Linguistically learned but culturally clueless

I DROVE A TAXICAB to support myself when I studied Japanese at university. One day, one of my passengers, a woman in her 20s, asked me why I was hacking a cab. When she found out I was a student of Japanese, she asked another question: “Oh, are you studying the culture, too?”

I didn’t know what to say at first. This was a college town, so dealing with the affected attitudes of my fares was an occupational hazard, but she didn’t seem to be that kind of person. It was more likely that she had never spent a lot of time studying a foreign language. People who do study a foreign language with the objective of fluency quickly discover it’s impossible to learn another tongue without learning a lot about that country’s culture. But instead of giving her that kind of answer, I just let it go and said, yes, I was studying the culture too.

After reading this article in the Japan Times, however, I realized it was possible for apparently intelligent people to become fluent in a foreign language without understanding much about that country’s culture. Roger Pulvers writes about the belief among some Japanese that their language is the most difficult in the world. He relates a conversation with a Tokyo cab driver in the mid-80s about this subject.

“Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn’t it?”

Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.

“I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!”

Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!”

. . .Why did my taxi driver at Seijo Gakuenmae persist in perpetrating the myth of difficulty?

Here was my first thought after reading this passage: This guy is writing fiction. As a translator, I know more than a few foreigners fluent in Japanese, but I’m not sure any of them can spout such phrases as the Japanese equivalent of “the nominative plural of male animate nouns” off the top of their head. No doubt there are a few somewhere who can, and perhaps Pulvers is deeply immersed in linguistics studies from a Japanese perspective, but I have my reservations. People who study foreign languages also wind up learning a fair amount of grammatical terms, but most don’t bother with the specialized vocabulary for grammatical forms that don’t exist in the language they’re studying.

Here was my second thought: What is this man trying to prove? It’s not unusual in the United States to run into cab drivers with a master’s degree and an ambivalent attitude toward the workaday world, but I’ve yet to run into any in Japan. (Guys like that in Japan tend to open up coffee shops or bars, play jazz on the shop’s sound system, and refer to famous musicians by their first name only.) Does he really think he’s going to have a meaningful conversation about comparative linguistics with a cab driver? Does he think he’s going to change the driver’s mind? Is he one of those academics who just isn’t aware of what people usually talk about when they’re passing time and exchanging pleasantries?

Here was my third thought: Pulvers may have a superb command of the Japanese language, but he still doesn’t understand the basics of Japanese culture. That’s because the driver wasn’t interested in talking about the Japanese language. He was just trying to strike up a casual conversation with a foreigner. In the mid-80s, even in Tokyo, his foreign customer was probably the highlight of his day.

Foreigners new to Japan often complain about how Japanese like to start conversations by bringing up what they consider to be trivial subjects, such as the foreigner’s Japanese ability, dexterity with chopsticks, or the weather. The tragedy is that they’re being given a basic lesson in one of the primary differences of Japanese culture and they fail to recognize it.

Yes, starting off with a comment about the weather is a cliché in the West for a trivial conversation. In Japan, however, that’s considered an excellent way for two strangers to break the ice. Listen to the start of a radio or TV broadcast, and one of the first things an announcer will talk about is that day’s weather, even if he knows most of his listeners are several hundred kilometers away. I have even translated training manuals for sales personnel that recommend the salesperson create a friendly relationship with the prospective customer by talking about the weather.

It’s puzzling: one reason for visiting a foreign country is to find out how those people live. Once there, the best way to find out is to pay attention to what happens every day between people at the most basic levels of society.

But some folks seem not to have noticed that one of the key points in Japanese social interaction, whether it’s in a classroom or a bar, is the effort put into getting everyone on the same page by seeking the least common denominator. Talking about the weather or chopsticks may be trivial, but that’s the easiest way to create and maintain a pleasant relationship for the next ten minutes (or the next ten years) without ruffling any feathers. Getting involved in a discussion about politics or any other subject that generates strong opinions could easily become unpleasant for both parties and destroy the potential for a harmonious encounter.

When people in the West say that one of the basic differences of Japanese society is the emphasis on cultural harmony, they mean it! So why not believe it?

This is such a basic component of Japanese behavior that the failure to recognize it suggests to me that some people are just too self-absorbed to learn about their surroundings. I’d be willing to bet the cab driver couldn’t have given a flying fig about the difficulty of the Japanese language. He was more likely impressed with his passenger’s speaking ability and figured the best way to have a pleasant 15-minute chat was by complimenting the guy indirectly on his language ability. But no—Pulvers couldn’t just casually agree and direct the conversation elsewhere. He had to give the cab driver a lecture about Polish grammar.

Maybe some people do need to take a course in culture when they’re studying a language.

Of course, there’s one other possibility. After listening to some pretentious foreigner butcher his language with an incomprehensible explanation of the nominative plural of male animate nouns in a language he’ll never speak in a country he’ll never visit, the driver decided he was justified in believing that Japanese was the most difficult language in the world after all.