Cultural Conundrums / Is there a cultural interpreter in the house?
Kate Elwood Special to The Daily Yomiuri
As a child I always loved the scenes in TV programs when a diner suddenly fell ill in a restaurant and someone called out, "Is there a doctor in the house?" Without fail, an elegantly dressed physician would hurry over, efficiently assess the situation, and save the day. How cool was that! Unfortunately, a B-minus in high school biology put paid to any fantasy I might have entertained of one day being the one able and oh-so-willing to hasten to the rescue.
The other day, I had an experience that reminded me of this type of episode. I was at a Japanese traditional restaurant for dinner with some colleagues to celebrate the successful completion of a project. Suddenly, the manager of the restaurant, a middle-aged woman in a kimono, urgently inquired, "Is there an English speaker in the house?" Well, actually, those were not her precise words, but the upshot was that she was having a problem with a foreign customer and wanted me to sort it out. Another colleague, a Japanese man, came along with me, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps because he thought it might be a situation requiring the expertise of two English speakers.
It turned out that the customer had finished eating and was in the process of paying his bill. However, he objected to one item he was being charged for. This was the tsukidashi, an appetizer. As is the custom in Japan, it had been brought along with the beer the man had ordered. In some restaurants and pubs, this appetizer may be included in the price of the beer or other drink, but in others, especially if the appetizer is somewhat elaborate, a separate payment will be expected. In this particular restaurant, the appetizer was gorgeous and the cost for it was rather high.
In fact, both sides of the dispute had enough knowledge of the other's language to comprehend the basic situation. The customer asserted that he had not ordered the appetizer and had not been told when it was brought to him that he would be charged extra for it. The manager pointed out that he had not asked anything about it and had in fact eaten it. The customer then countered that it was unethical to not be up-front about costs, and explained that, not knowing about the appetizer, he had ordered a separate fish dish "to be nice."
As they spoke indignantly, both parties looked at me and my colleague, and as I translated what each said for the benefit of the other, they nodded in irritation. I had thought I had been summoned for language support but that was not really needed. Each side wanted me to agree that their viewpoint was the more reasonable one and to help convince the other of the rightness of their opinion. The manager and customer were each comfortable their moral outrage. Perched on the fence and seeing both points of view, I was the awkward one. This was suddenly seeming a lot trickier than preventing someone from choking.
My colleague made an admirable stab, I thought, at trying to enable the customer to see the charge for the appetizer not as a pernicious attempt to deprive him of his money through unfair means but rather as a normal fee that might apply in the customer's own country, by asking him to view it as a table charge. This might have worked if it had been translated as such right from the start, but the man knew it was not really a table charge and rejected this invitation to shift perspective.
We were all getting a bit weary and I thought longingly of my own nice food and beer waiting for me back with my other colleagues. Both sides were unwilling to admit that their position was wrong or at least not the only way to look at the situation. But they did finally agree to a compromise of the customer paying half of the charge for the appetizer. Whew! My stint at refereeing the cultural clash in progress was at an end. My colleague and I returned to our own table.
This was my first time called out, as it were, for an on-the-spot consultation. But I am frequently asked to elucidate some quirky cultural trait or another. Well, elucidation is the ostensible aim, but often the real goal appears deeper and murkier. once a woman I used to teach English to, whom I'll call Mayumi, invited me over for tea. I wondered what was up since we hadn't kept up much in the years since I had stopped serving as her instructor. It turned out her son was going to marry an American woman. And Mayumi wanted me to explain why the fiancee drank so much Pepsi.
Before I could begin to consider my response, Mayumi told me that her husband had suggested that drinking Pepsi was the American equivalent of drinking green tea. However, Mayumi continued, surely I would agree that green tea and Pepsi were not the same thing at all. They were completely different!
When Mayumi reached this point she looked at me expectantly. I didn't know the bride-to-be. I didn't know the son. I didn't have the statistics of soft-drink consumption in the United States. I rarely drink Pepsi myself. But I did my best, agreeing that Mayumi's husband's observation had some validity, in the sense that when a Japanese person turned to green tea for refreshment, some Americans might similarly go for soda.
Mayumi gave a bitter shake to her head, and I realized that she didn't really hope to hear an exposition on Pepsi as an American cultural artifact. She wanted confirm!ation that her son was making a terrible mistake with serious consequences. But with only the Pepsi as evidence I simply couldn't do this for her, and after Mayumi poured me another cup of green tea--which had somehow come to mean so much more than a simple means to quenching thirst--I made my goodbyes and departed with Mayumi looking forlorn and disillusioned.
I wanted to console Mayumi and tell her that her fears were normal and that it is hard to trust that our children will be able to decide what is best for them. But I was still very young myself, without sufficient life experience to feel qualified to say that, and Mayumi did not seem to want to hear such words anyway. I ended up saying that the Pepsi would probably not be much of a problem if it didn't bother her son, although it was clear that Mayumi saw the Pepsi as the tip of the iceberg.
When I told some other colleagues about the tsukidashi incident, one of them said that when he went out with non-Japanese he translated tsukidashi as an "obligatory delicacy." This phrase has a nice ring to it. And the fascinating concept of mandated delicious tidbits seems like a useful and positive approach to all cultural conundrums. Approaching a different culture, there are things we must deal with--they are obligatory--but they are also delicacies. The beer that comes with them is nice, too.
Elwood is an associate professor of English at Waseda University's School of Commerce. She is the author of "Getting Along with the Japanese" (Ask, 2001).
(Apr. 26, 2007)