As a foreigner new to Japan you can easily break a few hundred taboos before you even step off the plane. The Japanese will never tell you what they’re really thinking though, so often you won’t know for sure whether you’ve broken a taboo – you’ll just sense you have done something horribly wrong. Whether its blowing your nose in public (god help you if you’re a habitual nose picker), walking while eating, using non-matching chopsticks or whistling in the dark, it doesn’t seem to take much for the Japanese to be mortally offended.
Immediately upon breaking some random taboo that the guidebooks neglected to mention, there will be an eerie silence followed by a hot prickly feeling in your gut and a cold chill up your spine. If you’ve got good hearing you might even detect the sound of their nervous systems freaking out at your faux pas. And still, no-one will say a word.
When you’re new in Japan, the constant feeling of doing something wrong accompanied by a complete lack of validation of your feelings is a recipe for extreme self-consciousness, if not insanity. You’ll feel so embarrassed at times you might want to kill yourself, which is totally fine – ritual suicide is one of the few behaviours that isn’t taboo in Japan. In fact, it’s seen as a better alternative to public shame and humiliation, which you’ll experience regularly.
After I broke a big taboo in front of 200 Japanese people during my first week in Japan, committing hara-kiri is exactly what I wanted to do. I made the radical mistake of refusing to sing karaoke at a high school dinner where I was teaching English. Not being into karaoke is sacrilege. Even worse is hamming it up and behaving like an idiot when you’re eventually drunk enough to give it a burl…karaoke must be taken seriously. They won’t look kindly on you taking the piss while you slaughter a Celine Dion song.
On this occasion, entire school staff and parents were gathered at a sushi restaurant to celebrate a successful school sports carnival. We were seated at dozens of 20-metre long tables on the floor, eating sushi, drinking sake and beer and chatting away. Being able to understand exactly nothing, I smiled and nodded, laughed when it seemed appropriate, picked at my sushi and tried not to get drunk. I took particular care not to stand my chopsticks up in my rice, as its how the Japanese present rice to their dead. I was doing okay; a great ambassador for Australia I thought.
As I was trying to work out what the weird slimy orange balls in my sushi were and whether I would offend anyone if I didn’t eat them, I realised the whole room was applauding me and the principal was beckoning me up onto the stage. I hesitantly went onstage expecting to receive a welcome gift or award of some sort but instead received a microphone.
To my absolute horror, I had been selected as the guest of honour who would sing the first karaoke song of the evening. On my own. In front of everyone. I froze. I stared in shock. Two-hundred pairs of eyes stared back. I shook my head. They looked worried, then offended. I willed myself to faint and when that didn’t work, slowly made my way off the stage. Immediately I realised my tragic error. I had broken a major taboo by not appreciating the great honour that had been bestowed upon me.
Sheepishly, fearfully, I returned to the podium and flicked through the karaoke book only to find 500 pages of Japanese songs, none of which I could understand. As I was about to throw up my sushi, the school’s inebriated head English teacher stumbled up the stairs and found the one and only English song in the book – and we were going to sing it together: ‘Endless Love’.
There we were, a mortified Australian girl fresh off the plane and a drunk Japanese bloke, attempting to sing like Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie. It was the worst rendition of the song in history, yet I received a standing ovation…not for my singing, but for my guts.
The Japanese like people with guts and they love team players. To be seen as anything but a team player is highly taboo. I reconfirmed this fact a week later when I tried to get out of a staff volleyball game after school. Despite the fact that no-one had warned me to bring my sports gear and I was wearing a suit and high heels (attire that was expected of me) I simply had to play, or at least pretend to play. You can get away with a lot in Japan by pretending. I spent an entire year there getting paid good money to pretend I knew how to teach English.
By my third week I thought I was getting the hang of Japanese etiquette when one morning before school, the teachers were chatting away in the staffroom and asked me about my boyfriend, Anthony, who I lived with just outside of Tokyo. This was courageous on their part, as it’s taboo to live with your boyfriend out of wedlock. They would have preferred to ignore this unsavoury aspect of my lifestyle and pretend Anthony didn’t exist, but their curiosity got the better of them.
“Here, let me show you a photo on my phone,” I said obligingly, trying to be a team player and include them in my life. I proudly showed them photos of a bare-chested hippy with long hair and tattoos, reclining on the bed.
The silence was deafening. All eyes were stuck to the floor like magnets. Oops, I did it again. Guess it’s not kosher to show half naked photos of your boyfriend around in the staffroom, I thought. Make mental note.
After a few faux pas-free weeks I thought I was blending in pretty well, when one day I was summoned to the principal’s desk.
“Leigh-sensei, you have different hairstyle today.”
“Ah, hai” I answered.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
He looked puzzled. “Why this hairstyle?” he interrogated, as if I were a POW captive who had just been caught trying to escape.
Should I tell him the reason I’d worn my long hair in plaits was because I hadn’t washed it in a week? No, probably taboo not to wash your hair every day.
“Because it’s the latest fashion in Australia,” I answered.
“Hmm. Not fashion in Japan,” he said sternly. I could tell he was offended but I couldn’t work out why. Did I remind him of his mother, his wife, a long lost love?
In the corridors on my way to English class I was met with hysterical laughing, pointing, jeering and genuinely puzzled and fearful looks from the students. Not just some, but all 3,000 of them. What the hell was wrong with wearing plaits?
I struggled through the day with my highly controversial hairstyle intact and my head held high, and called my Australia-born Japanese friend straight after school.
“You idiot,” she said. “Plaits are for schoolgirls only. Teachers don’t wear plaits; they wear grown-up hairstyles and makeup. They all would have thought you were completely taking the piss out of them.”
Oh shit. My mistake. Again. Who would have guessed a hairstyle would be taboo?
But by far the worst fuck up came one Friday at school. One of the best things about Japan is that magic mushrooms are legal and you can buy an assortment from specialised shops all around Tokyo. It’s cheaper to go mushying than drink alcohol, so one Thursday night my boyfriend and I decided to get off our trees sampling a few different types of local mushies, imagining we would get a few hours’ sleep before work the next day and go and teach as normal.
Wrong. I wasn’t prepared for the potency of the mushrooms and had a full-on psychedelic trip that lasted all night and into the next day. I couldn’t stop laughing and my pupils were like saucers. It would mean certain disembowelment if I didn’t turn up for work, so I somehow made it through the commuter crush on the trains, and fronted up for work.
I took one look at all the teachers in the staffroom and cracked up into fits of laughter. I simply couldn’t contain it. All my taboo breakages of the previous weeks came flooding back, and I suddenly found them utterly hilarious, and imagined what the reaction would be if I told them I was tripping. The teachers stared at me quizzically.
Lionel Ritchie came to my rescue again, asking me if I was drunk. I couldn’t very well tell him I was off my nut on mushrooms, but I couldn’t say I had turned up for work drunk either. Surely that would be taboo. Or…would it? I picked the lesser of the two evils and said I was drunk and needed to lie down.
Certain I had really done my dash this time, I started kissing and hugging all the teachers goodbye, telling them how much I had loved working with them while I serenaded them with my best ever performance of ‘Endless Love’. To my surprise, I wasn’t met with stony stares and bad vibes, but riotous laughter.
Lionel explained that getting so horribly drunk that you’re still drunk the next day – and still turning up for work – was to be admired. It showed guts and determination to do well at my job. I had shown myself to be the ultimate team player, willing to expose myself to ridicule and scolding rather than let the team down. No longer did they see me as an alien with weird hairstyles and a freaky boyfriend.
I was finally one of them, accepted into the fold. Or maybe that was just a hallucination. I can’t really remember.