Living in Japan has certainly made me a more considerate person, and I generally thinks of others before acting on my own personal whims. This wasn’t necessarily the case when I first came to Japan, and it took me a while to pick up on the “group mentality” all around me. I remember in one of my first ESL classes, I noticed the clock in the room was wrong, so I stood on a chair to adjust it, which led to a gasp from my students. “That chair is everyone’s chair! What about the next person who sits there?” one of them admonished. Japan really considers shoes to be filthy things, and because I’d stood on the chair without removing them, the faux pas I’d committed was significant. As a rule, Japanese walls are thinner, occasionally even being made out of paper in the case of tatami rooms with shoji doors (although these are not that common anymore); people here learn to make less noise, lest you cause inconvenience to other family members who might be sleeping. Another aspect of Japan’s group culture is enryo, a word that means “to hesitate” or “to refrain from doing” and which is a major feature of polite Japanese relationships. While Americans might fight over the last slice of pizza, it’s common for Japanese to stand there, offering the last piece to each other while its gets cold: “No, you take it. I’m full” “Oh, no, I couldn’t eat another bite, you take it.” The name for the last slice of pizza that no one wants to admit they really want to eat is “enryo pizza.” Maybe that’s the secret of how the Japanese stay so thin.
