Respect Your Elders My Ass

It's probably a universal feature of humans that (they think that) young people aren't showing enough respect for their elders. In Holland, I think it's quite true - living in Amsterdam, I honestly didn't have the idea that young people went out of their way to help elders, let alone respect them for no other reason than their age. Wow, I remember how my friend Loek could go on for hours about the uselessness of 'respect' - an extreme example of what I experienced to be the Dutch way of doing things.

In Japan, things are different. Historically, respect for the elders has been heavily ingrained in Japanese culture (perhaps it always has been more so here than in Europe). Of course, the usual keigo is applied when speaking to people who are older than you, and this I am gradually learning to accept (fortunately it's not so difficult to make people stop using it when talking to me). However, recently one source of frustration has been the excessive passiveness of younger people when in the company of older people. Overgeneralizing so you get the idea, older people are expected to make all the decisions and younger people don't talk unless talked to. Today I had a date with a girl from another band, it didn't go spectacularly, and I met up with U-ta and Yuuki afterwards. They forced me to accept, at least provisionally, the reason why many times conversation (and thus interaction, relationship, everything...verbal communication is essential to human interaction, am I wrong?) with Japanese doesn't flow well: I'm older than my conversation partners.

This is respect for your elders taken too far. I am obviously biased, coming from an unJapanese background; through these experiences, I realized that free conversation is one thing in this world I am extremely attached to and truly need in order to make my life meaningful. When anyone younger than you refuses to speak to you for no other reason than your age, and you are expected to do the same to your elders, there is no one left for you to have meaningful interaction (please give me alternative definitions for that term if you can) with than people of the same age. A dull world indeed, and again one piece of the Japanese puzzle falls into place, making it easier to see why many other Japanese quirks are as they are.

An example from personal experience: the people I'll be playing with tomorrow in Osaka. As the drummer (same age) and electric guitarist (2 years younger) were walking me back to the station yesterday, the drummer said the following:

"Wow, it's really a relief that we're the same age [he'd found out about half an hour before]! Makes the talking so much easier!"

...and I, in my head, was like "WTF are you talking about!? Who gives a shit?". I honestly feel bad knowing that if I were one year his superior, that would have a major, negative impact on our creative interaction in the studio as well as ordinary conversation. In fact, the tone of the vast majority of conversations with people you newly meet in Japan is instantly, conveniently, set by the answer to the question "How old are you?".

If it were up to me, 'experience' should be more of a respect-determinant than 'age', though I am dying to continue the old respect conversation with Loek and see if we can work out exactly how respect is ever useful (oh noes, did you just realize with me that that 'useful' is a completely relative concept? All my theorizing gone to waste...?). Of course, the two (age and experience) are linked, and in Japan they are very linked, which explains the situation. Maybe even more so than in the U.S. (from what I know), the percentage of Japanese lives that are completely stereotypical seems to be very high. School, uni, job, marriage, children, death, and all the extracurricular/'personal' activities along the way. Even a certain amount of 'craziness' is expected from anyone and included in the system of norms & values. I won't even try to compare Dutch and Japanese notions of 'craziness'; let's just say they're different, which somehow makes it so that when foreigners interact with Japanese, usually at least one party thinks the other is crazy. In a good way! It's why we are able to get along..it's interesting.

Wow, I can't help but feel I'm overrationalizing. What do you think? Anyway, let me conclude on a positive note (you know me by now). People who are older than you, if they're in the least cool, won't mind you (or me at least) dropping the keigo and speaking on the same level. I haven't been here for long enough yet to judge, but it seems that from there, good relationships follow naturally (as they would in Holland, where everyone thinks keigo is insane).

With it gradually becoming clearer that it will be very hard to 'integrate' psychologically into Japanese society, I am excited to see, within the next five years or so, how flexible my mind really is. Until now I've been proceeding smoothly, making good use of what I considered perhaps to be the one single thing I was really good at, but it seems I'm getting caught up in the rapids. Go with the flow - let's stretch to breaking point! Or beyond! Oooh, that sounds even more exciting .. another new world to explore .. I wonder what's hiding there...

P.S. A snippet of trivia: In Japan, almost everything begins in April (cherry blossoms, school, university, work, maybe even the fiscal year). It is not completely unexpected, then, that whether or not you're 'the same age' as someone else is determined by whether or not you're the same age on April 1, not on January 1 (aka same year of birth), as in every other country I've been to. Another one of those Japanese quirks that make Japanese culture completely different from Dutch. I should seriously start making a list of these subtleties to show to people whenever they ask me "so how is Japanese culture different from Dutch?", a question I invariably answer with "they are completely opposite" because it's so complicated I can't give a real answer.

P.P.S. If you have time, check out a movie called Ima, Ai Ni Yukimasu and tell me what you think. I have a very strong opinion about this film and just by talking about it to U-ta and Yuuki for ten minutes it seems we have stumbled upon another deep difference between Japanese and Dutch ways of thinking. But after reading some other people's opinions of the movie online, I realized that maybe it's not a Japanese-Dutch contradiction, but more one between a typical Japanese and me. I'm curious to find out the truth.