Too Late for the Festival: An American Salary Woman in Japan
Too Late for the Festival: An American Salary Woman in Japan
In 1985 and 1986, the residents of a Tokyo suburb were treated to a remarkable sight. Just before ten every weekday morning, a pallid-confronted, untamed-haired foreigner came scurrying away of her apartment, tucked her entire skirt between her legs, mounted a bicycle and bicycled away furiously, heading east. At around six-thirty, her neighbors whipsawed her again, bicycling home with her bicycle basket entire of Haagen-Daz ice cream and Shredded Wheat.Rhiannon Paine, 37, was working as a technological writer for Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley; she agreed reluctantly to transfer to their Tokyo branch. She had no idea what she was in for, and neither did her Japanese colleagues. While they coped with her societal gaffes, like arriving belated to work and blowing her nose in public, Paine fought with Japanese food — aberrant sea-creatures on rice — and with the Japanese language, which kept stumbling her up with unexampled verb tenses ( the conditional, the volitional, the inactive, the causative, the possible ).Paine writes with fantastic humor about the full times — spending an evening with a Shinto priest, drinking sake away of a bamboo pole and trying to do herself presentable on the beach with a package of poor Japanese nipplecovers. She collects eldritch English slogans printed on Japanese products (from a packet of instant coffee: Ease Your Bosoms).But she is besides honorable about her loneliness and sense of dislocation. A slender 5’4, Paine towers over most of her Japanese colleagues. She unconsciously contracts her backward muscles trying to do herself smaller, and develops backward pain for the first time in her life, a condition she calls being bonsai’d. Her in-depth contact with a radically differentculture raises questions she couldn’t begin to answer. If I hadn’t been borne American, would I however be antsy, challenging, obstinate-minded? Could the same natural material, worked upon by an unlike society, have produced a tea-making office lady or a contented housewife? This insight
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