Family Life: Learning to Listen

Enroute to our hotel in Nara, our Japanese guide, Masae-san, chatted with us about, among other topics, baseball fans in Japan and her own family background. In doing so she illustrated characteristics associated with what many consider to be the typical Japanese communication style, including the use of indirection, subtext and layered references. The listener’s responsibility under these circumstances is to put everything together, to take what is said and give it meaning.

In talking about the fanatic behavior of Hanshin Tiger fans – the Tigers are Japan’s equivalent to the New York Yankees and the Osaka area‘s “home team” -- Masae-san spoke about post-victory behavior with “crazy guys” jumping into the Dotombori River flowing through central Osaka from a well-known bridge in the area. She pointed out that the river was “dirty and polluted” and that “only guys” participated.

As we cruised along, out our bus windows we could see brightly neon-lit buildings calling attention to the Pachinko parlors housed therein. Pachinko is a form of vertical pinball that has been around for a century or so, one of the means employed to get around a formal government ban on gambling. Masae-san admitted she had never been inside a Pachinko “entertainment center” in her entire life – too noisy and smoky for her taste – but conceded men found the lure hard to resist.

Later, describing her family life, she mentioned that she and her husband of twenty-eight years had an arranged marriage. An older family friend introduced the idea to her just before she and some female friends left for an extended European vacation; the proposal escaped her attention during the European adventure but was revived upon her return.

She found, upon meeting her prospective mate for the first time, that he seemed like “a nice guy”. Moreover, agreeing to the match made the entire process of finding a husband much easier and less fraught with unpleasant possibilities. She also mentioned that the marriage itself eventually worked out so well because both spouses found within it the ability “to go our own separate ways” without recrimination from the other.

The couple have two children: a son, 27, who edits digital visual materials for a media company (she thinks – he doesn’t tell her that much about what he does) and a daughter, 24, now teaching Japanese language and culture in Ghana as part of a government program like the Peace Corps in the United States. She and her daughter are “great friends.”

Listening to all this, one has to pull together lots of individual strands to gain insight into what is really being said here. Taking into account the editing involved in the above description of excerpts from Masae-san’s monologue enroute to Nara, the attentive listener can gain several interpretative meanings from her comments.

• Men and women here live on different planets.
  
• Male behavior is frequently crazy and uncouth and seldom takes the more refined feelings of women into account.
  
  
• Women is general hold the behavior of the Japanese male in some distain, keeping them at arms length as much as the culture will allow while still fulfilling their “female responsibilities”.
  
  
• Masae-san is willing to share these comments with us because we are, after all, gaijin (“foreigners”, literally “outside persons”) here in Japan for only a brief stay (and only the truly intuitive will “get” what she is able to say to us that she might not be able to say to a Japanese audience).

This can be exhausting work for us “outsiders”, all this working out the “real” meaning behind what is being said. But it’s well worth the effort and will give us lots of insights into the “real Japan”..