Living in a foreign country for many years can change anyone, and I’m certainly a different person than before I went to live in Japan for an incredible two decades, as of this coming October. Last night while roaming through various bars and pubs in downtown San Diego with J-List staff, I happened to get something stuck in my teeth, so I reached for a toothpick and started cleaning my teeth with it…but I did it Japanese style, hiding my teeth behind one hand while the other reached under with the pick. It was a reflex, done because it’s considered bad manners to show your teeth in Japan, but I found myself doing it automatically despite the fact that I was in the U.S. It’s common to see women cover their mouths when laughing, too, and I’m sure someone who wasn’t familiar with the custom would wonder what was going on if they saw women regularly moving to hide their mouths from view. Other changes that have come from living in Japan including my inability to recall my shoe size in or weight using American measurements and asking for a seat in the “non-smoking” section of restaurants while home, forgetting that they’re all non-smoking in California.(I tried my best to get a picture of what the Japanese toothpick use looks like, but it’s such an atari-mae thing, that is it so common and ordinary, that no one ever thought to take a picture of it.)
Japanese gestures can be difficult to decode. This is a feminine gesture meaning, “Don’t look at my mouth.”
