Although I’ve been in Japan for more than 20 years, there are some things I’ve never really mastered, like eating nattou, the famous fermented soybeans that my kids love to have for breakfast. I can’t read “air kanji” Japanese people write with their finger, and I have trouble perceiving the secret messages Japanese see in numbers, such as April 4 being “Yo-yo day” beause the number 4 can be read as yo in Japanese. I was also never able to master the Japanese art of yankii-zuwari, literally meaning “squatting like a Yankee.” In Japan there’s a class of semi-delinquent young people who like to show their rebellious nature by dying their hair blonde (which usually comes out orange), and these people came to be called yankii, no doubt because they looked like Americans with their interestingly colored hair. (Another theory holds that they came from a part of Osaka nicknamed America-mura.) There’s a certain squatting pose these tough boys are famous for which is especially difficult for foreigners to pull off without rolling over like a daruma. It’s normal squatting, but somehow they can do it with their feet perfectly flat, not balanced on their toes, and they’re able to squat like that for hours without discomfort. The reason the Japanese can sit comfortably like this is Japanese style toilet seats, seatless toilets which you squat over to use, and Japanese develop muscles for this pose from an early age.
I still can do the flat-footed squatting thing that Japanese can all do easily.
