Yakumo Koizumi is a famous English journalist’s Japanese name, who lived in Japan until his death about a hundred years ago. He loved old traditional culture of Japan that was being lost gradually through the introduction of western civilization back then. He left numerous beautifully written short stories about daily life and mystical tales in Japan. One of the famous stories regards smiles of Japanese people. In the short story, he describes an old diligent Japanese servant, who smiled and thanked the master, who just fired him for the servant’s careless mistake, and committed suicide soon after that.
I read the story when I was a junior high school student. It came to as a great surprise that this rather common attitude among well-behaved traditional people, which we sometimes see in TV dramas, could be depicted so minutely by an English journalist that even I myself was moved. The story also suggested me that the Japanese smiles are different from those of foreigners.
I became a foreigner in the United States. Some while after the entrance to the land, I began to notice that those who talked to me showed puzzled faces momentarily. The puzzlement in most of the cases disappeared quickly during the conversation. My English, back then, was too poor to care for listeners’ instant facial expression.
As I became able to communicate better, I became more aware of the puzzled faces which randomly appeared during the conversation. That was when some of the puzzled faces started to transform into other behavioral expressions. Some seemed as if they had had eaten a stale food and they showed uneasiness on their faces. Some, when they had a company, looked in the eye each other and signaled like, “Did you see that?” Something was strange in my conversation. The strange reactions occurred to me totally randomly with no common factor included in the each conversation.
The cause of the strange reactions was not the topic. I was equipped with minimum common sense to choose who to talk to if I had to discuss touchy issues in the United States. And the cause had no relevance to individual characters. The reactions could be shown by virtually everyone I knew. The cause had no relation to the place or to time of the day, either. The reactions could be presented anytime anywhere. One more clue to the analysis, the cause is not critical. It could not be critically damaging, insulting or disturbing to the listeners, because they had kept the conversation going after they showed strange reactions for a few seconds. In that way, I crossed off several potential causes of the strange reactions of the listeners. It was not the pronunciation of my English, my clothes, or weather of the day.
One day I was sitting in a computer class of Mr. Davidson’s, who I thought was like typical funny old men that I had seen in the American old soap operas on TV screen back in Japan. He, as usual, made fun of himself when a student pointed out his small error. I do not remember the joke he said at that moment. The joke or his short comment made his whole class burst into laughter. The “whole class,” in this case, included me. Jokes or funny comments were often hard to understand for foreigners with language barrier. But this time it reached me immediately. I laughed.
When I encounter jokes in American movies or TV dramas, each joke can supply two smiles, or sometimes a laugh and a smile. First what it meant by the joke makes me laugh as much as it does to others. Then the joke is rehearsed in my mind, and the English wording of the joke begins to be analyzed and appreciated. For most of the jokes or even a simple greeting with a little wit in English are appreciable to me as they come to me as a new technique of English as a communication tool. When I complete the appreciation of the new phrases in English, I get satisfied and naturally smile.
Mr. Davidson’s joke was great on that day in sense of the meaning as well as the wording. It was so good that it bore several times of rehearsing in my mind. When it was done, I was smiling unconsciously. Mr. Davidson stopped before the blackboard and looked into me. He said, “What’s funny?” I did not realize that several minutes had passed since all the class laughed. I said, “What you said a little bit ago.” “What did I say?” he wondered. A student answered for me, “The joke you said when Mike found your error.” I realized that I had been enjoying a single joke too long and that I was smiling unconsciously.
Smile. That was when I learned that the people around me could have been puzzled by my unconscious smile. My hypothesis later turned out to be one of the causes of the strange reactions. I found it when I talked with my friend. I was speaking to her, while I was appreciating one simple word new to me that she had said, “iffy.” She asked me why I was smiling after showing the typical puzzled face. This time I did not miss it. I perfectly explained to her why I was smiling.
Puzzled faces continued to appear after that. I realized that they could occur when I was not satisfied with some new expression. It took almost a year to figure out the other type of the reason for the listeners’ puzzlement.
I returned to Tokyo during the summer vacation to earn money through part time jobs. It was after five month stay in the United States. I looked around at Narita International Airport where almost all the people there were Japanese. That was normal situation in Japan, as the Japanese citizens are extremely homogeneous in terms of the race. Five months was long enough for me to be used to having people of various races around. The bunch of Japanese people appeared weird. There was one more thing that made me uneasy back in Japan. People were smiling all the time.
Each of them looked normal when they were alone. But once they were with their company, smiles became the fundamental facial expression. People in the coffee shops, people in the TV dramas, and people even at the business conference. They all appeared smiling or grinning. I was paging through a magazine one day, and came across an article about successful job interview skills. It explained that the job searchers must not face the interviewers eye to eye, as the job searchers could appear adversarial or dissatisfied. They, instead, must place their eye on somewhere around the interviewers’ tie with occasional glance to the interviewer’s eyes.
This is the reason why Japanese people are always smiling when they are speaking to others. At the business meeting, the participants look down, while a speaker is making his speech. Some simply look down, some jot down in their notebooks, and others kept their eyes closed as if they were meditating. If they should look up and watch the speaker, they would appear adversarial or dissatisfied. Can’t they look at the speaker, showing affirmative or neutral attitude? Yes, they can. They can smile. That’s the simplest way of looking at the speaker without disturbing the peaceful and friendly atmosphere.
After coming back to Oregon for new quarters, I tried to be aware of my facial expression when I was talking with someone. Now that I fully understood the two reasons for the listeners’ sudden uneasiness: one due to my intellectual discovery of new wordings and the other due to preserve friendly atmosphere when I watch the listeners. Smiles are formed on my face almost subconsciously. They are hard to control. However, my subconscious behavioral pattern seems to be rather flexible. It adjusts itself to match with others after certain amount of exposure to their patterns.