Meticulous Japanese Women

One of the first things I noticed about Japanese females was how meticulous they can be. For example, when three Japanese women eat lunch together at a restaurant, one will usually produce a calculator so they can accurately split the bill, figuring the amount that each should pay down to the last yen, including splitting the tip, if in the U.S. One of the driving social concepts in Japan is the expectation that everyone should be chanto shita, that is, “proper” and completely honest, and making sure money is always accurately accounted for is part of this. If one person in the group paid too much or too little, a delicate social balance would be upset, causing confusion and bad feelings. My current favorite anime series is Sayonara Zetsubo-Sensei (“Goodbye, Mr. Despair”), about a sometimes-suicidal teacher and his classroom of odd students. In one episode there’s a funny scene in which Chiri, the girl with the need for everything in her universe to be proper at all times, is asked to cut a cake for seven people. Her brain goes into high gear, trying to calculate how to slice the four strawberries on top so that everyone gets an exactly equal share. “In order to divide the cake equally, each slice must have an arc of 51.428571428…” In the end, the only way to ensure that everyone received an exactly equal amount was to dump the entire cake into a blender and liquefy it.

Chiri tries to divide a cake among seven people with complete accuracy; Mt. Asama belches out a plume of ash