Tatemae vs. Honre

I was probably as low as I could possibly be when I went out for Izakaya with Atsuko and Teruzo. I was brought to this country with the promise of pay and now the company had collapsed, leaving me without pay and now my wallet had been stolen. It seems to me that the reputation of Japan has very little to do with its true nature, but with the image that Japan has portrayed through the years. Japan is obsessed with respect and honor, but beneath it all they are rude and pushy, just like every other culture. There is a tremendous air of evasion in this culture: anything goes as long as you pretend not to see it.

When you walk down the street, people lower their heads so they won’t see you and proceed to walk wherever they want. If they don’t see you then you aren’t there and they won’t be at fault if they run into you. At first you think it’s cute when the short, hunchbacked grandmothers are walking with their sunvisors lowered to the floor, but when you multiply that image into an entire population not looking, it’s impossible to get anywhere without a collision. So you too lower your head or text while you walk, and then it’s not your fault either. Evasion is an embarrassing contagion.

This theme in Japanese culture was most obvious to me when Nova started to collapse and everyone pretended that everything would be okay. The Japanese staff were paid late months in a row and denied their annual bonus, but they frowned for a second and said, “So desu ne” and continued to work for free. They put on their genky face and laughed with students, while they had gone without and waited for months for their salaries. It was shocking to me. For my Japanese staff, leaving or standing up for themselves was never even considered because they thought higher ups must know what they were doing and things would work out eventually. Well, Nova is now officially closed and they still haven’t received their wages from August which were due on September 27th. I started looking for another job immediately when I saw these signs, but most of the staff just ignored the symptoms of disease in the company. When I talked to my students about it, they said how angry they were with Nova, but they continued to come to classes and expected to see their teachers there, like the situation could just go away if they pretended not to see it. At points, I wanted to scream just to make the lunacy of the situation clear. I asked everyone out loud one morning when Mark hadn’t been paid for 3 weeks why we were here. They all looked at me like I was crazy and I stayed at work that day. I wish that I’d had the sense to walk out then- but the situation was so surreal. I couldn’t imagine that this was real and no one else was running out of the door.

When I was at dinner with Atsuko and Teruzo, I was venting about all of these terrible realizations and they told me that Japanese even have a word for this falseness- it’s called Tatemae. Tatemae is a fake feeling or attitude that you present to the world to hide your real feelings or intentions, called Honre. Funny, I just realized that Honre sounds like honor, which is the thing they hide behind falseness. On an individual scale, I have found Japanese people to hospitable and warm, but on a large scale they are very cold and irrational. For example, their society makes it almost impossible to be a foreigner and be independent: you need to work a month before you get paid and you have to have a lot of money and a Japanese sponsor to find a place to live. But, people fall over themselves to be nice to you in small ways: they invite you to parties and offer to lend you money, but it doesn’t breed self-esteem but indebtedness. You are dependent on someone to help you always, so you can never really be an individual.