If the American vice of choice is overeating, the Japanese vice is smoking. Smoking is still permitted in most public places. All restaurants have smoking sections. The locker rooms of sento bathhouses are always full of smoke. By contrast, eating or even drinking in non-designated places is frowned upon. The Sogo department store’s basement food stands are full of treats but there’s nowhere to eat them. They wrap your orders in several layers of plastic with the clear expectation that you will bring them home or at least elsewhere. Something as messy as a “food court” is unthinkable in Japan; many older people still cannot get their heads around “fast food.” My friend Nagao often discusses a former protégé of his, a friend’s son who became an academic and spent some time teaching in the U.S. Among the unsavory habits that marked him as no longer quite Japanese was his habit of carrying a drink with a plastic lid and straw everywhere he went, which he would sip periodically. Nagao compared him to a baby sucking a bottle.
Eating is treated with moderation and discretion in Japan; there are times and places for it. Though most Japanese rarely exercise, they stay slim by eating only at appointed times, by refraining from eating before they’re hungry and after they’re full (and by smoking). Slimness is a token of physical beauty in Japan, and their obsession with beauty far exceeds our own. Food itself is not fit for consumption unless it is beautiful, and everyone from the sushi chef down to the housewife preparing her kids’ bento boxes slaves over the food to make it beautiful. Good-looking people fare better in Japan. It would be unthinkable in Japan to sue an employer for discrimination based on appearance, not only because the society is so much less litigious but because the advantages of good looks are considered natural. Even the foreigners who visit (at least those who get on well) tend to be good-looking foreigners. Ugly and overweight people are openly and commonly stigmatized. When I told people I was swimming with a particular female professor, they teased me about the prospect of having to see her in a swimsuit. A story recently appeared in the newspaper regarding the subway cars. Japanese subways have all-female cars (marked with pink arrows on the platform) to prevent groping, yet some (presumably older and less attractive) women have been protesting the arrangement, as they claim the younger and prettier girls on the all-female cars taunt them by saying that no one would want to grope them anyway.
A cynic would say that beauty is skin deep in Japan, though a more neutral spin would suggest that the Japanese are more inclined than Americans to read character from outward signs. In Japan, people look their parts. Young women wear flowery skirts and tight black leggings; salarymen wear blue suits. There are no jean days or Hawaiian shirt days at the office; the government recently had to start a public service campaign just to get men to wear short sleeve dress shirts (to save energy on air conditioning). Most Japanese men would not be caught walking down the street in t-shirts, shorts, and sandals. (I felt like a pariah doing so, and expanded my wardrobe shortly after arriving so I could wear something presentable each day.) Beauty is like grace in Japan, which is why the Disney movies are so popular. As my former student Elyse Vigiletti discussed in her thesis, beauty is virtue in the world of Disney, even for supposedly “feisty” heroines like Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine.
In the U.S., we push inward for signs of character, confident that there is virtue behind ugliness and fearful that there is vice behind beauty. America is the land of film noir, where the upright citizen might always be the moral reprobate and vice versa. Thus our “tyranny of intimacy” (Sennett), and our tabloid obsession with the peccadilloes of successful and outwardly virtuous public figures. In Japan, the inner self is less violable, and the outward self is what is put on for the show of character. So obesity is profane in Japan, whereas in the U.S. obesity is just more padding for a possibly virtuous core. Conversely, in the U.S. bad teeth is a vice, while in Japan bad teeth are common (again, largely due to smoking). While Japanese facial expression is stoic, in the U.S. we are expected to smile; we emit and gauge character and virtue less through clothing and grooming, still less through physical attractiveness, than through facial expression, which is considered a window on the soul. Japanese young people who hang out at international bars in Osaka and Kyoto are relieved to be able to wear jeans and t-shirts; they are less aware of another sort of tyranny of smiling and laughing that takes hold in these places.
Japanese need not worry so much about smiling because in Japan the mouth is relatively inviolate; it is relegated to the private self. Most Japanese (especially women) cover their mouths with their hands whenever they are forced to speak while chewing and often whenever they laugh. The Japanese keep their mouths to themselves and manage others’ impressions of them in other ways that can be prepared at home. Kissing is rare and tongue kissing unheard of except among the closest intimates; single friends have told me how Japanese girls who are perfectly willing to dirty dance in nightclubs and exchange massages in love hotels will draw the line at kissing. For Americans the ritual of exchanging saliva is homologous with our striving for a meeting of minds and souls. The Japanese are perfectly happy with the outward contact of their beautiful bodies.
Btw, if anyone is still reading this, and if it is not clear from the confused tense and sense of place above, I might mention that I been home for several days now. So as far as the blog goes this is a "wrap" or, as C. W. McCall famously put it, "We gone, bye bye!"
