Some of our differences

Over the past few months I have noticed that the Japanese and Americans each have a very different approach to the concept of small talk. Because small talk is an integral part of English conversation I always start off all of my adult lessons by asking how my students are doing and if anything new or interesting happened over the past week. In American society if an acquaintance says "Hello, how are you?" the normal response is "fine, thanks" and then there is the quick swap of each person's current good news and that's about it. In Japan when you ask "how are you?" it is taken far more literally, so often times you will receive a much more honest and in depth response than what you may have expected. I have one student in particular who informs me every week of the fact that her shoulders are aching. Sometimes her neck is sore too and once she actually drew a picture of a spinal chord in order to express that her back was aching as well that day. Needless to say, I was not particularly surprised when she came into class a few weeks ago and informed us that she is going to need surgery.

Another one of my students always tells me the most delightfully random stories (those of you who know me are probably thinking right about now, hmmm... sounds familiar). One time when she was in class I asked if anything interesting had happened, so she sat and thought for a minute, because it always takes her a minute or two to organize her thoughts, and then she cheerily explained to me how her chopstick had broken in half while she was eating lunch that day. Another time she told me how she lost her "pretty bag" on the train and then miraculously had it returned to her because they actually stopped the train to look for it (at least that's what I understood based on what she told me).

Today, however, I had a different student and her interesting news was not quite so delightful. Because her English is obviously not perfect the story started off a little strangely and I thought she was just going to tell me about something she did with her friend. It turned out that she was actually telling me about how they had buried her friend's bones earlier this week. I was a little shocked because she told me about it so casually, almost as if it were an everyday thing. She explained how after the funeral the family waits 46 days for the spirits to decide where the person should go and then they bury the person's bones so that the person can be released into "the Buddha World". This was obviously a somewhat odd description of the Japanese burial process since my student didn't have all of the necessary vocabulary to explain it, but I still felt like she got the main idea across. Later on I told my co-worker about how nonchalantly my student had described the burial of her friend and he told me this was a fairly common thing. Apparently in addition to small talk, the concept of death is also viewed somewhat differently in Japan. I think that learning about these social and cultural differences and having the chance to actually experience them is one of the reasons that traveling abroad is so important. It forces you to become open minded and see from a perspective that you may have never even known existed.