When I first came to Japan I worked in Ofuna, a city about fifteen minutes from Yokohama by train. I would get the train back to Yokohama every evening, Occasionally, an Anglo-Australian expeditionary force would reconnoitre such points of interest as the "Pub and Snack" whose neon sign promised familiar comforts. Remarkably, this venue completely failed to contain a dart-board and a jar of pickled eggs on the counter. Instead, it seemed to be some fiendish kind of Japanese device for removing a substantial amount of money from foolish pockets for very little entertainment in return. Wiser but poorer, we were.
All part of the normal learning process when moving to a new place, of course, but what would baffle me for over a year was nothing more complex than the station's escalator.
Here's Ofuna Station and its escalator in 2013:
Ofuna station yesterday.
The original escalator is on the far left, going up. More recently, the down escalator and the lift (or elevator if you prefer) have been added.
If you happened to use the station after 10:30 p.m. you would find that the escalator had been stopped and you had to use the stairs. Right after the Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 it was normal to find stations without stopped escalators as there was a general drive to save energy. Before that, any non-moving escalator in a station was broken. And all the other stations I used in my first year in Japan all had their escalators working until they closed, usually around 1 a.m., so why was Ofuna's escalator stopping at 10:30 ? Naturally, I asked Japanese people about this but got no answers. Nobody knew why this strange phenomenon occurred.
Now, I appreciate that the "Ofuna escalator mystery" may seem like the dullest-ever episode of Columbo, but for me during my first years in Japan, it came to represent the basic question that most have when trying to cope with a different culture: are these people just mad?
Resigning oneself to not understanding things is a choice that is overwhelmingly popular, the RUN DMC school of philosophy: It's like that, and that's the way it is. At a party, after a decade in the country, I was telling a long-term English resident of Japan that I'd been here ten years when he quickly interrupted me with: "Oh that's the point at which you realise that you'll never understand anything here !". Not understanding anything about the place where he lived was seemingly of no concern to him, and naturally he didn't bother to check my opinion on the matter, happy as he was with his idea.
Columbo: A pro- asking and checking to get to the
bottom of the Ofuna Escalator Mystery. Possibly.
However, the entirety of human history is about people making an effort to understand how things work. Everything we enjoy now is a result of people trying to understand how things work. And people are things.
To understand others is to understand yourself. To see another culture is to see our own, albeit in a fun-house mirror. Yet if we don't understand our own culture, we will really have no good idea of what we are looking at. The chimpanzee who sees his reflection for the first time can't get over how funny the other fellow is. Look at that face!! Look at those antics !
In history, the propagandists, those government marketers, have usually been very keen for people not to understand others. It's a very handy tool.
In order to get a better idea of anything we need better information, and not the information that those with an agenda are supplying us with. To get a better idea of other cultures we need to ask the run of Bela Lugsi's Pyramid to get the information we need.
But if you ask the people who live in a culture to explain their own culture, they most often can not. And you are left with the idea that these people live in a place that doesn't make sense!
Which is not at all like our culture, is it?
Pigeon: often seen loitering in Ofuna Station. What
did he know?
Of course, understanding cultures is a lot more complex than understanding why an escalator stops at 10:30. But the basic principle is the same as ever:
(more) Info ------------> (more) Idea
Why wouldn't we want a better idea about something?
However and anyway and eventually; a long time after I'd started trying to get to the (metaphorical) bottom of this moving stair-case, I received the information I needed, and it was elegant in its simple ability to illuminate:
It wasn't Ofuna Station's escalator! The simple fact of the matter was that the escalator belonged to the department store right next to the station. The department store that closed at 10:30.
With this knowledge I could breathe a long sigh of relief. The situation made sense now, and I wasn't in a land where you can't possibly know why things happen. With better information you can understand things for that's how communication works.
No wonder those in power guard information so zealously.
And by the way, that English guy who was quite happy not to understand anything? He worked in marketing.
All part of the normal learning process when moving to a new place, of course, but what would baffle me for over a year was nothing more complex than the station's escalator.
Here's Ofuna Station and its escalator in 2013:
The original escalator is on the far left, going up. More recently, the down escalator and the lift (or elevator if you prefer) have been added.
If you happened to use the station after 10:30 p.m. you would find that the escalator had been stopped and you had to use the stairs. Right after the Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 it was normal to find stations without stopped escalators as there was a general drive to save energy. Before that, any non-moving escalator in a station was broken. And all the other stations I used in my first year in Japan all had their escalators working until they closed, usually around 1 a.m., so why was Ofuna's escalator stopping at 10:30 ? Naturally, I asked Japanese people about this but got no answers. Nobody knew why this strange phenomenon occurred.
Now, I appreciate that the "Ofuna escalator mystery" may seem like the dullest-ever episode of Columbo, but for me during my first years in Japan, it came to represent the basic question that most have when trying to cope with a different culture: are these people just mad?
Resigning oneself to not understanding things is a choice that is overwhelmingly popular, the RUN DMC school of philosophy: It's like that, and that's the way it is. At a party, after a decade in the country, I was telling a long-term English resident of Japan that I'd been here ten years when he quickly interrupted me with: "Oh that's the point at which you realise that you'll never understand anything here !". Not understanding anything about the place where he lived was seemingly of no concern to him, and naturally he didn't bother to check my opinion on the matter, happy as he was with his idea.
bottom of the Ofuna Escalator Mystery. Possibly.
However, the entirety of human history is about people making an effort to understand how things work. Everything we enjoy now is a result of people trying to understand how things work. And people are things.
To understand others is to understand yourself. To see another culture is to see our own, albeit in a fun-house mirror. Yet if we don't understand our own culture, we will really have no good idea of what we are looking at. The chimpanzee who sees his reflection for the first time can't get over how funny the other fellow is. Look at that face!! Look at those antics !
In history, the propagandists, those government marketers, have usually been very keen for people not to understand others. It's a very handy tool.
In order to get a better idea of anything we need better information, and not the information that those with an agenda are supplying us with. To get a better idea of other cultures we need to ask the run of Bela Lugsi's Pyramid to get the information we need.
But if you ask the people who live in a culture to explain their own culture, they most often can not. And you are left with the idea that these people live in a place that doesn't make sense!
Which is not at all like our culture, is it?
did he know?
Of course, understanding cultures is a lot more complex than understanding why an escalator stops at 10:30. But the basic principle is the same as ever:
(more) Info ------------> (more) Idea
Why wouldn't we want a better idea about something?
However and anyway and eventually; a long time after I'd started trying to get to the (metaphorical) bottom of this moving stair-case, I received the information I needed, and it was elegant in its simple ability to illuminate:
It wasn't Ofuna Station's escalator! The simple fact of the matter was that the escalator belonged to the department store right next to the station. The department store that closed at 10:30.
With this knowledge I could breathe a long sigh of relief. The situation made sense now, and I wasn't in a land where you can't possibly know why things happen. With better information you can understand things for that's how communication works.
No wonder those in power guard information so zealously.
And by the way, that English guy who was quite happy not to understand anything? He worked in marketing.
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