On the values we choose to represent us
When people ask about what drew me to Japan, or what keeps me here (or infer those questions, even without asking them outright), I often mumble something about my love of Japanese literature, or the food, or how little I miss Canadian winters. Those are all factors. But I think the real reason might be omotenashi. Once you’ve accepted it into your heart, it’s hard to imagine a life without it.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an explainer post about the life-changing magic of the ancient Japanese tradition of omotenashi. That’s been done elsewhere, and done well.
To me, omotenashi isn’t just Japan’s (excellent, world class) take on hospitality. It represents a desire to present one’s best self to others, and to make others feel cared for. This is a capacity we all have within us. When it manifests, it creates a shared experience that speaks to the best of what humans are capable of when we interact with one another. It doesn’t always manifest. The point is that it has the potential to.
Examples include:
1) The server at the restaurant I visited recently with my family. I merely inquired as to whether they had small spoons and forks for children. I simply asked about their existence as I walked toward the buffet. Not thirty seconds later, two tiny spoons and forks appeared at our table. This example is obvious and textbook.
2) The well-documented cleaning up of seating areas and dressing rooms by Japanese soccer fans and players in Qatar. This is maybe less obvious.
A concept doesn’t become embedded in a nation’s consciousness without a large amount of buy-in. People need to agree that the concept is worthwhile, and that it speaks for them and what they value.
For me personally, in the context of Japan, it’s not the omotenashi itself that I appreciate. It’s the fact that this country would choose omotenashi, above all else, as a form of representation. I find that dedication admirable, regardless of the success of the results (which could be called into question!).
The San Francisco Police Department was recently granted permission by that city’s board of supervisors to use robots to kill people.
That could be a whole post on its own, couldn’t it?
I could spend a whole day reading and rereading that sentence, like it was the world’s worst Zen koan. That it was true is a lot to try and process, especially with everything else burning down going on.
Thankfully, someone paused and realized, “Hang on, we don’t actually want to live in a Terminator movie, do we?” The decision has been overturned.
But the fact remains: the city in which The Wikimedia Foundation, Uber, and Elon’s Blue Birdie are all headquartered was, briefly, home to robots authorized to murder humans.
(I’ll tell you this: I am a pacifist person with no specialized knowledge or training. But I know some ways (at least theoretically) to disarm a human being if I ever had to, in self-defense. You know what I don’t know? Anything about what to do if a goddamn robot is coming at me.)
The point is, a group of people decided that the story they wanted to tell about themselves was: Hey, we have murder robots here!
In Indonesia, extramarital sex has been outlawed. A group of people has chosen to tell its story to the world in the form of, “Don’t come here if you’re looking to fuck with no strings attached.”
Don’t even get me started.
Omotenashi. It can be hard to recognize, especially when you’re unaccustomed to it. It’s not exclusively something that happens in hotels and restaurants.
Here’s a third example of omotenashi, to demonstrate that it can hit when you least expect it, and that it may take years of reflection for you to realize that you’d experienced it at all.
In 2010, the year I first came to Japan, I blew part of my first paycheque on an Xbox 360. (It seemed a bold choice, to purchase the only non-Japanese-made gaming console to ever make a dent on the country’s sales charts. I wasn’t trying to be provocative. I already owned a PlayStation 3, which I had left in Canada (arrogantly assuming I wouldn’t have the time or desire to play video games while living in… the country that produced all of the video games I had ever loved), and didn’t want to buy another one.)
I bought it along with some Halo game, an American-made game about invading an alien world and shootin’ it up. Also, importantly, Bayonetta—a Japanese-made balletic action game about a sexy pole-dancing witch with guns in the soles of her stilettos.
The clerk who rang up my purchase did not bat an eye about the Xbox itself, or about Halo. He paused, however, when he got to Bayonetta.
“Uh. This game has very complex controls,” he said. “Are you sure you’ll be alright?”
Let me tell you how often I referenced this episode to my video game appreciating friends as a moment of derision and insult! My gaming abilities had been called into question! The unrefined foreigner with the video game equivalent of a greasy cheeseburger, fumbling naively toward exquisite connoisseur fare.
Now, years later, I get it. I see what that clerk was trying to do, and it warms my heart.
(I never finished Bayonetta. Game’s hard as shit. Gorgeous to look at though.)
In Nemesis Games, the fifth book in the remarkably consistent Expanse series of sci-fi novels which revolve around a conflict between human-colonized planets (I have a type, what can I say), a key character states, “There are two sides in this… It’s the people who want more violence and the ones who want less.” As is often the case with sci-fi literature, what at first reads like an oversimplified distillation of human nature reveals itself to be an observation well worth reflecting on.
What are we, as groups of people, putting into the world? Why?