Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Twelve things not to do in Japan

This is about Japanese manners. The man made this video because his viewers have asked him a lot of questions about living there.

I thought everyone knew these things.

(Best viewed muted with captions. The poor guy's speech impediment is disqualifying)



My dad told us to nevermind the men slurping in the soba shop. He told us it's a bit rude to not slurp.

"How come?"

"It communicates to the chef it's delicious. If you don't slurp then it's not delicious." 

What joy!

What a wrong thing to tell five children. The next forty-five minutes was nothing but slurp, slurp, slurp, SLURP, slurp, slurp, slurp, slurpslurpslurpslurp, slurp slurp s-l-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-r-p for one little noodle, slurp, slurp, slurp SLURP slurpslurslurp, slurp, slurp, slurpy-slurp-slurp, s-l-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-r-p, slurp slurp slurp. 

Ha ha ha, slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp, s-l-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-r-p, slurp, slurpslurpslurpslurp. 

Then my sister misbehaved. 

No little trip together is complete without my sister misbehaving. 

It was a thing with her. 

It's mental.

My dad did not know this, and it's not in this video, the correction of children is the duty of the mother and not of the father. When a boy grows to early teens then the father takes up. But not until then. It's like a bar mitzvah. My dad got out of his chair and walked over to Beverly and pinched her chin as you do inserting a credit card and held her entire head to his attention and whispered threateningly his correction. 

That's all she wanted. Dad's attention. Singularly apart from the rest of us. 

But all of the slurping in the shop suddenly stopped. The sound stopping caused the chef to poke his head through his service window. All eyes were on my dad. The men in the shop simply couldn't believe what they were seeing. An American man actually corrected his daughter. Right there in public. How very odd. They undoubtedly went home and told their wives,  "You'll never guess what I saw today."

My dad sat down. Slurping in the shop resumed. But our slurping fun was ruined. 

Nobody said anything. Like the video says, they're very gracious about foreigners being odd. Except for the shoes thing. 

1 comment:

deborah said...

I'm guessing you see it in retrospect that she craved her father's attention. Family.