenely say to myself, who cares? Orthodontia has never caught on in Japan, despite seemingly enormous potential demand, because by the local canon of beauty overlapping and angled-out teeth look fetching, especially in young girls. It was barely a century ago that Japanese women deliberately blackened their teeth in the name of beauty. The delicate odor of decaying teeth was in those days a standard and alluring reference in romantic poetry. This is not how it’s done in Scarsdale, but so what? For their part, the Japanese can hardly conceal their distaste for the “butter smell” that they say wafts out of Westerners or for our brutish practice of wearing the same shoes in the dining room and the toilet.