It’s fun to try to understand Japan by thinking about its culture from new directions, for example through the aesthetic concepts of 侘び wabi and 寂び sabi, translatable as “sober refinement and austere serenity,” which in practice mean appreciating things that are old and imperfect, like a well-used green tea cup or the sad loneliness of a rural train station in Hokkaido. You can even seek to understand Japan from the bottom up, so to speak, by thinking about shoes. The Japanese famously remove their shoes at a lowered area called a 玄関 genkan before entering a home (or businesses like J-List), which keeps most of the outside dirt from coming in. Shoes are always considered 汚い kitanai (dirty), and if I were to ever wash dirty shoes our family’s washing machine I’d be buying my wife a new washing machine in a hurry. Because shoes are always left near the front door, you can tell if a boy has female company over by checking his shoe area. This happened in a recent episode of Kyoukai no Kanata/Beyond the Boundary, when Mirai visited Akihito and noticed a mysterious pair of girl’s shoes in his genkan, which led to a very cute misunderstanding.
Shoes in a genkan can give away your secrets.
