EATING OUT

Last evening was the first that participants in the Seminar program were responsible for finding their own ways to dinner independently.  Our first night we had been fed on the plane; and the second, the program's Welcome Dinner (sukiyaki, of course) left everyone in a good mood and off the hook for another evening.

My usual practice has been, under these circumstances, to combine the search for a meal with a lesson on using the local subway system to get from our hotel into downtown Kyoto.  Anyone interested is asked to meet in the lobby, and we go forth to conquer the evening from there. 

My assumption is that most participants will drop off somewhere along the way as we move along Kawaramachi and the adjacent covered shopping arcades through the city's main retail district.  At the end of the line there is a two floor collection of restaurants located atop Hankyu Department Store that has always, in the past, represented "the court of last resort".  This glorified food court has all types of restaurants from fancy to basic, from multiple variations on Japanese dishes through Chinese and Western cuisine.

Last evening, however, despite lingering in front of display case after display case filled with plastic models of the food available in each, after explanations galore about the various foodstuffs represented in each window, we still had an undecided group of about five or six unable to make up their minds.

We ended up in a robatayaki restaurant some blocks away and spent another thirty minutes or so even then before settling on our meal choices.  Later, talking with H.L.Todd, the Tour Manager, we two happened on an interesting explanation for the difficulties many were experiencing.  The basic problem: Americans don't live easily with the level of ambiguity and uncertainty, the yugen ("mystery and depth") most Japanese take for granted.

For example, Japanese dictionaries contain well over 50,000 different characters.  No one could possibly know every last one of them.  As a result even highly-educated Japanese go through life apt to encounter unknown written characters in the ordinary course of their daily lives.  We Americans, too, often encounter words we don't know the meaning of in our daily routines, but we can brush over them more easily because they at least appear in letters of the alphabet with which we are familiar.  Japanese characters, however, don't lend themselves to that kind of behavior -- when you try reading unfamiliar kanji characters, there is no way to make out its meaning or even to attempt to pronounce it.  However, despite this, most Japanese don't run off to a dictionary when they come across a strange character; they simply admit their ignorance and move on, content to live with whatever ambiguities result.

The spoken language also contains few explicit uses of basic pronouns in daily conversation; the single word "suki" can mean anything from "I like you" to "they like her" to "we like them".  This lack of precision doesn't particularly bother the Japanese at all. To be sure, they use lots of subtle body language to help make sense of what the words themselves may fail to communicate; but they have learned to live with implications left unsaid as well.

Going out to dinner in Japan is a far different experience than in the United States. Most of the time one would probably be taken to a special spot initially as a guest by a colleague or friend; there might not even be a sign out front indicating the restaurant's existence. The menu likely would consist of seasonal specialties using the freshest ingredients, presented with the eye as well as the palate in mind. No wonder there are few useful guides to great restaurants in Japan -- they simply don't exist or are not open to the "public".

Therefore, if forced to make an independent decision about where to eat, most Japanese would do so on the basis of the type of cuisine they might be craving at the time -- lightly-battered tempura, fresh sushi, udon noodles -- rather than seek out a specific place or location. They, too, might be uncertain about what to do; but they plunge right in and live much more easily with their choices than many Americans ever could.

Even "eating out", it would appear, can become a culturally-interpreted occasion!

OCTOBER 29, 2000

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