Culture as a Sign of the Past
Mar. 22nd, 2007 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorBack in college, I worked as a student manager at By George, the cafeteria beneath the Undergraduate Library. One morning on my way to open the joint, I stumbled upon an interesting bit of paper. It gave me reading material for the walk.
It turned out to be material for a graduate level Japanese class, specifically a propoganda cartoon from the Pacific War (what we Yanks call WWII). Happily it was also translated. Here I learned a new word or two that came in handy later.
During my shift at the cafe, there was a problem with a new hire. He was too good.
He was an older Japanese English as a Second Language student who had not yet completed, well, any of his English coursework. He was a good worker, though, so he was put on pots and pans detail. Go anywhere in the world and you should be able to tell someone how to clean just by pointing.
He made quick work of the stack. So quick, the boss was concerned that there would not be enough work left over when the afternoon crew punched in. Weirdly, to save the trouble of finding work for slackers, she took Our New Best Worker off pots and had him place stickers on burger clamshells.
It was obvious he was confused about the reassignment. From his expressions, he thought he had screwed up, and we didn't have a common language to explain the State Work Ethic (or lack thereof) to him.
I made his day by practising my new Japanese. I gave a solemn bow in his direction and said, "Gaman suru" -- a warrior's patience, in English.
He burst out laughing. I'm happy to say my gaijin crack made his shift quite a bit less fretful.
Whenever I see signs of the Japanese struggling through their daily lives with far less complaint than any upstanding Westerners could be expected to summon, I think of that cartoon, that worker. No person on my bus would tolerate being shoved by pushers that pack the coach like they do on Tokyo trains, for example. That's everyday gaman.
With this realization in mind, I wasn't too surprised to learn that the Japanese heat their homes very differently from we in the West.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
imomus observed that, rather than heat the house and insulate it against the harsher elements, the Japanese tend to keep their homes more open to the outside. He offers several explanations:
He closes with what might be closer to the core reason for this deliberate exposure; that being cold in the winter is proper in a shinto way; as he says, ". . . it should feel cold."
Based on some recent reading, I thinkimomus might be both a bit right and a bit wrong. He got the observations correct, but failed to put an island nation's past into perspective when he drew the ultimate conclusions.
Jared Diamond writes in Collapse -- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed about how Japan faced and managed a population/resource crisis during the Tokugawa Shogunate.
That last section describes perfectly the modern Japanimomus describes. Interesting as his observations were, I feel getting this historical background far more useful than the intuitive but still speculative explanations offered by imomus. As to the shinto attribution, could it not well be that the centuries of resource management have led to a Japanese culture that feels such traditional heating and living methods to be appropriate? A past of necessary resource management has created a culture that clings to their less consumptive traditional uses of wood. Perhaps the need to conserve helped develop the shinto zeitgeist, instead of vice-versa.
The strength of character necessary to permanently alter one's culture? Now that's gaman. . . gaman suru.
I got on this tear a while back reflecting on Peak Oil and Global Warming. I tend to side with many experts in the various fields see the future as one with both forced and pragmatic reductions in energy use. Some see those forcings as forcing something far more insidious than mere survival. They see any required consumption reductions as imposed by a dictatorship that violate the sovereignty of our nation.
Well, perhaps our culture will change over time. Perhaps before the Tokugawa resource reductions the Japanese people consumed far more energy per capita relative to the technology than they do today.
The point is, the Japanese are still here.
The same cannot be said for the Greenland Norse, who refused to eat fish on the coast of Greenland (!) or give up their hungry, hungry cows.
The same cannot be said for most of the Easter Islanders, who refused to protect a breeding supply of the world's largest palm (now extinct), to stop building energy and resourse intensive moas, those enormous statues that pepper the almost abandoned island, or to slow growth in their own numbers on their very very tiny speck of rock.
Those cultures lacked foresight and a willingness to reign in their lifestyles. They both favored tradition over pragmatism. Perhaps they chose faith over the evidence provided by their own eyes.
Most of all, those now extinct ways of life lacked gaman.
.JPG)
It turned out to be material for a graduate level Japanese class, specifically a propoganda cartoon from the Pacific War (what we Yanks call WWII). Happily it was also translated. Here I learned a new word or two that came in handy later.
During my shift at the cafe, there was a problem with a new hire. He was too good.
He was an older Japanese English as a Second Language student who had not yet completed, well, any of his English coursework. He was a good worker, though, so he was put on pots and pans detail. Go anywhere in the world and you should be able to tell someone how to clean just by pointing.
He made quick work of the stack. So quick, the boss was concerned that there would not be enough work left over when the afternoon crew punched in. Weirdly, to save the trouble of finding work for slackers, she took Our New Best Worker off pots and had him place stickers on burger clamshells.
It was obvious he was confused about the reassignment. From his expressions, he thought he had screwed up, and we didn't have a common language to explain the State Work Ethic (or lack thereof) to him.
I made his day by practising my new Japanese. I gave a solemn bow in his direction and said, "Gaman suru" -- a warrior's patience, in English.
He burst out laughing. I'm happy to say my gaijin crack made his shift quite a bit less fretful.
Whenever I see signs of the Japanese struggling through their daily lives with far less complaint than any upstanding Westerners could be expected to summon, I think of that cartoon, that worker. No person on my bus would tolerate being shoved by pushers that pack the coach like they do on Tokyo trains, for example. That's everyday gaman.With this realization in mind, I wasn't too surprised to learn that the Japanese heat their homes very differently from we in the West.
imomus observed that, rather than heat the house and insulate it against the harsher elements, the Japanese tend to keep their homes more open to the outside. He offers several explanations:Japanese houses are built for summer because, thanks to the warming Pacific current, the Japanese winter is short and mostly mild. Also, Japanese have a range of "localised heat" technologies which they (like us canny, mean Scots) prefer to the global heating systems of the West: the kotatsu table, the electric carpet, the heated toilet seat, even hot stick-on patches fuelled by chemical reaction, these provide spots of heat where and when you most need them. Apart from those, the omnipresent air conditioning unit serves as a (rather feeble) heater too. Also, the Japanese spend a lot of time out and about in public. In the public bath-house or the izakaya you can keep warm in company. What's more, the threat of earthquakes makes the Japanese build rather flimsy, throw-away houses.
He closes with what might be closer to the core reason for this deliberate exposure; that being cold in the winter is proper in a shinto way; as he says, ". . . it should feel cold."
Based on some recent reading, I think
imomus might be both a bit right and a bit wrong. He got the observations correct, but failed to put an island nation's past into perspective when he drew the ultimate conclusions.Jared Diamond writes in Collapse -- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed about how Japan faced and managed a population/resource crisis during the Tokugawa Shogunate.
The 1657 Meireki fire, and the resulting demand for timber to rebuild Japan's capital, served as a wake-up call exposing the country's growing scarcity of timber . . . at a time when its population . . . had been growing rapidly. That might have led to an Easter-Island-like catastrophe. Instead, over the course of the next two centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and much more nearly sustainable resource consumption rates.
. . . (A)spects of the shift served to reduce wood consumption. Beginning in the late 17th century, Japan's use of coal instead of wood as a fuel rose. Lighter construction replaced heavy-timbered houses, fuel-efficient cooking stoves replaced the practice of heating the whole house, and reliance on the sun to heat houses during the winter increased.
(Diamond, Collapse, Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 299-300)
That last section describes perfectly the modern Japan
imomus describes. Interesting as his observations were, I feel getting this historical background far more useful than the intuitive but still speculative explanations offered by imomus. As to the shinto attribution, could it not well be that the centuries of resource management have led to a Japanese culture that feels such traditional heating and living methods to be appropriate? A past of necessary resource management has created a culture that clings to their less consumptive traditional uses of wood. Perhaps the need to conserve helped develop the shinto zeitgeist, instead of vice-versa.The strength of character necessary to permanently alter one's culture? Now that's gaman. . . gaman suru.
I got on this tear a while back reflecting on Peak Oil and Global Warming. I tend to side with many experts in the various fields see the future as one with both forced and pragmatic reductions in energy use. Some see those forcings as forcing something far more insidious than mere survival. They see any required consumption reductions as imposed by a dictatorship that violate the sovereignty of our nation.Well, perhaps our culture will change over time. Perhaps before the Tokugawa resource reductions the Japanese people consumed far more energy per capita relative to the technology than they do today.
The point is, the Japanese are still here.
The same cannot be said for the Greenland Norse, who refused to eat fish on the coast of Greenland (!) or give up their hungry, hungry cows.
The same cannot be said for most of the Easter Islanders, who refused to protect a breeding supply of the world's largest palm (now extinct), to stop building energy and resourse intensive moas, those enormous statues that pepper the almost abandoned island, or to slow growth in their own numbers on their very very tiny speck of rock.
Those cultures lacked foresight and a willingness to reign in their lifestyles. They both favored tradition over pragmatism. Perhaps they chose faith over the evidence provided by their own eyes.
Most of all, those now extinct ways of life lacked gaman.