Something that annoys my friends is when I try to figure out something that everyone already knows and takes for granted. It's rude, in a way. "Settled fact," that is to say, "received wisdom," is a method for reducing cognitive load - thus minimizing the energy demands of consciousness. And, look: I'm not trying to say that absolutely everything you've heard from the gleeful commissars on your favorite podcast is a lie. But I do, on occasion, like to try and build the case for something from the ground up. Just to see.
What I really want to know is if an abuela is the same as a grandmother. See? This is why they get mad. I understand that as a purely technical matter of language, these two concepts map to one another. Or, they both refer to the concept that your parents each have their own mothers, and we have to call them something. I don't just mean the cultural freight of a word. Do they hook into the same panel of some cosmic switchboard? If I right click on these terms and go to properties... is the path the same?
This is all to say that I don't think arigatou gozaimasu could possibly be the same as Thank You. I don't think it plugs into the same port. One of these things is USB-C, and the other is, like... A cat.
There was a very tiny Japanese grandma working at a sushi restaurant by our hotel in Kyoto that I could have taken home as a carry-on. I could have put her in the overhead bin; I can see her waving happily as the latch clicks. "Konbanwa!" she might say. "Konbanwa!"
The kindness this woman showed to my family is... Well, the only thing I can compare it to is every other place I went in Japan. Once, somebody thought I was gonna try and tip them - I would never, Kiko said no - and they looked at me like I was trying to give them a tarantula. They were so scandalized by it that their skeleton tried to climb out of their mouth. What you owe a stranger in Japan exists on an entirely different plane. That's just how it is normally. I wasn't being extended this kindness because I'm not from there and I'm rolling through with three adorable redheads.
(When we emerged from the Shinkansen in Kyoto, there was a line of kids going from one place to another. That is, until one of them froze and stared at my daughter Ronia with such intensity that it held up the entire column. I mean, I think she's very cool also. But it doesn't interrupt my body at a fundamental level.)
I just got out of security coming back into the US, and it was such a shitshow compared to going to Korea or Japan that it's offensive bordering on disgusting. In a US airport, someone way, way dumber than you just starts yelling at your children. They get off on this. They jack off to this idiot power they've been granted. In Japan, the job of the person in control of that system is to move people through it as safely and as quickly as possible. That's it. If it's not about that, then it doesn't happen. They don't yell at your daughters about whatever rule you don't know because they just changed it, under incredible time pressure - like their fake-ass, theatrical pseudosafety has material or religious heft slash import. What becomes clear very quickly is that we don't get anything for our profundity of toil except a torrent of abuse from our masters and the wolverines they've deputized to abuse us. We can't get our medicine, and our "right" to not be impoverished by the decay of our bodies - an inevitable phenomenon - is largely gated by employment. We endure a Darwinian hellscape in large part because we've never been to Japan. We don't know, at a deep level, what we deserve.
It's pretty hard to explain to your seventeen year old that the society we hail from has advantages, any at all, after they've been to the Konbini. I was trying to explain that there exists a slider between collectivism and individualism, and there are advantages and disadvantages at each threshold as you traverse it, but my heart wasn't really in it. And neither was my mouth, because I had a highball in one hand and a mystic wand of optimally grilled chicken thigh in the other. As far my eldest is concerned the "freedom" to get shot at school isn't aspirational in nature. We don't have it because it was stolen from us, kid. I wish I had a better answer.
(CW)TB out.
