The Instructed Isles
Them’s the rules. Lots and lots of rules.
I admit to feeling a bit inadequate coming to Japan, a barbarian from the western wilderness setting his foot in a land that had spent millennia developing a culture of legendary refinement. The place where grabbing a cuppa is an act of high art that begins at dawn, where one sweeps the flagstones in front of the tea house with a birch broom while meditating on the subtle symbolic tension between the burgeoning buds on the branches and the gently decaying leaves on the ground in the woods beyond.
Me, I’ve been known to belch after drinking beer straight from the bottle.
It’s not that I arrived completely ignorant. I know not to stick my chopsticks upright in the rice bowl, blow my nose in public or walk on tatamis in shoes. I am a barbarian, after all, not a degenerate.
Still, I was intimidated. This is a country where schoolchildren master four different scripts before puberty, one of them that has at least two different pronunciations for each of its 6000 characters, while I can barely write my own name legibly.
Fortunately, the people of these fair isles are nothing if not considerate. Being well aware of foreigners’ shortcomings, they provide detailed instructions for everything, in English, Korean and Chinese. Seats on trains have two pages worth of instructions on proper sitting etiquette. Sidewalks have coloured lanes and arrows to keep you moving in the accepted direction. Using a toilet is not much more complex than flying an airplane, but there are detailed instructions to ensure you land safely.
Or so I thought. After a while, though, I realized that those instructions are not only or mainly for foreigners but for the Japanese themselves. Many signs (don’t stop here, says a yellow rectangle on the sidewalk; walk on the left on this staircase, but on the right on the next one, explains a sign on the wall) are only written in Japanese and frequently consulted by passers-by.
Traffic wardens stand on every other crossroad in narrow suburban streets and use their red batons to politely wave on the one lone cyclist that passes every ten minutes. Two attendants stand guard on rural train stations, directing and helping the rare passenger insert their ticket into the ticket machine. Restaurants have touchpads with picture menus that let you order remotely, but a hovering waiter appears at the slightest sign of confusion on your face to show you how to make a selection.
I am now less intimidated. True, Japanese schoolchildren still learn more by sixth grade than I have managed in my sixty years, but even they have a limit. Sometimes, even Japanese trains are delayed. By up to four minutes, accompanied by the deepest apologies, but definitely delayed.
