I experienced racism (tattooism?) in Japan

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was driving to a Halloween party at the beginning of the month with a friend, and realized I’d forgotten my atlas. Going by what I thought was the first major turn I had to take, I pulled into a rest stop to see if there was a map posted. There wasn’t. OK, so after availing myself of the facilities, I decided to ask my other rest stop companions if they had a map I could look at. After consulting my cell phone dictionary (thank you!), and discovering that the word for map was pronounced almost the same as that for cheese, I ask the first guy (maybe 40ish) I had seen upon entering the rest area, who happened to be cleaning his license plate with a sponge.

Pardon me, I asked in my politest of tones, do you have a map of (this) prefecture?

No I don’t, he responded.

No big deal. There was some other dude (50ish) coming out of the toilet on the way to his car at that time, so I amble over to him.

Excuse me, I venture, but do you have a map of (this) prefecture?

More apologetic than the first guy, he responded that he unfortunately did not.

Seeing as how there were a total of three cars in the rest stop, one of them being mine, I decided that I was SOL. I wandered back to my car to inform my friend of our unfortunate luck. But then she had a revelation. Seeing as I was dressed as a gangster for Halloween, maybe the large tattoos of a dragon and fire adorning my neck were frightening the poor patrons of the rest stop. Just then, I spotted a woman coming out of the toilet. You go and talk to her, I told her. The word for map is “cheese.”

I watched my friend go over to the woman, and a moment later the woman went to the second guy I asked and got a set of keys from him. She opened the car door that I had stood not 3 meters from, and pulled an atlas (which may have been open) from on top of the dashboard.

I hadn’t even been wearing the rest of my costume (which in reality was just a suit and a concealed handgun). I was just a regular-looking foreigner in a t-shirt, jacket, and jeans. The only reason the tatts were already on was because of a Halloween party I had attended the night before. I guess my beard didn’t help much, either.

What really gets me about it is how apologetic the second guy seemed. If it had been a kind of mild “no, fuck off” tone like the first guy had used, I would have understood. The first guy probably had a map too, but his attitude seemed to be more like, “I’m cleaning my damn car. I don’t have an atlas for you.” The second guy said “I don’t have one” or more literally “I’m not carrying one” twice in a row in an apologetic tone, with the little flat-palmed hand gesture by your face which in America means something smells bad but in Japan is more for when you’re using certain negative sentences.

I’m not broken up about it or anything. I don’t experience racism (or whatever you want to call it. The guy probably would have given the same response to a J dude with tatts) on a regular basis, and when I do it tends to be more amusing than anything else, like the owner of the snack bar explaining how all foreigners smell funny.

It does seem like Japan (along with the rest of the world) is slowly making progress on racism. It just seems like their insular culture might take just a bit longer to come around to it, given that things like smoke detectors in homes and seatbelts in the rear of cars are new laws this year.

2

You do know that tattoos in Japan are taboo right? They are typically associated with yakuza. The wiki article on irezumi is accurate as far as I can tell.

So, it was either ‘tattooism’ or quite possibly they were just scared of you.

Here is a great article on tattooing in modern Japan. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20070906r1.html

3

Yeah, hence the fact that they went with my (Japanese) gangster costume. :slight_smile:

I was very polite, though!

4

Of course, as you noted in your OP, Japan is changing. If you’re a Jpop idol or live in certain parts of Tokyo or Osaka, you can get away with tattoos :wink:

From here: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fs20080826a3.html

5

Are you sure you weren’t just accidentally asking them for local cheese?

6

I’m pretty sure. Cheese is pronounced “cheeezu” and map is pronounced “cheezu.” I’m pretty sure I clipped the middle vowel enough. If not, then maybe my speech was hindered by my skin-constricting tatts!

7

「いったいCheeseがありませんか」
「いいえ、ないです」
パー！
Such a senseless waste of human life.

8

Chizu　地図

Not even close to ‘cheeze’ for them. BIIIG difference in pronunciation to their ears, if not yours. But don’t feel bad, even after 2 years in Japan I was still having trouble getting the pronunciation of “water” (omizu) good enough so that the waiters would understand what I was talking about. Seriously.

9

OT, but I am beginning to seriously suspect that you aren’t a chick. :smack:

10

Honest question: when I went to Japan for a couple of weeks, people told me that it was a pretty easy language to pronounce passably, as long as you stuck to the syllables… is this totally wrong? I can’t imagine “omizu” being a persistent challenge to pronounce but maybe I’m unaware of some phonetic nuances.

11

I don’t speak Japanese, but in my experience, native speakers of a language that relatively few foreigners bother to learn, don’t have very good “figuring out what the non-native speaker” is saying" skills that native English-speakers do. I’m not sure how many Japanese-speaking gaijin are wandering around Japan, so maybe it isn’t an issue and I’m wrong.

12

By and large the pronunciation of Japanese is fairly easy. There are only 5 vowel sounds, and they all exist in English. They do tend to be shorter than the vowels in English, and even the words that have longer sounds on paper might not necessarily be said that way (for example, the word for yesterday is “kinō” with a long o. But everyone says it as if it were written “kino.” The word for cheese is written in phonetic Japanese for the English word, so it shows up with the long “i” sound in the middle (in English we would say this as “ee”), ie chiizu. But the word for map has the short “i” sound, which is still pronounced “ee,” just you clip the vowel a bit earlier (ie chizu, as Isamu pointed out).

Some of the consonants are a bit tough, as they are usually less emphatic than the English ones. This makes “ryo” sound a lot like “yo.” And they’re also ones that we might not use in the places that the Japanese use them, or as stand-alone sounds, such as “tsu.” We use the “ts” uh, blend (?) at the end of the word “gets,” but we certainly don’t start words with it. The “ga” is pronounced (and I’m told that this is universal, but it might just be my region) “nga,” so even the transliteration of Japanese (called rōmaji) doesn’t accurately portray what it might sound like in English.

Still, by and large, it’s not too difficult a language to pronounce. I’m not fantastic with languages, but I can generally hear whether or not I’m mimicking something at least fairly accurately (I was largely kidding with the cheese thing, Isamu). I just wish my vocabulary were larger-- I have conversations that go “blah blah word I know blah word I might know blah wait what was that first word blah blah?” And then I’m supposed to answer. But with speaking, I can usually get basic concepts across, even if it’s not totally accurate grammar.

Which leads me to Kyla’s point, about natives trying to figure out what the non-native is saying. I don’t have a ton of experience with how this relates to pronunciation, but man, do the Japanese ever suck at charades. You can get them 90% of the way there, and (for the most part, and they tend to be a little older or the ones who don’t really interact with foreigners much, which is most of them) they just can’t fill in that last 10%.

I had my kitchen sink clogged, and I went to the dollar store (which are fantastic in Japan) looking for draino or something similar. I told the saleslady “sink” and “water” while gesturing that water was inside it, and then “down” and “no.” I think I also gestured a pipe and blocked it. Still nothing. I think we eventually wandered to the cleaning products where I finally saw a pipe with a blockage on the package.

ETA: Oh, and olives, of course I’m a chick. I’m just descended from the bearded lady and a gorilla.

13

I guess it has to be more of a woman bonding issue, probably the guy wasnt sure if he had a map. Probably he was not so sure about having a guy standing next to him while he was searching through his glovebox too.

Japanese (some) are a bit insular at times like this. They like to help, but not at the cost of their imagined danger.

I have quite a few tattoos and never faced tattooism in Tokyo, but up north I did get a few smart aleck comments. Chalk it down to a wierd experience and forget it.

BTW, just curious, but I thought that all cars had some sort of navigation system, so maps are a bit rare these days, I for one, never have one and prefer to use my phone.

14

Yeah, but it was on the dashboard! I’m pretty sure it was open. They probably stopped at the rest stop to pee and look at their map. I understand about not wanting to turn your back on someone for awhile to dig for something (though in reality, if you’re an older dude and some young dude wants to rob you or something, he probably is just going to pull a knife or hit you or whatever, back turned or not-- not that fear is necessarily rational), but I’m pretty sure this guy knew that his map was right there.

Tell that to my rickety-ass kei van. Maybe more (most?) modern cars do, but few of my friends have new cars, and of the two friends who have bought new cars in the last year, only one has it. Of the newish cars I know, some have TVs, but not many have the GPS. And yeah, my phone does have it, but using the internet on my plan is prohibitively expensive. I hate the friggin cell phone plans in this country.

15

Things can you can glean in a quick search of Auto’s posting history.

1- He’s a dude.
2- Pass on the soup, if invited over for dinner.

16

I like to think I have a good ear for languages. And not to toot my own horn but my Japanese friends say my pronunciation is fantastic, and people who meet me for the first time will say it too (rather than saying my Japanese is good, they say my pronunciation is good - irk!)

Anyway, I was at a restaurant one evening with 3 J-friends, and I asked the waitress for some water. She stared at me blankly. I got frustrated. She left. So I turn to my friends and they ask what happened - I explained and gave a demo of what I said, and they all agreed that I was slightly off the correct pronunciation so that’s why she couldn’t understand me. (I still think this is complete bullshit by the way! - I think the waitress was a ditz).

17

This reminds me of Honeymoon In Vegas, when Nicolas Cage is on the phone trying to get an address from the operator in Hawaii, with a bad connection: “Was that KAME’A’A? Or KAME’A’A’A?”

18

I didn’t realize how true this was (for Portuguese) until I was in Brazil for a few weeks last summer.

Me: Un kie pur REEN yah (caipirinha), por favor.
Waiter: Que? (or) No intiende. (in other words, something to indicate he didn’t understand what I had just tried to order.

Me: Un kie pur REEN ya?

Waiter: Same response.

Me: Umm… (gesturing retardedly) Cachaça con cal y açúcar…

Waiter. Ahh, kie pur REEN yah

Me: Si, senor!

Waiter : walks away.
My buddy and I look at each other, with dropped jaws.

Buddy: I didn’t hear any difference in the way you two pronounced those, but there must have been something there.

Me: enjoys my caipirinha.
FWIW, I have pretty good pronunciation, but I probably have more of a Spanish accent than an English one. I don’t speak Spanish, but I grew up around it.

19

I’m surprised he got that one, since your “lime” is the one that is “quicklime” and not the fruit.

Anyway, I imagine that the only problem with the pronunciation you offered is the second syllable: it would be pronounced “peer”: kie peer REEN yah.

Of course, I have my own issues: my wife is always correcting me when I say “sky” vs. “your” (céu vs. seu) and other open/closed vowel sounds. Sometimes I get blank looks when I mess up a open or closed vowel.

20

I dunno, maybe it’s different in countries that see a lot of foreigners, but at least in Japan I think it’s what people are expecting you to say. When I speak the local dialect (and I do mean local. Even other Japanese in the same prefecture, but from the east instead of the west don’t understand it) in a restaurant, I’ll get blank stares. Now I’m sure that my pronunciation of the dialect isn’t as good as my standard Japanese (which of course isn’t perfect), but if I said the exact same thing and looked like an 80-yr old farmer I bet they would understand me.

It’s true to a certain extent for everyone. I’ve had conversations with some friends here who have decent English abilities, and they’ll say something in Japanese, and then follow it with something in English. Since their pronunciation isn’t perfect, and I was expecting Japanese, my brain is trying to connect the sounds they just made to Japanese words, even though they spoke in perfectly passable English.

Oh, and BTW Isamu, nothing annoys me more (no, not even being told I’m good with chopsticks for the millionth time-- which I FINALLY stopped getting at work about 10 months in) than saying one or two basic phrases and being told that your Japanese is good. Like, 今晩は、私はBellRungです。 And then they start in with the nihongo jozu! deal. Gah!!