It’s always a difficult process to go into, but especially get out of stores in Japan, due to one particular, culture-linked reason. There exists a wide array of stark contrasts in Japan, some of which I have covered before in my tales. The one I’m going to introduce now concerns verbal communication in service situations. While there is very limited small talk occurring elsewhere, shopkeepers and other service personnel tend to talk constantly for no apparent reason, spouting polite slogans all the time, forever.
This communication is culturally inclined to only happen one way. They are supposed to make me feel welcome and satisfied, but I am not really supposed to answer or even acknowledge them. The aforementioned lack of action is extremely difficult for me. If a person thanks me or welcomes me, I get an irrepressible urge to retort. Judging from how natives handle these situations, the correct behavior appears to be limited to ignoring and, on a good day, dismissive grunts. I am miserably bad at doing that. Granted, I have the ability to fully ignore certain people I know. My friends are similarly adept at ignoring me; it’s the only thing that keeps us from killing each other. But I am horrendously ineffective at ignoring polite strangers. These boring paragraphs work as a premise to the following, equally irrelevant problem.
The oft-repeated irasshaimase notwithstanding, I still attempt to answer most “thank yous” and “goodbye, come agains” that are sent my way. The issue here is that Japanese people are required by law to have the final say in all things courteous. They need to be the last ones to bow or say thank you. To make matters more interesting, so do I. Many a time have I ended a restaurant or konbini trip in some kind of never-ending thanking duel, as if time had suddenly stopped in much the same way old VHS tapes behaved when put on pause: repetitive discrete motion and a hiss. The ultimate conclusion to these visits used to be that I was already well out of the shop before finally shutting up with the “azassss”, an infinitely shortened version of the standard arigatou gozaimasu.
I was also reminded of a story I read a long time ago about a foreigner wishing to leave a store without allowing the clerk to answer his final bow. After bowing what he had decided would be his winning performance, he dashed to his car and tried leaving the premises. To his surprise, the Japanese shopkeeper was waiting for him at the exit of the parking lot, and got his revenge.
My ingenious way to prevent this from happening nowadays is timing. I have been following a harsh regimen of arigatou training in order to place my thanks correctly in a real life situation. If I begin thanking at just the right moment, I will end the verbal portion of the exchange at the exact same instant as the adversary, thus relieving us both from answering duty and leading the non-argument to an end.
All of this came to mind because I made two trips to Saint Marc Café today. Two trips were necessary because I wanted to take photos of the pastries and forgot on the first try. Naturally I had to go there for a second time, only for the sake of the blog, and not at all because I wanted to eat more chocolate croissants. Weirdly enough, I forgot to take photos before going on a binge on the second visit as well. Instead, here is a picture of some stuff I ate at a café in Kobe roughly a week ago.
Train station lunch. The manly drink is strawberry milk, with ice. A straw was added later.
IT’S NOT FUNNY! DON’T TALK! THE HOT TUB’S TOO HOT!
In other news, for the second time this season, the sento of Hotel Chuo was too hot for a westerner to enter. I’m pretty sure the old Japanese men frequenting it have boiled themselves so badly they cant even feel anything anymore.
-Antti
