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Authors: Will Ferguson
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and work breaks and free evenings. She was a maid at an inn near Cape Toi. She was single, female, and gainfully employed—which in Japan translates as “world traveler.” One of the acute ironies of the Japanese corporate-male philosophy is that the men of Japan do not have much time to enjoy themselves on extended holidays. Young women, on the other hand, may be underpaid and underappreciated, but in many ways they have more freedom. Their work is rarely their life, and it is they who are Japan’s new breed of traveler. The men of Japan are lousy travelers and even worse expatriates. The women, in contrast, are more aware of the world: less xenophobic, more adventurous.
This newfound worldliness of Japanese women has also been partly responsible for a phenomenon known as “the Narita divorce.” It begins during the honeymoon, when the young husband discovers—to his eternal chagrin—that his new wife is more sophisticated, more self-assured, and more at ease in a foreign country than he is. He also discovers that his samurai prerogatives are meaningless once he leaves the maternal bosom of Japan. The young wife, in turn, notices how un worldly, how bumbling, how inept her husband is, and by the time they get back to Narita International Airport in Tokyo, they can’t stand the sight of each other. Fortunately, in Japan the marriage certificate is not usually signed until long after the ceremony, often not until the honeymoon is over. This acts like an escape clause. A couple returning from their disastrous first trip abroad can part ways at Narita, never to see each other again, and the marriage is effectively annulled.
Mayumi had traveled through Canada and Europe, and she was now planning a trip to London—and this time she was taking Akemi. The relationship between Mayumi and Akemi was, to a certain extant, one of senpai to kōhai , senior to junior, teacher to student. In Japan, absolute equality between two people is very rare. One person is always older or better-trained or more knowledgeable. This is true everywhere in the world, but nowhere is it quite so entrenched as in Japan, where the senpai/kōhai system is the basis of virtually every relationship. It is not always apparent, but the more attuned you become to the nuances of relationships in Japan, the more often you see it. The senpai/kōhai system is not meant to be an antagonistic master/serf relationship, though it does degenerate into this at times. More properly, it is the sense of a chain of knowledge being transmitted from one to another. In the case of martial arts or company training, the position is explicit, but even among friends there is usually an unstated understanding of who is to be the senpai and who is to be the kōhai. (And every kōhai naturally aspires to becoming a senpai one day.) Everyone in Japan is entangled—or nurtured, depending on your bias—in an interconnecting web of uneven relationships, here the senpai, here the kōhai.
In Mayumi and Akemi’s case, their friendship easily divided into senpai (Mayumi) and kōhai (Akemi). Mayumi was the same age as Akemi, but she had traveled more, done more, seen more. It wasn’t a matter of Mayumi dominating Akemi, it was simply a rapport that they—like most Japanese—felt comfortable slipping into. Just as Americans feel most at ease with unpretentious jocularity.
Mayumi and Akemi were a society of two. They had a secret map that would take them away. They told me far more about themselves than they really ought to (and more than I feel comfortable divulging). When you are a hitchhiker, people spill their lives into your lap. Things they would never tell their family, they gladly surrender to a hitchhiker precisely because the hitchhiker is a stranger, a fleeting guest, a temporary confidant. But there is also something about the physical position; there is little eye contact. Drivers watch the road and you talk with parallel vision, without the extended face-to-face of
This newfound worldliness of Japanese women has also been partly responsible for a phenomenon known as “the Narita divorce.” It begins during the honeymoon, when the young husband discovers—to his eternal chagrin—that his new wife is more sophisticated, more self-assured, and more at ease in a foreign country than he is. He also discovers that his samurai prerogatives are meaningless once he leaves the maternal bosom of Japan. The young wife, in turn, notices how un worldly, how bumbling, how inept her husband is, and by the time they get back to Narita International Airport in Tokyo, they can’t stand the sight of each other. Fortunately, in Japan the marriage certificate is not usually signed until long after the ceremony, often not until the honeymoon is over. This acts like an escape clause. A couple returning from their disastrous first trip abroad can part ways at Narita, never to see each other again, and the marriage is effectively annulled.
Mayumi had traveled through Canada and Europe, and she was now planning a trip to London—and this time she was taking Akemi. The relationship between Mayumi and Akemi was, to a certain extant, one of senpai to kōhai , senior to junior, teacher to student. In Japan, absolute equality between two people is very rare. One person is always older or better-trained or more knowledgeable. This is true everywhere in the world, but nowhere is it quite so entrenched as in Japan, where the senpai/kōhai system is the basis of virtually every relationship. It is not always apparent, but the more attuned you become to the nuances of relationships in Japan, the more often you see it. The senpai/kōhai system is not meant to be an antagonistic master/serf relationship, though it does degenerate into this at times. More properly, it is the sense of a chain of knowledge being transmitted from one to another. In the case of martial arts or company training, the position is explicit, but even among friends there is usually an unstated understanding of who is to be the senpai and who is to be the kōhai. (And every kōhai naturally aspires to becoming a senpai one day.) Everyone in Japan is entangled—or nurtured, depending on your bias—in an interconnecting web of uneven relationships, here the senpai, here the kōhai.
In Mayumi and Akemi’s case, their friendship easily divided into senpai (Mayumi) and kōhai (Akemi). Mayumi was the same age as Akemi, but she had traveled more, done more, seen more. It wasn’t a matter of Mayumi dominating Akemi, it was simply a rapport that they—like most Japanese—felt comfortable slipping into. Just as Americans feel most at ease with unpretentious jocularity.
Mayumi and Akemi were a society of two. They had a secret map that would take them away. They told me far more about themselves than they really ought to (and more than I feel comfortable divulging). When you are a hitchhiker, people spill their lives into your lap. Things they would never tell their family, they gladly surrender to a hitchhiker precisely because the hitchhiker is a stranger, a fleeting guest, a temporary confidant. But there is also something about the physical position; there is little eye contact. Drivers watch the road and you talk with parallel vision, without the extended face-to-face of
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