イン ザ・ミソスープ In the Miso Soup

イン ザ・ミソスープ In the Miso Soup

My flight routine was as usual – two pills of benadryl, a glass of bad on-board wine, an episode of the Office and then nine hours of airplane dozing between Doha and Kansai International. When I got to Japan, I was really confused. No wonder though: I’ve been traveling a lot in the past few weeks- Brussels, Prague, Krakow, Rome. Is this the long desired final destination? At the Osaka Airport, I went through the immigration procedures. A shy Japanese official in a surgical mask asked me to look into a tiny camera. Blink! My face showed up on fluorescent screen framed by Sakura leaves with Mount Fuji in the Background: a perfect Hello Kitty souvenir. At that point, I knew I had arrived safe and sound. I knew it was Japan.

On the express train (aren’t all Japanese trains express?) to dowtown Osaka, I was slept on by two exhausted Japanese citizens – a dozing salaryman on my right shoulder and a Japanese schoolgirl on the left one. I felt liked. Opposite to me (and my two new sleeping friends) sat a Japanese grandma who kept staring me. I tried to avoid her glare but since she sat underneath the subway map, some form of interaction was inescapable. “Hallllooo!” she said with regular Japanese enthusiasm. Hello, I said. “Were arrre yu furomu?” I was not ready for this existential conversation. Yet, adamant this lady was – she kept asking and asking and asking. At some point, I tried to make a joke out of it. I tried to tell her she was a very curious lady. She didn’t know what curious was. I told her it was ok. But she got obsessed with knowing the meaning of the word. It became her holly grail. I tried to explain again but failed. Finally, I pulled out my ipod dictionary and typed curious. She put on her glasses and we both awaited impatiently the result of the dictionary search. SEARCHING THE DATABASE. PLEASE WAIT. SEARCHING….

Oh, here it is! I said - hopeful she’d laugh a bit. I couldn’t read the kanji reading so I just passed her the device. But what a strange reaction! My Japanese friend’s face got oddly pale. The poor lady took off her reading glasses, grabbed her purse and left the car without saying goodbye. Flabbergasted, I only managed to gather my device and get off at the next stop. I couldn’t stop thinking – what about curiosity did she find so insulting? I was just trying to make a joke. Plus, our Yale sensei never mentioned that curiosity was so looked down on. Maybe a generational gap? My mind went crazy. I wanted to search Osaka for my Japanese friend who I insulted so much that she, despite her advanced age, fled the subway faster than SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog. I lay down in my capsule hotel room and contemplated. Out of sheer despair, I decided to read the entire section on Japanese etiquette in my lonely planet guide (auch, how painful that was!). Nothing about the dangers of curiosity. I grabbed my ipod to text my parents about my failure.

The screen still held the mysterious kanji reading of “curious.” I clicked on its hiragana transcription: “CURIOUS – TAIHEN; HEN” What??? Doesn’t that mean weird or horrible? Isn’t that the word our teachers used in reference to sexual perverts, social deviants, and subway gropers. Wait, subway gropers? And so I quickly realized that there is not such a thing as curious in Japanese – there’s either weird or not weird. And the poor old lady was told to be the former. I put the goodhearted Japanese grandma in the same category with sexual perverts, social deviants – and subway gropers. Ouch.

…

You never know what you’ll find in the miso soup. Seriously. Most usually there are pieces of tofu and seaweed. But sometimes you can find a chunk of rice, an eggshell or even a small piece of wood from poorly separated chopsticks. Japan is kind of a miso soup. There are love-hotels, express trains, schoolgirls in navy blazers, noodle-slurping salarymen and the ubiquitous hello kitty accessories. But there are also other weird things that one would not expect in the Land of the Rising Sun. Other weird things like clueless Yale boys with bad manners and even worse dictionaries.

And so, at this occasion, I would like to make a statement. I would like to apologize to all Japanese grandmas: すみません、おばあさん。やさしいひとです！たいへんじゃないです！

“Dear Japanese Grandmothers! No matter what I say, you’re not weird. You’re very nice and very kind. You’re neither sexual perverts nor social deviants. AND DEFINITELY NO SUBWAY GROPERS.”