Honne and Tatemae

The idea of a local custom carries with it the idea of tourists who see or experience something and it becomes an anecdote when they get back. I want to steer clear of that superficial approach. What I am going to reflect on is something that I initially appreciated but which ended up causing me a lot of problems when I lived in Japan for three years. Honne and Tatemae are your true self and your public facade respectively. Your Honne only makes an appearance with friends and family, and perhaps not even with them, if it can carry the risk of crossing firm cultural boundaries. Your Tatemae is the face you present to the world and is the one that prioritises fitting in and meeting cultural expectations above all else. As a gaijin (foreigner) I was not expected to be quite as careful, at least not initially. However, after a while the pressure to conform with certain expectations becomes greater and can lead to problems. It was certainly the case with me.

During my time in Japan I took people at face value, and as they didn’t argue with me or explicitly express displeasure I assumed I was doing OK. It turned out I wasn’t and that certain aspects of my behaviour did not endear me to my hosts. The biggest issue was my priorities, where looking after my family was first and foremost. This meant that when I was invited to work parties I always declined because my wife was having problems with settling in and I was not about to abandon her. This was a cultural faux pas of quite some magnitude! By consistently ignoring work parties I was insulting my coworkers because work parties are all but compulsory in Japan. However, to avoid conflict, no one ever told me. I was only informed in my third year there by a teacher at one of my schools who had heard that I was unsatisfactory and that my first office were desperate to get rid of me! If the cultural imperative of keeping harmony had been ignored early on I think things would have been very different. Janet found out the full extent of my unpopularity when her friend, who was Welsh but had been living in Japan for over a decade and had married a Japanese professor told her. I was really shocked and it soured the rest of my time with many of the people I was working with. In the classroom no one had any complaints but out of the classroom I felt like I could no longer trust anyone at either my first office or my office for the third and final year. I ended leaving under a cloud and with a poor view of my time there that lasted for quite a while until maybe four or five years later I was able to put it in perspective.

Interestingly the Honne and Tatemae and the reluctance to have open conflict had some parallels with the UK, but in the UK I could read between the lines to some extent, something that I had no ability to do in Japan. Obviously, nowadays, the social norms in the UK have been pretty much ripped up. People play their music out loud, have their devices on speaker, show outright aggression to anyone with a different point of view and use intimidation to get their way. That, sadly, is the future of the UK as social order continues to break down. Being secretly despised turned out to be preferable and I would go back to that in a heartbeat!