If you walk into any cafe, shop, or delicatessen (okay i have yet to see a deli anywhere but i like the way the word sounds in this sentence) there is someone yelling out a greeting of some sort or another. Seriously, every time and in a high-pitched voice - I know not why. I seem to be immune to it, but it drives many people nuts! Can you imagine going to get your morning coffee and the cashier shouts out GOOD MORNINGGGGGGGG 3 or 4 times before you can even order and/or wake up?? Well I assume they're saying good morning or welcome but I really have no idea. I don't know much Japanese (I will address this issue in a future post). But the guy in this blog called kotaku does and he explains the practice of yelling in a hilarious article titled "Japan: It's not funny anymore." Click the word kotaku to read the article/blog in its entirety or just read the excerpt below, which I just had to read again! Too funny!:
I can't have not mentioned this before: Employees at shops in Japan scream all the time, and sometimes with no reason. I read several weekly Japanese business magazines, and I once read one where a columnist reported some figures from some Japanese PhD's recent research findings: Apparently, "putting on the impression of being busy" is mathematically proven to be "more important" for making money than either "offering good products" or "offering good service".
Western business gurus have been advising young up-and-comers for years to put "President and Founder" on their business card instead of "First and Only Employee." Well, Tokyo is a pedestrian culture, and on the ground, this advice translate into something terrifying.
Chances are, if you've only spent a short time in Japan, you might have found it endearing. You really came to feel like you were in Asia, what with people screaming everywhere, like they would in an epic Chinese marketplace scene in an adventure film. This atmosphere is completely manufactured. Like, the biggest electronics stores actually keep ladders on hand so that certain employees can climb the ladders and scream indecipherable words down at the customers, through megaphones.
I do not use the word "indecipherable" lightly. Very seldom are the words actual words. A friend let me in on this secret. "You know, aside from 'irasshaimase', they're not using actual words, most of the time." He had prior job experience, see. Apparently, some stores actually demand that employees enlisted as barkers absolutely refrain from using actual words. That's a little weird. I don't like knowing things like that. It's like seeing a cockroach scatter from behind the TV and up into a crack in the ceiling just before you shut off the light to go to bed in a seedy motel: now you have to sleep with that knowledge.
So, wait, if everyone knows that the people aren't saying actual words, why don't they, like, get pissed about it? I mean, that's some serious "The Matrix" bullshit right there. That's a machine there's got to be somebody raging against.
Or maybe it's just me. Maybe these things really don't bother other people so much. Japanese people always tell me, "Oh, it's just a Japanese thing. If you grew up here, maybe you'd be okay with all of it."
Well, sure. Maybe I would have become desensitized to it. Hell, maybe I'm on the verge of becoming desensitized to it right now. Maybe the rage of this current moment is, in fact, a last-ditch effort to affect some change before I can't care less anymore.
Okay, here's what I think is the crux of my problem. When I first came to Japan, and learned that "irasshaimase" meant "come [into the store]!" I expressed a certain amount of confusion to the dude who was playing the part of my tour guide. We were in a Jeansmate — a Japanese jeans store that is inexplicably open twenty-four hours a day, even in towns where (as in ours) the only god damn supermarket closes at eight in the PM. I was looking at jeans, and an employee, standing nearby, was repeatedly yelling "Irrashaimase" at my roommate and I. "That's just how they do things." He must have yelled it maybe a hundred times. We were the only customers in the store. "Why is he telling us to come into the store if we're already in the store?" "Beats me, man," was my roommate's response.
Years later, I was dating a woman who might have really hated me. I think the thing she might have hated most about me was that I didn't hate her. Anyway, I brought up the "irasshaimase" thing, and she groaned. Her first explanation was the knee-jerk: "It's a Japanese thing." Her second explanation was to give me a history lesson: "Irasshaimase is a greeting that dates back hundreds of years, when shops were traditionally stalls in a marketplace. In such cases, the word indicated to customers that they should come closer to the stall, that they should buy their little dried fishes at your stall, and not the stall next to you, which sells the same things." This explanation was good enough. However, the kid in the Jeansmate, years ago, wasn't standing behind a stall. The word "Come [into the store / over here]" is not genuine. The kid was calling it out repeatedly as he folded jeans a few aisles awayfrom the jeans that interested me. If I were to blindly and deafly heed the command semantically buried in his polite perfunctory greeting, it would require me to abandon my act of genuinely curious commercialism.
My problem is that "irasshaimase" actually means something in both ancient andmodern Japanese. Like, we have the word "Hello" in English, right? "Hello" doesn't mean anything. You look it up in a dictionary, and it'll say "Word used to greet someone in a friendly manner". Actually, I just made that definition up; let's actually check Dictionary.com:
hello –interjection 1. (used to express a greeting, answer a telephone, or attract attention.)
There you have it. Many of the words used perfunctorily in the Japanese language have both useful purposes and cold, hard semantic meanings. That kind of bothers me. I can't really say why — maybe because I didn't grow up with it? No, that can't be it: I once met a hardcore Japanese punk rock dude who brought up his own out-creeped-ness with the semantics of Japanese customary greetings completely independent of my input.
Like, during orientation at a Japanese company, you're told to use the word "Otsukaresamadesu!" when greeting other employees either in the hallway, at the coffee machine, or even on a train station platform on the weekend. The word means, more or less, "You are tired!" The progression goes like this: When you see someone in the office before noon, you are to tell them "good morning." After lunch has finished, leading right up to the end of the day, it's "You are tired!" So there you have it: Japanese people in the office are expected to work themselves to tiredness before lunch. Or maybe they're expected to eat so much that they get tired.
Of course, it's all a front. You might have heard that the Japanese work insanely hard, or that some people die from overwork. That's a joke. They don't. You know how they die? The same way that kid in Korea died while playing Counter-Strike: The very act of sitting and staring at a computer screen becomes something of an addiction in and of itself; they simply forget to use the toilet, or maybe have an aneurysm. In short, if you've ever worked at an office anywhere in the world, you've done about the same degree of actual work that Japanese people do in Japanese companies. You just might have not had the same semantic prison constructed around you by all the people subliminally intoning "You are tired!" to you every thirty fucking seconds.
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