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I was recently getting changed in the locker room at the gym I go to here in Japan and for a few moments I had the entire changing room to myself. Then I heard the door open and somebody came in puffing and huffing after a workout. I didn’t see the person as a bank of lockers separated me from him. Indeed, it is quite likely that he had no idea of my presence as I am generally a fairly silent changer. He, however, was inappropriately noisy. Regardless of whether or not he thought he had the room to himself, there was simply no need for the kinds of sounds emanating from his side of the lockers. A bit of huffing and puffing after exercise is forgivable, but this fellow proceeded to make large grunts, a few moans and several loud exhalations and weary sighs. For a moment I thought he was doing a jobby on the floor!
I hate people emitting unnecessary noise, and although the Japanese are by no means alone in their audible annoyances, there are some areas where I think they truly are world beaters. One is in the area of food. It is well-known that the Japanese slurp their noodles noisily and that this habit isn’t rude in the slightest in their own land. I quickly became used to this, but all the same it does sometimes seem that short of letting rip loudly at an imperial banquet and inviting the Emperor to “get a whiff of that one” no table manners would be too outrageous for the Japanese dinner table. Of course I generalize, but eating with a group of Japanese people really can be a sure-fire way to lose one’s appetite. You can hear an astonishing array of sounds, from people noisily shoveling rice down their gullets to folk managing to make huge smacking chewy noises when they eat absolutely anything from a piece of delicate sashimi to a bowl of ice-cream. On occasion it has taken all of my self-control not to ask, “Are you trying to be disgusting? Is that a cultural thing?” Indeed, if you watch any one of the myriad cooking shows that plague television here you will witness the astoundingly popular pastime of trying to talk with an entire mouthful of food still resting upon the tongue.
The other area of unnecessary human expulsions in which the Japanese are truly masters is that of hitorigoto, more commonly known to you and me as talking to yourself. It seems that the whole country is at it, from post-office workers to old women in the supermarket to the fellow standing far too close behind you at the cash machine. Nowhere, though, have I witnessed hitorigoto more than at a junior high school where I used to teach. I would only have to visit the school once a week, but I swear that the whole bloody lot of the teachers in the staff room spent virtually all their waking moments mumbling and muttering to themselves. It could be very unnerving. Of course, I couldn’t understand what they were saying most of the time, but the guy sitting next to me in the staff room was a compulsive hitorigotoer and from what I could gather his verbosity was a simple stream of consciousness: “Ah, it’s hot today. What shall I do now? Where’s my pen? It’s not on my desk? Where could it be? Ah, what shall I do? I’ll use another pen! Ah, here it is! It was in the drawer! Ah, it’s hot!...” all day bloody long.
That chap was also a proud proponent of using the word yosh! This is a word that many Japanese people use to signify that they are, or have been, expending energy. Lifting a box? Yosh! Finished stacking a ridiculous number of books on your desk for no apparent reason? Yosh! Sitting down after a bit of a strenuous class? Yosh! But this guy took it to extremes. He would Yosh! every time he stood up or sat down, every time he made the slightest of decisions, and even on occasion at the herculean effort of putting a pen in his pocket. It drove me nuts just being there once a week. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to work there every day. They were insane.
Perhaps none was more whacko than the science teacher who would habitually try and engage me in conversation in painfully broken English. He would usually begin with, “To tell the truth” or “By the way”, so that his opening gambit might be, “To tell the truth I am a hangover!” or “By the way, it is very fine today!” He was pleasant enough though, and just trying to be friendly. He always asked how I was and when I returned the question would come out with some wonderful replies, ranging from the perfectly normal, “I’m fine” to the Michael Jackson-esque, “I’m bad” to the quite startling, “I’m funky” which rather took me aback, coming as it did from a thin geeky chap with greasy hair and glasses on only our second ever conversational exchange. On my last day at that school he came to say goodbye to me. He said, “By the way, I am sad this your last day. You are my best friend!”
Steady on there big fellow!
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