Before I left Ireland, I was talking to one of my Japanese friends living in Ireland and she was complaining that Irish people have no “joushiki”. Kenkyusha defines it as “common sense” or “practical sense”. It also uses “wisdom” and “common knowledge” to define it. She’s dead on though. They just don’t get it. I wasn’t convinced until I heard a story from one of the more odious girls this morning.Last night I was invited to an Irish bar with a few of the other people on the tour, but even if I had wanted to go I had no where near the energy required to get out of the hotel at that time at night. This morning I met that particularly execrable girl who explained that the bar was open quite late. Of course I avoid her like the plague but she was talking to my dad and I was listening. Anyway, she told him that they kept dimming the lights like they were closing and stopped selling alcohol quite early but they just didn’t close. In the end, “the Irish were the last ones standing”, while the bartender sat reading a book for the last hour or so.What they didn’t understand is that this is Japan. The shop can’t close while there are customers there. And they can’t tell the customers to get out. When they stopped selling drink and when they were flashing the lights, it meant “we’re closing. You all don’t have to go home but you do need to get out of here.” It’s really not that hard to understand… there are a lot more subtle things the Japanese do that I wouldn’t understand at all but this one seems fairly obvious to me.That poor bartender probably had a family to get back to, but in Japan お客様は神様です (o-kyaku-sama ha kami-sama desu, “The customer is God”). This meant that he had to wait for all these customers to tire out and go home before he could. Lame!
Jun
17
2007
17
2007
Irish people just don’t get it…
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Well, i’m afraid that’s not the irish tourists fault, and in case you had forgotten, you are irish. You, of all people should know that most tourists most certainly will have not read up on as much common etiquette in Japan as you. In fact for most of them this is probably their first time talking to a Japanese person. I certainly wouldn’t have known that. They most likely would have left if they had known that that was the case. Here you’re told quite literally to get out. There they probably thought oh great, they’ve stopped serving but we’re allowed to stay here as long as we want. I’ve finally found a flaw in the over-politeness of the Japanese, you can’t deal with tourists this way. It is most certainly not our fault if the bar tender hasn’t the common sense to say he has to close up. I certainly feel no pity for him if none of this was explained to the irish tourists. Its not lacking common sense on their behalf, its lacking it on the Japanese side of things. Common sense is not staying up all night because you’re too nice to tell some foreign customers you have to close for the night.
It’s a Japanese bar in Japan! It’s not the owner’s fault for not understanding how foreign bars work! Granted the Irish can’t be expected to understand how it all works, but that doesn’t put any blame onto the Japanese.
Other stupid things Irish people did here: When leaving a temple, lots of people took their shoes from the “genkan” (which they had taken off when entereing) and put them on inside. Then walked outside. It was pretty clear that this was wrong as there were ladies telling everyone not to put the shoes down inside. When one lady got it wrong and was told she had to put on her shoes outside, she literally laughed in the face of the lady telling her off.
One lady started idly walking into a zen garden (those raked rock gardens). I’m not surprised that they see foreigners as big clumsy barbarians at all now.
I think it is up to the the individual to understand that if your a tourist in japan, there is going to be a different way of traditional drinking or pub’ing in their own country,,no matter how much japan wants to be in the western eyes…its still japan. As for me, being a hapa(half) i can see this both ways…The japanese here in Hawaii have made their embarrassing moments too , not only Hawaii, but many other places of interest..Im a film director and have a keen eye for things and culture. so this all boils down to just learning …..
i think that if they stopped serving and turned the lights off on me id get the point