I like to pick up on random bits of Japanese language and see what they can teach us, and one word that’s culturally loaded is medatsu, which means to stand out or be conspicuous in a crowd. To you or me, the concept of standing out might mean no more than accidentally wearing clothes out of season or carrying your backpack over both arms in violation of local fashions which require you to choose just one, but to the Japanese it can be a much bigger deal. Many personal choices from fashion and hair styles to what computer OS or cell phone style you go with are influenced by how much an individual wants to avoid being seen as departing from perceived norms. I’ve known more than a few Japanese who got upset when I “complimented” them on being unique or different — they preferred to be thought of as futsuu, meaning normal, the same as everyone else. I even knew a programmer at an eroge company who legally changed his name to Reiji Abe, which is abere-ji or “average” when read in Japanese name order, which he said was his favorite word of English.
That’s not to say that Japanese people don’t do things that stand out very much to us, something you know if you’ve ridden a train in Tokyo and watched a really awesome Goth-Loli girl get on, or visited Harajuku on a Sunday morning, when all the interesting cosplayers are out. It’s been said that when Japanese “rebel” against the larger society around them by, say, joining a boso-zoku biker gang, they’re essentially moving from one “normal” in-group to a smaller one. Of course, I’ve been known to stand out a little over the course of my life. When I lived in New Zealand as a boy, my mother failed to notice that schools there had school uniforms, which forced me to be the only boy in school without one all year long. (Gee thanks, Mom.) I also have to be at peace with standing out in Japan, like last weekend when I went to a high school culture festival at a school my son might attend. As is often the case, I was the only foreigner around, and it takes some courage to be the only gaijin in a sea of bobbing Japanese heads.
The idea of “standing out” in Japan is a little different.
