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Somehow

Somehow, it doesn’t phase the Japanese. Somehow, through some divine intervention, the Japanese act as if it’s nothing.

It’s not nothing.

It’s very much something.

It’s a uniquely Japanese superpower. It’s ability unlike anything seen anywhere else in anyone else.

This video highlights it with excruciating detail (cheers RetireJapan for the heads up). My favourite author on all things Japan, Alex Kerr, even wrote an entire book on it.

In Japanese.

And they still didn’t get the message.

It’s something those of us who have lived here long-term have become accustomed to. Or at least, we pretend we have.

If you’ve become accustomed to it, you can safely say you have officially become Japanese. As a thirteen-years-a-gaijin I give you permission.

Good on you.

Instinctively bowing on the phone. Instinctively bowing while driving a car. Instinctively bowing while on the phone while driving a car (don’t do that). Knowing the difference between a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine, knowing which one needs the claps, and which one a bow suffices. Mastering Japanese, including knowing the difference between ン and ソ, knowing all the readings for 日 in this sentence: 今日は日曜日で、明日は祝日 (hint: they’re all different), or the holy grail, knowing when to use は, and when to use が.

These all have nothing on this.

You know it and I know it. Anyone who’s spent time in Japan knows it.

I’m talking about the unique ability of Japanese people to see only what they’re supposed to.

Signs, cones, and their dastardly cousins bright blue tarpaulins be damned. We are Japanese. We see past your fickle demeanor.

Visit any tourist location in Japan. Visit any school, any park, any public location in Japan and you are bombarded with all manner of distractions.

Everywhere.

And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere.

Put simply, the Japanese love signs. (And cones. And tarpaulins.)

And I’m not talking about the neon signs the likes of which you see in Shibuya and Harajuku, Osaka, and downtown Tsuruoka.

I’m talking the normal signs.

All of them.

Signs that read:

‘Multilingual guide: hold your phone up here for information in English, Chinese, and Korean’, written only in Japanese.

'No smoking’.

'No pets’.

'No drones’.

‘No smoking pet drones’.

'Don’t wear high heels or sneakers on the snowy slopes of Haguro-san, you can borrow gumboots (what us kiwis call wellingtons or rain boots) for free at the Ideha Cultural Museum.’

Or my personal favourite, ‘wearing a swimming cap in the pool is common sense’ (spoiler, it’s not, ask any head-hair-challenged person).

It’s not what these signs are saying that’s the problem. By all means have these rules and enforce them, give us the information, no matter how ridiculous or uncommonsensical.

It’s that these signs are everywhere.

It’s that these signs completely ruin what we have come to see in the first place. It’s that these signs are so ubiquitous, so much so, they counteract each other.

Are you expecting us to stop and read them all?

What I have spent thirteen years in Japan trying to understand is how the Japanese are able to live with so much signage, so many cones, so many bright blue tarpaulins, how they’re able to live with so much junk.

And yet, there’s no rubbish anywhere*! Rubbish somehow becomes an unquestionable path-ruiner, but signs, cones, and tarpaulins don't!

Just how they able to see past all the distractions, and only focus on what they came to see, it’s a superpower. It must be. The uniquely Japanese superpower. There’s no other way around it.

It’s something I admit I’ll never understand, and it’s the single reason why, try as I might, I could never even come close to being Japanese.

*Disclaimer: There is rubbish in Japan. Just go to the beach. Or in my case, my local rice field 🙁