The Land od the Rising Yen

forgiven. Or again he
can surmount these difficulties and learn Japanese perfectly. Perfectly is perhaps too high a claim. Many Japanese and Japanese-speaking foreigners
told me that a ninety-per-cent knowledge is the maximum attainable to a gaijin. (Most Japanese will know less of their own language, but their mistakes
will be of a different kind.)
    It is when the rare foreigner has
achieved this ninety-per-cent (or even a slightly lower) status that his real
troubles begin. An American friend, a brilliant Japanese scholar, told me:
‘They are absolutely convinced that no foreigner can speak proper Japanese.
Pidgin-Japanese, with a few odd words, well that’s quite touching and polite;
but the legend is that no foreigner can progress beyond that. So when I speak
to them in perfect Japanese they are foxed. They look at me in bewilderment and
think that I have spoken English. As they know that they cannot
speak English they are sure they have failed to understand me. If they do speak
English they understand me but think I have spoken English to them and they
reply in English. I go to the station every day and ask for my ticket in
Japanese. The clerk — and a different clerk on each occasion — may not look up
at me at all. If he doesn’t there is no trouble. I ask for my ticket in
Japanese, he gives it to me as he does to all other passengers and on I go. But
if he looks up, he either answers me in English — believing that that was the
language I addressed him in — or he is simply unable to understand what I want
until I repeat my request in English. On the telephone I have no difficulty
whatever. But in the streets, in shops, in offices I may go up to a person,
address him in perfect Japanese and get the courteous reply: “Sorry, I don’t
speak English.” In restaurants I order something in Japanese and the
flabbergasted waiter turns to my Japanese wife: if she nods, endorsing my
order, it is accepted. Once in Hokkaido I had a different reaction. I went to a
place where perhaps they had never seen a gaijin before. I spoke to a man
in Japanese and, surprisingly, he understood every word I said. He took me for
a Japanese. When I finished, instead of answering my question, he asked me in
bewilderment: "But why did you dye your hair blond?” ’
    More educated people, of course,
realize the dreadful fact: some gaijin can speak good Japanese. And they
do not like it. The gaijin should speak English. To speak any other
language is wrong. Japanese should speak Japanese; foreigners should speak
English. For a foreigner to speak Japanese is intrusion on their privacy; it is
eavesdropping. It’s Commodore Perry’s steamships on the spiritual horizon once
again.
     
    On the other hand, millions of
Japanese learn English with dedication and diligence. I met quite a few people
who get up at five o’clock every morning to listen to the English lesson on the
radio. The demand for English teachers is so high that people who spent two
days in London or New York and have less than a smattering of English can get
jobs as teachers. I met English teachers whom I would reject even as pupils —
they were hopeless cases. No English-speaking person can fail to get a
reasonably good job in Japan today as a teacher, interpreter or translator.
    Many signs and notices are put up in
English, and teachers who really know English are employed to word them. Over
an elegant shop I saw the neon sign:
     
    LADIES
OUTFATTERS
    ‘It’s not fair to laugh,’ I rebuked
myself. ‘A mistake of the sign-maker. The person who worded it most certainly
knew how to spell the word.’
    He most certainly did. As I got
nearer, I saw another, smaller sign with an arrow:
     
    LADIES CAN
HAVE FITS UPSTAIRS

THE FRAGILE GIANT
     
    Ask a Japanese any question and G.N.P. — gross
national product — will somehow creep into the answer. Be the question about
golf, or the weather or the railway timetable between Nagoya and Osaka, the reply will somehow be connected with G.N.P. What bushido and the
national flag used to be in former times, G.N.P. is today. Before going to Japan I did not even know that there was such a thing as G.N.P.; by the time I left, I had
come to believe that there was nothing else.
    It is trying, even exasperating, for
the poor Briton to read day by day on the front page of Japanese newspapers
that exports have reached new heights, that the balance of payment has further
improved, that new orders from abroad are pouring in, that