a healthy smack upside the head

Back in the '90s I spent a couple of months in Japan (for reasons I may blog about, eventually) and it was as you'd expect a mind-opening experience. When you're trying to get to a job interview and you can't read any of the signs around you in a subway station, or when you have to rely on badly-lit photographs of "dishes" to understand what you're about to order in a restaurant, you look at the world in a different way.

I was forced to bulldoze through my natural reticence and actually engage people in order to get any answers, people with whom I usually shared about ten words of Japanese. (Limited of course by my understanding of and ability to speak only ten words of Japanese.) It's actually fun, and you'd be amazed at how much you can communicate with so few words, and some gestures.

(Proof of this comes from the fact that, even with a dozen angry non-English-speaking Japanese police, I was able to explain my way out of an, um, "incident" in front of one of the Imperial palaces in Tokyo. But as I said, that's another post.)

Another thing it did for me was give me a brutally honest perspective on my place in the world up until then. As a Canadian you naturally grow up bathed in the culture of America, aware that the favour is not reciprocated but still insistent on the centrality of North America. But what I found in Japan was more shocking, more complete.

I discovered a world that was able to function quite nicely without any awareness of hockey, Bob Rae or Mike Harris, the music scene on Queen West, the Globe and Mail, the Kids in the Hall, the New York Times, Seinfeld, SCTV or the Simpsons. What's more, they didn't want to know. They had their own culture and lives, thank you very much, and didn't have a lot of interest in the quaint practices of a few snow-bound barbarians.

The perspective was breathtaking. Everything I knew in the world made up only an extremely tiny part of Japanese consciousness. (I happened to be back in Tokyo when Pierre Trudeau died; that made the news. I'm sure the G8/G20 summit will too, but there won't be a lot about the people holding it.)

Contrary to the cliché, the world is a big place. And while there are of course a lot of human realities that we all share, a lot of stuff doesn't travel with you when you get off the plane. Language is an obvious one; culture is another that's not so obvious. Know what jokes, books, movies, music and social issues to talk about in rural Mali? Me neither.

This kind of culture shock is a real slap in the face, but it's healthy for you. You stop asserting things that you discover are only true back in that tiny part of the world you came from.

Instead, you find yourself asking a lot of questions, and listening more. And that is always good.