GAIKOKU (Foreign Countries)
When living in a foreign country you look at Japan from the outside, you notice various things, which you never notice from inside of Japan.
I watch a TV program sent from Japan, "This is strange, Japanese" which started in the fall of 98. The show introduces Japan through the eyes of foreigners living in Japan. I can’t help grinning because it sometimes is common to what I have found about Japan.
The other day in the program they talked about "Simple questions to foreigners." There was a question. "Why foreigners try to talk not in Japanese but in English in Japan while Japanese try to talk in English abroad?"
In the show they concluded that a language is the culture itself, so people should speak Japanese as long as they are in Japan. There is nothing wrong with it. But something bothered me.
The question discussed about included the feeling of unfairness. But it ignored an important thing. Do Japanese try to speak Thai or the Indonesian language when we visit there? We try to speak English, don’t we? When we visit European countries, many of us don’t try to speak each language of each country but try to take advantage of speaking English. (In the program they showed a Japanese middle aged woman in a French restaurant who complained to a waiter in Japanese. I feel this is just arrogant and lazy.
On the other hand do people from Thailand or Indonesia try to speak their own language in Japan? Even French people who are famous of being proud of their language may try to speak English rather than French in Japan.
Considering this fact it is obvious that the unfairness only applies to the people who are from English speaking countries. Japanese are not the only victims. All but English speaking people experience the same. We must be thankful for the fact that because people all over the world, although maybe not willingly, use English as their almost common language, we don’t need to learn various languages of the world. (If you don’t like it, we need to make Japan so attractive that people in the world willingly want to learn its language. And this itself is important.)
We are apt to think the idea of "we Japanese" and "they foreigners." Even though we know that there is no country which name is "Foreign country" in the world, we combine various countries except Japan to "foreign country." I don’t think only the Japanese do this and it can not be avoided. But it is important for us to keep in mind that there are various countries and various cultures. Also we must not forget that people including ourselves tend to think the world where they live is in the center of the world.
When I tell Americans that I feel ashamed of my poor English, many of them tell me, "You are great because you can speak a language other than Japanese. It is me who feels ashamed of being able to speak only our native tongue." So what if your English is not so good. Let’s keep it up.
Keiichiro
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