Football, Flutes and Formalities
I realised I haven’t really been posting much about Japan recently… I mean I’m living here, spending a lot of my time studying and learning Japanese, talking to Japanese people, learning about Japanese culture… And I haven’t written anything about it since my David Mitchell video link… It was a great video though!
So today I am going to talk about something Japanese! Japanese love hierarchy. Well I don’t know if they love it, but they certainly stick to it! Recently in my Japanese classes I have moved on from basic hierarchical language that surmounts to every day politeness when talking to people to specific language that is designed to illustrate to all around your deference of position to another person. This is a well known feature of Japanese (I think) but it really is a point of great interest and insight to Japanese society…
The two types of polite language I have been studying in a bit more depth are honourific, the other is humble. Honourific language is used when speaking to someone who is on a higher plane than yourself about them, what they are doing and so on. Basically it is used to give honour to someone else. Humble language on the other hand is used when talking to someone on a higher plane than you about yourself, basically humbing yourself and things about you.
In reality this kind of stuff isn’t used by everyday folks in everyday life at home and on the street. It is used in places where obvious deference is deemed important, places like the work place where you use this kind of language when talking to your boss, or when talking to a customer, or someone from another company to show your respect and deference to them, thats not the only case, but an easy one to understand I think!
I think thats enough talking about language study really… If you are learning Japanese you know what I mean and I am sure you feel my pain… If not you will probably lose interest should I go into any more detail! So lets leave it there and move on to the other interesting observation re hierarchy.
Recently I joined a windband with Alaric, another OMFer from the UK here in Sapporo. On my first day people were asking the normal questions: Who are you? What do you do? How old are you? Where are you from? and so on. If you are, like me, a spritely young thing you won’t find anything overly wrong with that, but if you are a bit older you might wonder why people are asking how old you are all the time… But that is one of the most common questions I have been asked since coming to Japan (And, might I add, the response is almost always surprise at how young I am!).
The reason? Well it is quite simple, if you are older then you move up the hierarchy, if you are younger then you move down. As a little 20-something I am a good bit down the hierarchy from the other tenor sax player in her 30s (36 to be precise, and she had no qualms in informing me). Ultimately it probably doesn’t actually make that much difference to how I am treated or expected to act at something like windband, particularly with me being a foreigner and also apparently looking deceptively old to Japanese eyes (probably the beard). But it lets everyone know where everyone stands and so everyone knows how to act when appropriate situations arise…
The football pitch is a different story however. I have been going to Futsal (basically 5-a-side rebranded by Brazillians…) most Fridays with some guys. We go to the hall, pull a number from a hat and all of the groups play in their teams on a rotation, each game is 5 minutes long, or first to two goals and the winner stays on to play the next team… A draw means both teams go off and the next two are on. All kinds of people show up to play, from junior high school kids (15 year olds) through high school, university, young workers through to a few 20 and 3o-something missionaries. The quality of the football is very high (til we are up to play!) and everyone has a good time.
You might already have guessed how this related to hierarchy… While waiting for our turn to come around (we do a lot of that) and watching the games as they go past, it doesn’t take long to see that the players often play differently with the different teams, older players will happily be more boisterous and less considerate when playing against younger players and should a throw in or other set piece be disputed, deference is usually, and quickly, shown to the older player.
Now this isn’t really age discrimintation, it is pretty much just the way society works, it is how our society in the west used to work (another great David Mitchell video could go in here), and kind of, to a much, much lesser extent, still does…
Tags: age, culture, deference, elderly, football, futsal, hierarchy, honourific, humble, japan, japanese, old, youth
