Blondes Prefer Gentlemen

A few days ago Japan entered the season of daikan, or extreme cold, but so far it has been unseasonably mild and I’m already dreaming of spring. The malls are now avalanches of pink and chocolate in preparation for Valentine’s Day, and even the ducks in the Kamogawa, who were all single just last week are now paddling about in pairs. Everywhere are little signs that the season of twitterpation is arriving.

It would be dishonest to say I am immersed in my studies and immune to it all. It was the ducks that did it. “I guess if one is a duck, finding a nice guy is pretty simple.” And so, following my train of thought that afternoon that wandered from ducks to matters of the heart, I will write this journal about something a study abroad orientation or class may mention only in passing: observations on the opposite sex in my host country.

Yukiko lowers her voice conspiratorially, her eyes lit with a playful spark. “So, what do you think of Japanese boys?” It’s times like these when I have an opportunity to practice Japanese indirectness. “Oh, well, they have great fashion-sense!” At Doshisha this is completely true: pea-coats, leather jackets, fedoras, scarves, dangling suspenders, boots—oh, American young men could learn a thing or two! But sometimes they go too far I think. German friend Tilo has reported that the sinks in the men's rooms are crowded with boys teasing their hair! The carefully plucked eyebrows are also a bit otoko-rashikunai (unmanly) in my opinion. There is one boy we often see in the cafeteria, whom we've dubbed Mayu-nashi (No Eyebrows) because he has plucked them within a fraction of their lives. “Mayu-nashi’s sitting behind us again!”

Aside from a taste for fashion, there is something else I’ve noticed about the general Japanese male population: a lack of gentlemanliness. Granted, half the problem is me being Western and expecting something from Japanese people that was never a part of their culture to begin with, but my unmet expectations are sometimes cause for embarrassment and surprise: the time I bumped into a door because I had expected the man who went in ahead of me to hold it open for me; the time I sat down with a group of friends and it was a fellow American (a girl) who went to find another chair while the Japanese boys around the table didn’t lift a finger; the time at the grocery store when I saw a woman loaded up with grocery bags while her husband walked by her side swinging his empty hands.

It works both ways; Japanese women also don’t generally complain, and I think the old Confucian ideas of men's and women's relationships are still alive and well, perhaps especially in conservative Kyoto. Just sometimes I see or hear things that I think with amusement would make some American feminists cringe. When talking with Japanese girls, the inevitable question comes up, “Do you have a boyfriend?” and my disappointing reply is often met with squeals of “mottainai!” (“What a waste!”) It makes me giggle. Oh yes, all this beauty going to waste because there’s no man around to appreciate it properly.

Now I realize I can’t expect American behavior from Japanese people, and that it’s unfair to make blanket statements. There are of course exceptions; “Japanese men” are all individuals. Just recently at the conbini (convenience store) an older man opened the door for his wife and held it open for me as well. It was so nice I went straight home and told the girls in the dorm all about it!