What happens when you put three Japanese
managers and a clumsy Sicilian guy in one very elegant restaurant in Kyushu?
This is their story.
This is their story.
My hosts were determined to impress me. With
traditional Japanese hospitality they had printed out the page of our website
that lists the food a Jew can and cannot eat, and had made a reservation at a
traditional Japanese restaurant. A path made of large stones, like the ones
found in Japanese gardens, led from the sidewalk to the building, a clear sign
of opulence. The name of the restaurant was engraved on a black, rugged
mountain rock, standing at the beginning of the path. At the other end of the
path, behind a bamboo fence, was the restaurant. The concrete building had all
the decorative elements that are supposed to elicit the nostalgic image of a
traditional Japanese house: a roof made of black tiles with decorated ends; white
plaster walls and wooden posts, lintels, and rafters; reticulated shutters; bamboo
mats hanging loosely in front of the ground floor windows, and on the second floor
shields at the windows to give privacy and let the people inside the house spy
on the samurai outside from a higher level without risking their heads (if this
story is true); rain-chains pointing to a stone barrel partially covered in moss.
It couldn’t get more Japanese than that. And I loved it.
In the stone vestibule a woman wearing
the clothes of the peasants of the days of yore greeted us and stood in
attention, while another woman, in white tabi socks and wearing an elegant light
blue kimono and flowery obi, came to welcome us from the inside walking on the tatami
floor. Tatami are the traditional flooring of Japanese homes, made of weaved
grass panels and one is supposed to walk on them with socks or barefoot, a habit
probably born out of hygienic and economic factors (tatami, for being so
delicate to maintain and expensive to make, were reserved only to the wealthy).
In time a mixture of customs and superstitions as accrued and regulate the way
they are laid out in a room and the way one cares for them, but no matter how westernized
one is, the rule everyone observes is that no slippers nor – God forbid -
outside shoes touch the tatami. Ever. Walking inside a house with shoes is
already a major faux-pas, but trampling with shoes on the tatami mat is tantamount
to an act of extreme violence that only the police are permitted to do under
special circumstances. It is almost a desecration of the holiness of the other
person’s home. Accidentally, the idea that a tatami room is special is so
deeply rooted in the Japanese psyche that last June, the group of volunteer I
joined to work in one of the towns hit by the tsunami was instructed to remove
our boots every time we entered the tatami room in the house we working one day,
even though the tatami was really ruined.
Since I am in Japan, I have become more
careful about my socks: I always make sure they match and at the slightest sign
of wear and tear I throw them away, as you never know when you’ll have to take your
shoes off. However, despite this added care, every time I’ve found myself in
this situation the first thought has always been an anxious scan of my lower
extremities; and the second has gone through the steps that make a smooth,
seamless "shoes on-shoes off-up on the raised level
of the living quarters" sequence. Anyway, I always try to go last because my anxious
gaijin self wants me to observe once again what people do in order to imitate
the locals.
Fate had it different that evening.
Fate had it different that evening.
The senior among my hosts bowed showing me
the way with his right hand that I enter first. In return, perspiring and with twirling
bowels, I bowed back showing him the way that he enter first. He did not
recede, so I had to go first. “You’ve done this literally hundreds of times in
the past three years. You know how to do it without crashing the sliding paper door
or leaning against anyone else (which they do, by the way). Just relax and do
it.” Deep breath. First shoe: off. Deep breath. Second shoe: off. Then I hear
one of them telling the other: “He has really learned our customs, hasn’t he?”
At which point I stooped, picked up my shoes and before the woman wearing the
clothes of the peasants of the days of yore could reach them, as politely as
possible, I lifted them and put them on the tatami mat. It was then that my
blood froze, waiting for all the Kami of Japan to smite me through the hands of
my hosts.
After one second or one hour of the
heaviest and stillest silence in my life all I could say or think was “Sumimasen,
I’m sorry” while trying to evaluate what kind of bowing the present
circumstances would require: 90 degrees, 130 degrees, or down on my knees sticking
out my neck to a sword. They were really gracious. Well, I mean the hostess was. Using
a very polite word that means “It is ok” she lifted my shoes and handed them to
the woman wearing the clothes of the peasants of the days of yore, while my
three companions kept apologizing to her for the foreigner who clearly had not
yet learned the proper Japanese customs. The hostess smiling silently just motioned for us to enter.
And when I thought the evening couldn’t
get any worse…
