That's Why the Japanese are Annoying

Nikhil, my erstwhile host brother, and his charming wife Sandra came to visit us a few weeks ago. They brought along a book for me in German called Darum nerven Japaner. The title, roughly translated, is “That’s Why the Japanese are Annoying”. It’s a collection of short vignettes about life in Japan, written by Christoph Neumann, a German expat.

Whoa...

It’s full of some really great anecdotes. He talks about a friend who, when he walked into his living room one day, found his roommate with a bag over his head, not breathing. He called the Japanese 911 (119, natch) and the emergency responders rushed in minutes later, but made sure to take off their shoes before entering the apartment to try and save his roommate. In Neumann’s words:

Hopefully it wasn’t because of the 15 seconds it took to take off their shoes that their patient died on the way to the hospital. But the persistance of this habit, even in extreme situations, shows how serious the Japanese are about it.

It’s full of interesting tidbits like this. One big surprise for me was that the birth control pill was outlawed in Japan until August 1999. It was only the record-breakingly quick approval of Viagra that shamed the overwhelmingly male medical institutions into approving the Pill. But many medical authorities still openly question its safety. Neumann wonders if:

The government purposely started rumors about the safety in the pill, because they realized that they could no longer prevent its approval through normal channels. They were afraid that if Japanese women started taking the Pill, they would stop having children completely.

Given the low Japanese birth rate, they might be right.

The book is a little odd, though. Typically, books in this genre follow a fairly predictable format. It goes something like this: “Hey, you, take a look at this weird thing! Isn’t it weird! Can you believe they do that here? Wacky, huh? But, you know, I love it here anyway!”.

This book has the first part in spades. All sorts of wackiness, oftentimes presented in a fairly harsh, ironic tone. But the “I love it here anyway” part is missing entirely. Even the photo on the cover of the book, a Japanese woman laughing with her eyes all scrunched up and her orthodontry-free teeth exposed, lacks sympathy.

The strangest thing is that the book has, according to the foreword, been translated into Japanese. If the tone wasn’t changed in translation, I can’t imagine that a Japanese person would read this book and not take offense.

It doesn’t seem to be available in English, but if you read German or Japanese, it’s definitely worth picking up.

Posted by pmk at November 13, 2005 3:10 AM