Ok, there was this guy on the trains from 静岡 to 名古屋. He was a westerner, white, and had a big camping backpack like me. He was dressed to travel, like me. Yes, we were the only two westerners either of us had seen all afternoon. Yes, we were probably both too cheap to buy bullet train tickets and had therefore probably been riding all the same local trains a quarter of the way across Japan’s main island. However, for some reason I just didn’t want to make eye contact with him, and I didn’t want to do the usual “Gaijin nod” where the two, usually Western, guys (do women do this too?) meeting each other in a foreign place, in this case surrounded by Asians, nod knowingly to each other as if to say, “We are different. Here we are – how special we are.”
The guy stared at me almost continuously for almost two hours and I’m convinced it wasn’t because there was something strange attached to my face. I am almost sure he was waiting for that classic eye contact moment that would have either ended at that or become the gesture that justified further conversation between us, the two fellow Western travelers far from the international metropolis of Tokyo.
Maybe I was just being an ass. But something has started to annoy me about this little ritual. Why should I treat him differently from anyone else on the train, filled as it was with students returning from their rural schools to their rural homes? Sure, many of them stared at me too, but if ever our eyes met, they wouldn’t give me the smug smile and nod which is the slimy visual handshake for our community of outsiders. Ok, the Japanese will never look at me as “one of them” and quite frankly, I have no desire to be “one of them” but neither do I feel any kind of automatic communion with all foreigners in Japan, just because they are of a particular race (strangely enough, I have only experienced this “visual handshake” with non-Russian caucasians, blacks, and South Asians here in Japan. I think this would make for a great research topic: what is the link?).
At any rate, I refused to gratify him with eye contact and buried my head into my Japanese book on Taisho period Japanese history. For some reason I felt like I was showing more respect towards the Japanese I was surrounded by in performing this little act of defiance. Somewhat ironically, I found myself caught up by another standard foreigner’s ritual in Japan, when a Yamaha executive sitting next to me asked, “Can you read Japanese?”
Somewhat annoyed, I answered, “No, I’m just looking at the pictures.” When I’m not annoyed, I remember that this kind of question is neither asked out of stupidity or necessarily out of disbelief that foreigners can learn to read Japanese, but instead as a way to politely indicate their respect and appreciation for the work that we put into mastering the language.
He took me seriously at first and pointed to a chart of the 1924 Japanese Diet election results which happened to be on the page I was reading and said, “Oh, I see, you are looking at the colorful charts.” After checking his facial expression to see if he was making fun of me (that actually would have been a great come back line), I regretted my sarcasm and backtracked. I explained that, no, I actually could read some of the Japanese in the book. He smiled and answered surprisingly fluently, “Ah, I see, you were pulling my leg.” We then had a normal conversation in English and he told me about his five years living in California, his work supplying overseas subsidiaries with some electrical thingymajigs and he gave me some friendly tips on cool places to visit in Mie before he got off at his station.
I then went back to the full time task of avoiding the other foreigner’s stare. “Damn it,” I thought to myself, “now he knows for sure that I’m not Japanese and that I speak English. My cover is blown.”
Mitch, no! Now you too have become a ‘gruff and arrogant gaijin’. It’s not goint to hurt your pride that much to simply nod to a fellow caucasian, is it?
Hehe, it is not my pride! It is an annoyance at the snobbish “we are different and cool” attitude of foreigners which I don’t like. That was my motivation…whatever the result.
You don’t have to leave the west to experience the same phenomenon. I spent a year as an exchange student in Germany trying desperately to blend in and to avoid other Amerikaner. Some of it was childish arrogance on my part but some of it was a natural defense mechanism: I was convinced that only complete immersion in German would get me where I wanted to go linguistically, and so I resisted not only conversation in English but books and pop culture, too. The books were especially hard — I had a painful couple of months of withdrawal before my German was good enough for pleasure reading.
My one shameless exception was eavesdropping on Amis who would talk on the subways and in other public places as though everyone around them was deaf. On a later visit I heard two guys loudly discussing how German girls wouldn’t put out but the pickings were easy in Prague and Budapest. I felt like reporting them to some authority that could revoke their visas on grounds of boorishness. I also ran into two teenage girls one time, probably army kids given their suburban destination, who were savvy enough to know that many Germans speak English and so had a tittering conversation about everyone in the S-Bahn car in Pig Latin.
In Mexico, where I could never pass for a local (in Germany I could do it until I opened my mouth), I’ve also had the experience of a friendly local wanting to practice English while I really wanted to speak Spanish. It’s been hard to decide whether to stick to my total-immersion guns or gracefully indulge the other guy.
It must be very different now that the Internet is a global addiction and the first thing many travelers do when they hit a new town is check their e-mail from home. I can’t see myself going offline for a year just to avoid English. Maybe I could read everything via Babelfish? :-)
PR, thanks very much for your posting of your story experiencing something similar in Europe!
Most of the eye contact research being done recently is relating to discern if people are telling the truth. For example, someone who is lying in a pressure situation is more likely to give short answers, make poor eye contact, sweat, etc. Border guards and airport screening officials have been using these tell-tales for years.
Direct eye contact between people facilitates important social-cognitive effects, improving the speed with which we can categorize people as men or women and categorize them based on our individual stereotypes, according to a study published in the September 2002 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society. Authors of the study are researchers C. Neil Macrae, Dartmouth College; Bruce M. Hood, University of Bristol, England; Alan B. Milne, University of Aberdeen, Scotland; Angela C. Rowe, University of Bristol, England; and Malia F. Mason, Dartmouth College.
Hey Chris! Thanks for the comment, and the tip on the research. Interesting! I guess my failure to meet his eye contact was my indication that I had no desire to participate in the categorization (or at least not admit to it) process :-)
Thanks!