Although I’ve been in Japan for 18 years, there are some things I’ve never really mastered, like eating nattou, the famous fermented soybeans that my kids love to have for breakfast. I can’t read “air kanji” that a Japanese person will write with their finger, and I have trouble perceiving the secret messages Japanese see in numbers, like November 22nd being the official Happy Married Couples Day, since 11/22 can be read ii fuufu, meaning a married couple that’s very close. I was also never able to master the Japanese art of yankii-zuwari, or “squatting like a yankee.” In Japan there’s a class of semi-delinquint young people who like to show their rebellious nature by dyeing their hair blonde (which usually comes out orange), and these people came to be called yankii, no doubt because they looked like Americans with their interestingly colored hair. There’s a certain squatting pose these tough boys are famous for which is especially difficult for foreigners to pull off without rolling over like a daruma. The reason the Japanese can sit comfortably in this pose for hours is that Japanese-style toilets lack seats, and are basically flat recipticles you squat over to use, so these squatting muscles are well developed from a young age.
Can you “squat like a yankee”? It’s hard to do without lifting your feet, which is cheating.
