Most common questions from my Japanese students:
1. Do you have a 'rubber'? (that is, do you have a Lover?) - Yes.
2. How tall are you? - Guess. . . .
3. Do you eat sushi? - Yes. Lots of people eat sushi in America.
4. Do you eat natto? - Yes, but I don't like it.
5. Can you use chopsticks? - Yes.
6. How tall are you? - Um, the same height as you.
7. Sign, please. (this means they want me to give them an autograph. I sign dozens every day for excited students. Multiple for each. Where do they keep their collections of gaijin autographs?)
8. What is your favorite color? - (I change it daily to trip them up.)
9. Are you from America? (apparently all foreigners, uniformly, are assumed to be from the USA) - Yes. Nebraska-shu, Omaha-shi.
10. What is your favorite Japanese food? - When I reply "umeboshi" everyone is SHOCKED. How could a gaijin appreciate this Japanese delicacy? Unfathomable.
11. Do you eat sushi? Um, yes. With chopsticks.
12. What is your blood type? - I don't know. To this, the children gasp. Apparently they consider it absolutely frightening and unsafe to NOT know. There is also a tradition of believing people's personality traits can be attributed to their blood type, like we use horoscopes.
13. A common question from adults: How long are you visiting Japan?
The kids are a delight, but it sure is a unique experience to be likened to a 'movie star'. When I lived in South Africa the kids would climb all over me, sing for me, dance around me. . . but they didn't ask for autographs or squeal if I blinked. Yet their curiosity is charming. Japanese children seem to be more open-minded and warm-hearted than their parents -- but I wonder if this isn't the case for all children everywhere?
2 comments:
Charming!
XOXO
~A
i think generally children are more open minded than adults, because they haven't been conditioned to make judgments on other people/situations yet... (like, i'm thinking specifically of children of slave owners playing with slave children, and the kids not knowing that it was "wrong" until they reach a certain age, and then the slave owners separate the playmates and they can't play with each other anymore and the children are confused by this and don't know why it's suddenly wrong. just one example.) what do you think?
i think it's sweet the way that they react to you. i remember when i was in china almost 10 years ago, and people wanted to get their pics taken with me because i was a westerner. and after a while i started to tell them that i was a famous movie star, which they LOOOVED, and of course had no way of knowing back then if it was true or not. funny!
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