The compulsory group crush of the morning commuter-train ride behind me, I had just arrived at the Japanese organization I'd been employed by for the last three months and was offering my routine ohayos (morning!) to the administrative staff on the ground floor, when the company's vice-president (the man who had hired me in the United States), arrived at work, too. I made one of my recently learned, inept bows and wished him pleasant good morning. His face, however, remained impassive, though his eyes, I could see, made a quick appraisal of the dozen staff people behind the counter. "Make sabisu!" he admonished me loudly, then rushed off upstairs with his two lieutenants running to catch up.
I was stunned. I could feel my face flushing in mortification. My Japanese boss had just demanded that I "do more service," that is, give more of myself without thought of personal reward. In effect, my boss had just rebuked me publicly for being a selfish, lazy bum.
I staggered to my office to lick my wounds. Shame soon gave way to hurt, and hurt to rage. The man had humiliated me before my coworkers. Who did he think he was? I would tell him a thing or two! And I dashed off to his office to do just that.
Mercifully, he wasn't there. Recklessly, I vowed to beat him up (or at least shove him around, or at least poke a finger in his chest, or at least glare at him) the next time we two met in the presence of the witnesses to my humiliation. The next time we did meet, he completely disconcerted me by smiling warmly and joking with me. Obviously way out of my league in the Asian game of "face," I could only smile, mumble inanely, and privately abandon my pointless schemes for revenge.
Face: The side that faces the world
Face, like so many things in modern Japan, is all the more inscrutable to Americans because superficially it looks similar to something in American society but is in fact quite different. Most Americans, given my role in his little drama, would likely have felt they had lost face, but as I was to learn, face in Japan is a profoundly more complex and subtle reality.
In Japan, face revolves around concepts like men (mentsu), tatemae, and omote, all of which in one way or another suggest the front of something, be it a person, organization, or object. Face in Japan, accordingly, is exactly what the word implies: the front, the side which faces out onto the world. This would be too obvious to need mention, were it not for our Western insistence on projecting our notion of face onto theirs by equating it exclusively with dignity. In fact - as the above incident was finally to reveal to me - in Japan it is quite possible for one to keep his face while at the same time losing what Westerners would call their dignity.
As the front one displays to the world, face in Japan necessarily presumes there's something different behind the front. Hence face in Japan depends heavily on the distinction between surface and interior, outside and inside. What is on the outside represents what one must, or is willing to, yield to the world; what is on the inside is what one reserves for him- or herself, or spares the world.
The Japanese house
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