Warukuchi

I thought I knew Japanese people. I had been interested in Japan for over five years, had lived there for 18 months, 10 of those months in homestays with two Japanese families. In Australia, I had shared my apartment with two Japanese flatmates for about nine months. I had many Japanese friends and language-exchange partners, had been actively involved in Japanese churches in both Australia and Japan, and had taught English to Japanese students in both countries in professional and volunteer capacities.

My impression of Japanese people was that they were some of the best people that I had ever known. They struck me as honest, diligent, clean, polite, and considerate. I could find almost nothing to fault them, and could heartily concur with Xavier when he described the Japanese as being “the best [people] who have as yet been discovered, and it seems to me we shall never find among heathens another race to equal the Japanese.” But this rose-tinted view was painfully shattered during my second stay in Japan.

Things started off well. I was working in a research group in a Japanese university. My supervisor and his graduate students made me feel very welcome. At the same time, I started sharing an apartment with a Japanese undergraduate student who was very friendly and easy to get along with. Everything was fine for the first six months or so.

Then I started overhearing the conversations being held in the adjoining office at the university. I initially noticed that there was a lot of laughter going on, and that it was not the general, good-natured variety, but the mocking type when someone is being subjected to ridicule. I tried not to pay too much attention to it, but it persisted and seemed to grow worse. While I couldn’t hear everything and my Japanese was far from perfect, I could pick up enough to know that I was the main person they were talking about. I found it very difficult to focus on my work while it was going on. On a couple of occasions, it became so intense that I had to leave the office and walk around campus.

The worst perpetrator seemed to be a student that I had first got to know when he visited my university in Australia for a few weeks. I had become friends with Yoshi (not his real name) and took him sightseeing one day. When he became sick one day, I went shopping for him. Then when he needed a place to stay for the last few days of his visit, I let him stay at my apartment. He returned the favor by helping to move my stuff when I moved into my apartment in Japan. He was always ready to help me whenever I needed assistance with anything in the lab. Nothing was ever too much trouble for him.

But for some reason his attitude towards me had changed dramatically. To this day, I’m not sure exactly why. He seemed to be the most vehement and scathing in his criticism of me behind my back. The thing I found hardest to take was that there was no hint of animosity when I spoke to him face to face; indeed, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I could overhear his conversations, I would never have suspected that anything had changed in our friendship.

A few months later, I noticed a similar phenomenon occurring at my apartment. When the student I was staying with had friends over, I often heard raucous laughter similar to that I was hearing in the lab. Once again, there was no hint of any animosity when I spoke with him directly.

I began to wonder if I was suffering from paranoia, and I told my predicament to someone who lived in Japan for much longer that I had. She informed me that speaking about people behind their backs was an all too common occurrence in Japan and that a lot of foreigners experience it. I have subsequently experienced it in many different situations – at a ramen shop where the owner assumed that I couldn’t speak Japanese, at a Japanese factory I visited a few times a month for work, at the Japanese companies that I’ve worked at. The telltale signs are two or more people speaking just far away enough so that you can’t hear the entire conversation, but not so far that you can’t pick up the gist of what they’re saying; the characteristic mocking laughter; and conversations peppered with the word “jibun” (myself).

Saying unkind things about other people behind their backs while pretending to be friendly with them to their face is certainly not something that is unique to Japan; nor is it a characteristic of every Japanese person. But I was taken aback by the intensity of the backstabbing and by how well people concealed it when they were dealing with me directly. The latter phenomenon is a well-known characteristic of Japanese people, and is referred to as tatemae (public face) and hone (true thoughts).

I wonder about many things. I wonder if the fear of this form of ridicule and rejection is one of the main reasons why Japanese people find it difficult to be open about their faith at work and in other environments and why it often takes seekers a long time before they decide to publicly follow Jesus. Being different from others might expose them to this form of rejection. In other words, warukuchi could be one of the biggest hammers in the toolbox that Japanese society uses to clobber down the proverbial protruding nail. I wonder how much it occurs in Japanese churches (thankfully, I haven’t encountered it much in the churches that I’ve been involved with). I wonder whether, for various reasons, Westerners living in Japan are spared or are ignorant of the worst of this backbiting, whereas Japanese are all too familiar with it.

Have you experienced this phenomenon in Japan? If you have, I’d love to hear from you and learn about your experience. Please drop me an email at docsimple111@gmail.com.