Last time I talked about how there are times when gaijin in Japan might find that some doors open for them if they speak English rather than fluent Japanese. I’m not sure why this, but the tendency for Japanese to react positively to someone speaking English seems to be related to the strange “English complex” they possess, the various difficult emotions each Japanese person has about the language, which most study for years but don’t really master. Tomo tells me it’s related to what’s known as seiyo suhai shugi, translatable as Worship-of-the-West-ism, the tendency for Japanese to assume that Europe and America are more socially advanced and inherently superior to Japan. Basically, when a person speaks English, he seems to be elevated to a higher rung of the social ladder than if he spoke fluent Japanese — even if he could recite the Tale of Genji from memory while performing tea ceremony and folding origami (sigh). One area that tends to be important to males living in Japan is, well, meeting females, and the great agony of gaijin who have studied a lot Japanese is the inverse relationship of language study to how popular you (might) be with certain kinds of Japanese girls. It seems that a fun English-speaking foreigner might just be more interesting (mysterious?) than a Japanese-fluent gaijin who can discuss the various historical causes for the Saigo Takamori’s Rebellion which took place after the Meiji Restoration. Of course, this is a pretty big generalization, and I know that my wife was intereted in me because of my deeper passion for Japan rather than in spite of it. But seeing newly-arrived teachers in the JET program go drinking with girls hanging off them at the local pub made cramming for Level 1 of the Japan Language Proficiency Test just a little bit harder. Oh well.
