Wakannai
Everyone knows about the incredible politeness of the Japanese and their well behaved manners and it really seems that way, the service is great! Around the useless packing of the newly bought item one finds another plastic bag around another plastic bag and an additional pair of chopsticks which caused the Chinese woods to vanish completely...
This is all very well, until you realize that manners and good behaviour are only as long required until you enter the first train in the rush hour. You will say: In how far do people in the Tokyo trains behave worse than in Berlin, London or New York?
Everywhere people make disgusting noises with their noses, push other people, the occasional passenger will fart, scream randomly at people and show bits of their bodies that probably no one has seen before besides mammy changing nappy.
The difference between Tokyo and other cities is that if you enter any kind of relation to a Japanese they are overly overly polite and well behaved, so that when the safety of complete anonymity in the train is provided, it means CIVIL WAR and at the beginning this is a bit shocking.
So basically this gap between the two lets lots of things seem hypocritical. It is not only like in the States that they tell you it is nice to get to know you although they could’t care less. It is also that they consider you stupid, because you cannot speak Sonkeigo, Kenjougo and Teineigo in the right form at the right time to the right person, and probably never will. Even though they tell you how great your Japanese is, even if it consists only of “Konnichiwa”. Totally contradictory but just as well possible is that at the same time you are being envied, because you speak English and maybe German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Polish or all of these languages.
Even so, hypocricy seems to be a means of surviving in Japan. The density of the population is so high that if one ever was honest here, daily violence in the big scheme would be a logical consequence. Tokyo can be seen as some kind of proof that the nearer people have to be physically the further they back off mentally. But even as Gaijin, and obviously so, we have to try and understand the Japanese mentality. Somewhere, deep inside the Japanese society there is some kind of sense in how people behave. If we study for about a century and pray every Sunday, we might even find it...