We Are Weird

Three months in Japan; routines are becoming established; some of the initial surprise and shock at new things has become dampened; I’m starting to get used to life here.  Cars on the left side of the street?  Of course!  Chopsticks and rice at every meal?  Naturally.  Being unable to communicate with most of the world around me?  Has it ever been otherwise?

But new things do still happen here from time to time, I guess.  Thanksgiving was last week.  Although I’m fairly familiar with the traditions surrounding this holiday, this was the first year I’ve had to celebrate Turkey Day away from my family.

As my alarm buzzed me awake Thursday morning all I could think about was how horrible it was to have to work on Thanksgiving.  But I managed.  At school I was wishing every kid I saw “Happy Thanksgiving!”  Most just passed by with a confused smile on their face, but a few stopped and asked for an explanation.  As I struggled to express the traditions in simple English I was brought back to an experience I had in high school Spanish class.  Each year we would study cultural traditions particular to certain Spanish-speaking countries – Los Dias de Los Muertos (The Days of the Dead) stood out in particular.  Their traditions seemed so strange to me, but at the same time I could see how important they were to the people celebrating them.  I knew in class that I would learn plenty about what their traditions were, but getting an understanding of the feelings accompanying the traditions or why they were so important . . . that was impossible.  And however much I could acknowledge that the traditions had profound importance for someone, somewhere, they could never be more than cultural oddities to me. 

So when I started explaining Thanksgiving to students I strongly identified with the opposite side of my situation in high school.  Sure, I could tell students about turkey and football and family and being thankful, but I couldn’t tell them about sitting around a table in Enon, OH, reuniting with family, joking about Erin making an extra green bean casserole sans mushrooms just to accommodate my preferences, falling asleep halfway through the Cowboys game, waking up to pie . . . .  No matter how much I told them about our traditions, there’s no way I could communicate all that to them.

But I guess this all goes along with being a foreigner.  Most of my time here I’ve been stuck noticing all sorts of weird things Japanese people do that are nonetheless essential to their way of life.  This Thanksgiving made me pause and consider some of the weird things that Americans do that are essential to our way of life.   Why do we do the things we do?  Why do we relate and communicate with people in a particular way?  It sure isn’t because one way is more effective or efficient than the other.  At times I’m confused by the Japanese way of doing things because there seems to be a much more efficient way of getting the job done, but sometimes efficiency isn’t the goal.  Maybe that’s some of my American-ness coming through; we tend to place value on brevity and directness, while the Japanese way often seems to prefer indirectness and patience.  But even Americans do not always do things the most efficient way.  I can’t help but paraphrase the words of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, “How did we start doing the things we do?  I don’t know.  But it's a traditions, and it's our traditions that tell us who we are.”  (This part in the video starts at 2:10)
 

 Yes, we are all weird, we do things that don’t seem to make sense or have a reason, but that is what makes us, us.