An Ethnography of Dinner Entertainment in Japan

HARUMI BEFU

ENTERTAINMENTin Japan is a highly ritualized activity, full of set procedures and etiquette. Limiting the analysis to entertainment in ryootei, or the Japanese-style restaurant, essentials of these procedures and etiquette are outlined. Aside from the sheer behavioral side of the entertainment ritual, symbolic meaning given to such behavior is complex and often too subtle to be perceived by untrained eyes. The paper dicusses how symbolism is used in entertainment interaction.

Superficial understanding of a culture is often said to be worse than no understanding at all. The reason is, of course, that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing: it gives one a false conviction that he knows it all. Foreigners who have been living in Japan for a while and begin to manage their daily routines often lodge the allegation that Japanese say or do things that they do not mean, implying the insincerity of Japanese. True, a Japanese would offer a gift of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, saying, “Please accept this worthless gift. . . .” Or, when you are invited to a Japanese home, the hostess is likely to say in an embarrassed voice, “Our house is in a cluttered mess, but please come in,” but you will find the house immaculately clean. It
is only the foreign novitiates to Japanese culture who are surprised by the contradiction. A Japanese guest would expect the house to be clean. If the house is in fact the cluttered mess the hostess says it is, the guest is entitled to surmise that he is not as honored a guest as he thought he was.

I recall the time I was invited to a Sunday lunch by a Japanese friend when I was collecting data on gift-giving in Kyoto. I was temporarily alone in Kyoto, my family having gone to visit a relative in western Japan. The friend, in the course of conversation about various and sundry things, found out I was alone and asked if I would come next Sunday. First, I had to judge whether my friend indeed meant to invite me or whether the invitation was a meaningless pro forma, uttered simply to fill time and to convey friendship and no more, much as Americans say, “Hi, how are you. . . . oh, I’mjust fine,” not as a way of conveying a message about one’s state of affairs but merely to indicate one’s readiness to enter into further interaction. Invitations are often extended in Japan without meaning to invite anyone when (and because) the context of the invitation makes it obvious that %n invitation is not really intended and the invited person is expected to politely decline. Had I sensed that the invitation was of this variety, of course I should not have accepted it. Interpretation of the invitation was tricky in this instance, not only because of the dual possibilities of the invitation, but further complicated by local custom. On one hand, Kyoto people are known for extending “false invitations” more sincerely than other Japanese and are fond of ridiculing others in private for misinterpreting them and, on the other hand, this hostess was unusually insistent on inviting me, even for a native-born Kyoto woman. Did she mean it or didn’t she? Since etiquette requires me to decline any invitation initially anyway, I took advantage of the time required in the repeated give-and-take of declining and inviting several times to weigh all evidence to see if she really meant it. I finally decided that she really meant to invite me and I accepted the invitation. To this day, however, I do not know, and I probably never will, if my interpretation was in fact correct.

Be that as it may, when I accepted the invitation, the hostess asked me what I would like to have for lunch. I was, of course, quite well aware of the Japanese etiquette of not making demands on others. So I told her that anything would do. But she insisted that I specify what I wanted. I kept insisting I had no preference, knowing full well I would soon have to tell her what I wanted. However, I knew that protocol required that I wait until the hostess had made several urgings, after which to state one’s wishes would not seem too forward. Following what I judged to be an appropriate number of urgings, I said to the hostess that ochazuke would be just fine. Ochazuke, a bowl of rice with hot tea poured over it and served with one or two pickled dishes to increase the appetite, is one of the simplest meals in the whole Japanese culinary repertory. The hostess said fine, that she would serve me ochazuke as I requested. The following Sunday she did indeed serve me ochazuke. It turned out, however, to be the last, small appendage to a sumptuous luncheon served with elegant heirloom utensils starting with a bowl of fine soup and vinegared vegetables Sake was served with fish of the sea­ d’oeuvres. At last, almost as an anticlimax, tsukemono (pickled food) and kamaboko (fish preserve). Was I surprised? Yes and no. Indeed, I asked for the simplest dish imaginable and got a feast instead. I should be surprised. On the other hand, knowing my relationship to the hosts, something more than a bowl of rice with tea poured over it was definitely in order, although the meal might have been a trifle more elaborate than I had expected. I would have been indeed surprised had the hostess simply served a bowl of rice with tea over it. It would not have been far from the mark in interprehg the event to mean either that the friend’s luncheon invitation was actually pro forma and I shouldn’t have accepted it, or that the invitation was meant but I wasn’t highly thought of. Knowing my relationship with the hosts, I felt they meant to invite me and I was reasonably sure they respected me. Knowing this then, the feast I was offered was no surprise. But the rub is in the fact, or in the cultural rule, that the guest in this situation ought to act as if he was surprised. Like a good Japanese, I expressed much surprise with such a treat, while saying to myself, “this is about what I expected.”

Now, did my hosts tell me a lie? Were they insincere? Or did they try to mislead me when they had agreed to treat me to ochazuke? If you assume that people always have to say what they mean literally, then the answer is yes. But an intriguing part of the cultural assumption operating in this context is that both hosts and guests are supposed to say what they do not mean, that they are supposed to know that they are supposed to say what they do not mean, and moreover that they each know what the others really meant to say but did not say without being told. Hosts and guests are thus in collusion, acting out their parts in the everyday drama of Japanese social life.

Japanese do not have monopoly over such contrived behavior. Variance between intention and declaration is something we see everyday among Americans, who take pride in their being straightforward, in saying what they mean, and chastise people who are roundabout and cannot come right out and say what they have on their minds. As Sunday dinner guests leave, an American host is likely to say, with a big happy smile, “Good-bye, now. Come back any time.” But he would be most surprised if any of them returned the next morning unannounced. He can tell such a blatant lie because he knows his guests know that he does not mean it. To take another example, “if there is anything you need, just let me know” may be a way for your newly acquired friend to say, “I like you, let’s be friends.” But the court would not honor your claim for a breach of contract if he refused to give his $50,000 home for the asking. Here again is a collusion. Both parties know what is claimed is not to be interpreted on its face value. That is in fact why a lie can be told with such sincerity.

A representative of a business firm in Japan, when negotiating a contract with another firm, is often invited by his counterparts in the other firm to play mah-jongg. The counterparts, who are normally very good players, then begin to lose one game after another, while placing heavy bets. The representative, knowing all the different ways in which Japanese firms try to entice contractors, would suspect, and correctly so, that he is being allowed to win, that this is a form of semi-sophisticated bribery, the money having been probably supplied through the company’s expense account. Upon detecting this, the representative must not only continue to play games of mah-jongg, but also play the game of pretending to play a serious game of mah-jongg. There should not be even a hint that they are intentionally losing the game and that the money the representative won is meant to be a bribe. But after the game is over, without anyone telling him, he would try his best to get a contract with that company.

In sum, then, face-to-face interaction is like a drama, in which each actor knows what the others are supposed to say. Part of what this means is that multiple meanings of expressions are correctly sorted out by participants and behavior appropriate for each meaning is acted out in appropriate contexts.

Dinner entertainment in Japan illustrates workings of numerous cultural assumptions such as the above, many of which remain implicit and unstated. Spelling out these assumptions will hopefully help understand the general nature and quality of Japanese human relations in a way in which they are not ordinarily discussed.

Japanese prefer to entertain their business associates at a restaurant rather than at home, whereas Americans very often do entertain such guests at home. Japanese say that their homes are too small, that their kitchen is inadequate for preparing foods for guests, or that the wife lacks appropriate culinary skills. Such factors are not to be denied, of course, but business executives with large homes and adequate kitchen facilities still entertain their guests by and large in restaurants, which suggests that there may well be other factors.

There is indeed a very important social reason for not entertaining business associates at home. Home for Japanese is very private. Besides their own families, it is generally open only to relatives, long-time friends, children’s friends and, occasionally, a man’s subordinates at work. These are mostly people with whom one shares a great deal of affect and intimacy. They are, in other words, people with whom one need not be businesslike. Even subordinates at work, when visiting, tend to discuss personal matters or family problems about which they seek psychological support as much as, or more than, practical solutions.

Penetrability of American homes is seen by the eagerness with which the hostess will show her guests around the house, all the way to bedrooms and even bathrooms, as if they deserve the special admiration of the not-so-interested guests. This is a symbolic gesture which parallels the expression, “my home is yours; please feel at home.” Of course such an expression is another of those agreed-upon lies, but it nonetheless does indicate the relative openness of American homes. Not so in Japan. There is no Japanese expression comparable to “my home is yours.” Guests are expected to act like guests. They are never shown around the house. They are taken to a room specifically designed for outsiders known as kyakuma (guest room) or oosetsuma (reception room),
where guests stay put.

Japanese have invented the neologism “my-home-shugi” or ‘‘my homism” to express the idea that the home is a fortress of privacy closed to people with whom affect is not shared to a great extent. Neighbors, shopkeepers who come around to take orders and others who are excluded from the circle of intimacy must stand at the entrance (genkan) or the service entrance (katteguchi) and carry on their business, even though the business may take half an hour or a whole hour. The mistress of the house, being a paragon of propriety, will bring out a cushion (zabuton) for such people to offer a comfortable seat, but implicitly to convey the message that the visitor belongs at the entrance and no further inside the house. This parallels an American housewife who stands at the front door, fully open but otherwise blocked by her bodily presence, to indicate to a Fuller brushman that she intends to cut him short and not to let him into the house where he can spread out his merchandise. I have seen a handful of neighborhood housewives with shopping baskets in their arms huddled together at street corners in Kyoto, where
I lived in 1969-1970, talking for hours on end. Since they all do not want their neighbors to enter their homes just to sip tea and gossip, a street becomes a convenient open parlor for housewives to come and go and join and leave as time allows.

If neighbors are generally excluded from visiting, so are business associates whose visits home, in a sense, are tantamount to invasion of privacy. Excluded from the home, the only alternative is to entertain at a restaurant. While there are both Western-style restaurants serving Western dishes and Japanese-style restaurants serving Japanese dishes, practically all dinner entertainment of business associates, if done in style and if they can be called entertainment at all rather than just dinner, is done in a Japanese-style restaurant generally called ryootei or ryooriya rather than a Western-style restaurant. For the sake of brevity, we will refer to ryootei for Japanese-style restaurants. “Restaurant” would mean Western-style restaurants.

There are several reasons why yootei are preferred to restaurants for entertainment. First of all, sitting in chairs is not the most relaxing posture for Japanese. At work, in school, and at other places like trains and buses, Japanese do, or course, sit Western style. But when they want total relaxation, they like to move their center of gravity close to the floor. No restaurant in Japan offers this comfort. Secondly, in restaurants, except for a large group, one has no privacy since the dining room has to be shared with numerous strangers, whereas in a ryootei each group of diners has a private room.

Thirdly, the role of service employees is different in the two situations. In a restaurant, waiters or waitresses are what Erving Goffman has called “non-persons.” They interact with guests only to take orders and serve food; for the purposes of the dinner guests, they do not exist. Dinner guests ignore their comings and goings and recognize their presence only in connection with serving food. In a ryoolei, the people serving dinner guests, who are always women, are not even called by the same name as their counterparts in restaurants. In a restaurant, they are called kyuuji orjokyuu, unless English terms such as “boy,” “waiter,” or “waitress” are directly used. In a ryootei, they are nakai, neesan, okami­ sari, geisha, geiko, etc. Far from being a non-person, a ryootei service worker is an integral part of the dinner entertainment. She is expected to participate in conversation, although unless she is a geisha, her role is by and large passive, speaking up when spoken to and not taking initiative in directing the trend of conversation. The extent to which she participates, however, is a function of the degree to which dinner guests are affected by alcohol, the size of the group, and other factors. When dinner guests are drunk and jovial, she too must join in to help maintain the joviality by being, for example, a little more risque in her remarks, a little louder in speaking, etc. Her initial, reserved giggles should give way to uninhibited laughter. These changes must be executed even if she is not affected by alcohol herself. She is likely to receive offers of sake from time to time which she is expected to accept, but only in moderation so that she would not become truly intoxicated and fail to perform her duty in play-acting her intoxicated role.

In a ryootei, service workers serving in one private room are serving only one group of guests. At least during the time she is in the room, her services are monopolized. Even if they have other rooms to serve, they do not give a hint of it, so as to maintain an appearance, at least, of monopolized service which is not possible in a restaurant.

In ryootei entertainment, ordering of food is done by the host alone. Often this is done beforehand by telephone. And after the dinner is over, the host excuses himself from the dining room momentarily and pays the bill in the guests’ total absence; the bill may alternatively be sent to the host’s home or to his company if the entertainment is on the company expense account, as it often is. Thus guests do not see the menu with prices of each item printed or the total cost of the dinner on the check. All this helps to remove pecuniary aspects of dinner entertainment and helps to create a homelike atmosphere. This is a fourth reason why ryootei are preferred to restaurants for entertaining guests.

Fifthly, ryotei entertainment lends itself to creating a social environment conducive to group cohesion, at least for Japanese, because everyone-hosts and guests-have the same set of dishes. In a restaurant, each individual carefully studies the menu and orders his own unique combination of hors d’oeuvres, soup, salad (and salad dressing), main dish (not forgetting how the meat is to be cooked), side orders, and dessert as a symbolic way of asserting each individual’s unique existence. In contrast, in the ryootei, by everyone having the same dishes, emphasis is placed on common sharing of experience. Ryootei entertainment thus strives toward negation of individuality and denial of uniqueness of each participant. Instead, it strives to create an atmosphere conducive to communion through commonality by emphasizing the sameness of everyone, by everyone having an identical set of dishes in front of him as it is in home dinner entertainment.

I have not exhausted all the factors of preference for ryootei over restaurant for entertainment. In fact, I have reserved probably the single most important reason, namely, that sake is served in ryootei while it is not served with Western dishes and therefore not in restaurants. The whole ritual surrounding sake drinking is unique, and is not replicated in drinking Western alcoholic beverages. For one thing, Western beverages, except for wine and beer, are generally not drunk with meals; they are more apt to be before-dinner aperitif or after-dinner “dessert.” Drinking of grape wine has not caught on on any wide scale in Japan yet, and its significance in Japanese dinner entertainment is still negligible. Beer alone has come to acquire some of the features of the sake- drinking ritual and is often used as a substitute.

Japanese folklorists tell us that sake was originally a sacred beverage produced as an offering to the gods. Mortals drank sake in a ceremony called naorae, which was held in front of the gods’ altar, and drank it in communion with the gods. Mortals would assemble in front of the altar and share the spiritual essence of immortals by sharing the sake and other foods once offered to the gods and now given back as the gods’ gifts. Naorae, while an occasion for communion with the gods, was at the same time an occasion for conviviality and re-affirmation of communal mutuality. Now, drinking sake is a completely secularized affair; its sacredness is gone. But still, its “communal” functions are deeply imbedded in ordinary dinner entertainment because the etiquette and numerous rules of sake drinking insures conviviality and communion.

One of the elementary rules of the sake party is that one does not pour for himself. Pouring is done for and by each other. It is a symbolic gesture of indicating that each is at the other’s service. Since sake cups, except those used for solitary drinking called guinomi, are so small and allow only a few sips out of each cupful, this gesture requires constant surveillance of cups in front of others around you and an offer to pour as soon as a cup is empty or near-empty. At the same time, one should engage in absorbing conversation, an art which requires considerable training. An experienced host would, in fact, not wait until a cup is near-empty; he would hold a bottle of sake in front of a guest, slightly tilted (nonverbally communicating his readiness to pour), and urge him to empty or “dry” his cup so he can pour more.

When sake is being poured, the “owner” of the cup is expected to hold the cup in his hand rather than leaving it on the table. Leaving it on the table while sake is being poured makes it possible for one to ignore the service another is rendering. One would thus be inadvertently impolite not to show proper appreciation for the service. Holding the cup in hand, on the other hand, requires one to attend to the pouring and obligates the expression of appreciation.

Pouring sake without spilling requires coordination between the pourer and the one holding a cup to be poured. A sake cup is small and at the same time, the bottle has a relatively large opening. Since the bottle is opaque, it is hard to know how much liquid is still in the bottle and how much the bottle should be tilted. There are three general ways of guessing how much liquor is left in the bottle, none of which is foolproof. One is to judge from the total weight. Since the weight of the bottle itself varies a great deal, past experience is not of great help. A second method is to remember how much one had to tilt the bottle the last time he poured. Since the same bottle is usually passed around from one end of the table to another, one does not always know how much to tilt the bottle he happens to be holding at aparticular moment. The third means is to shake the bottle near one’s ear if it seems light, and judge from the splattering sound ,of the liquid inside how much liquor remains.

After a considerable amount of alcohol is consumed, the man holding his cup and the man holding the bottle may not have perfect control of their arm and hand muscles, let alone of their swaying torsos. Yet both parties are sober enough to know spilling is bad manners. There is momentary concentration by the two individuals on the act of pouring and coordinating of hands to avoid spilling.

If a guest has had enough sake and wants to accept-only out of politeness-just a little more but not a full cup, then before the cup is full, he must move the cup higher and higher to prevent pouring of more sake while mumbling something to the effect that it is enough. A good Japanese host is not one who necessarily respects the other’s wishes. He is more concerned with forcing his hospitality upon the guest. He is thus prepared for the contingency of the guest attempting to refuse by raising the cup. The moment he senses this defense strategy of the guest, he counteracts by holding the bottle higher and higher, raising the bottle at precisely the same speed as the guest raises the cup, so that he can keep pouring sake. To do this, and do it without spilling a drop, especially after both parties are intoxicated, is no easy feat. I might add parenthetically that Japanese do not spend a great deal of
time practicing pouring sake.

Numerous activities requiring various eye-hand coordination engaged in from childhood-goldfish scooping, using chopsticks, making paper-foiding figures, playing with beanbags, etc.-all prepare Japanese for their adult life, an adult life which includes pouring of sake as an essential skill.

After the pouring is over, there have to be some gestural or verbal cues on the part of the receiver to indicate his thanks. He may bow ever so slightly or mumble something like, “aaaa . . .” or “doomo . . .” or combine the two.

Etiquette requires that the host first pour sake for the guest, the host symbolically being the servant of the guest, and that the guest then reciprocate. It also requires that if a person of lower status wishes to exchange drinking with a person of higher status, the former first pours for the latter, and then the latter reciprocates. Also, if their seats are far apart, as they may be in a large party, the junior person is required to come to the senior person and ask him for the privilege of pouring sake for him.

This, incidentally, is a convenient ploy for a very junior person to approach a very high status person as a means of establishing an acquaintance, otherwise known as “buttering up.” Offering to pour sake is a way of showing one’s respect and paying homage to a high status person. It is thus socially correct, and offers a legitimate way for a lowly person to sit next to or in front of a high status person, a position he cannot otherwise occupy without seeming to be excessively forward. Thus he plays the game at two different levels at the same time. At one, he is showing respect to his superior and being formally correct; at another, he is furthering his personal gain by impressing the superior with his ability.

A practice unique to sake drinking is the offering of one’s own cup to another person after drinking the contents. While pouring starts from a lower status person to a higher status person, or from the host to the guest, in offering a cup, the higher status person has the privilege of offering it first to a lower status person, or the guest to the host. This is followed by the same cup or the cup of the other person being offered to the superior or to the guest. Each such exchange is a symbolic hand­ shake or embrace and is a re-affirmation of the social pact uniting those exchanging the cup. When a cup is offered to someone, he is not required to return it immediately. Since normally a person drains a cup in several sips, putting it on the table at intervals of a few minutes, often someone else comes along to offer another cup before he finishes the first. When one finishes the first cup offered, he might offer it to the second person if he happens to be engaged in conversation with him. The upshot of this is that the route a cup travels forms a complex pattern indicating social statuses, cliques, ulterior motives, etc. Also, after a while cups are unevenly distributed, some people having several in front of them- typically high status persons to whom others have paid homage-leaving none in front of some of the lower ranking individuals. Since it is improper to leave people without cups to drink from, the ryootei management, concerned about customers’ consumption (for which they can present a fat bill) as much as social propriety, will bring extra cups and leave them in the center of the table for this type of contingency. Thus, those without a cup may help themselves from the center of the table. High status persons should not hoard cups, however. They should try to drink up and redistribute them as fast as they can. Herein lies the reason why Japanese business executives are mostly heavy drinkers and why ability to absorb great quantities of alcohol is almost a sine qua non for upward mobility in Japan.

What makes excessive drinking inevitable in this sort of dinner entertainment is that there are no socially acceptable ways of refusing an offer of sake and at the same time making the occasion a success. Turning one’s cup upside down and placing it on the table thus is a socially recognized way of saying, “No thanks, I cannot drink any more.” But this is admittedly a socially poor thing to do, and if one must do this, he profusely apologizes for his ineptitude. If only one out of ten or twelve people is a teetotaller and if he is not a principal guest, then the atmosphere would not be affected appreciably since he may be ignored entirely and the entertainment can proceed without his social presence. But if there are more than one such persons in a small group and if they cannot be ignored because of their number or because of their position in the group, then the party cannot help being a failure.

On the other hand, succumbing to the insistence of the host and forcing oneself to drink when one does not wish to may not be pleasant at all. At least, however, it has the virtue of complying with the group norm and manifesting the willingness to sacrifice personal welfare for the good of the group. In the end, the participant may be dead drunk. He may say or do things he would not remember or prefer not to remember. But others observing him tend to be quite lenient in their judgment of his behavior. They are likely to show sympathy and some may wish he had a little more self-control. But one would not morally chastise him since such misbehavior is not a moral misdeed, it is simply social misconduct. By the same token, even if drunkenness and possibly getting sick and throwing up at the end may be due to unswerving insistence of the hosts, who often equate the amount of hospitality forced upon guests with the degree of success of the entertainment, it is quite improper for a guest to be angry with the hosts. The opinion of the community is on the side of the host, on the side of those who help lubricate social relations.

While a good deal of alcohol may be consumed in the course of a dinner, how drunk participants get is not absolutely a function of alcoholic intake. Socially defined rules of drunken behavior, varying from situation to situation, dictate how drunk one should appear. The help which alcohol provides in acting drunk is not to be minimized, of course. But we all know that the same amount of alcohol consumed in a party of congenial friends produces radically different results from that taken at home all alone. In a party, it takes very little alcohol to induce loud talking, shouting, loud laughter, singing and clapping of hands in unison with a wild, off-tune chorus of school songs. When the fun of the party is all over and it is time to go home, everyone except the few who lost control and are sound asleep by this time, regains his sobriety almost instantly and acts almost like a different person, like a group of actors leaving the stage after the curtain comes down. It is thus not strange that one almost never hears in Japan of a drunk, walking the narrow downtown streets without sidewalks and teeming with cars day and night, being run over by a car or hit by a bus. Of course, he is almost invariably helped home by his more sober companions.

One important rule to be followed in dinner entertainment of a small party of five or six persons is to center the conversation of the entire group on one topic. Breaking up into groups of twos and threes rather than keeping the whole group united in a dinner situation is a sign of conspiracy, a gesture indicating lack of interest in the major theme of the play being enacted, and therefore an outright expression of a lack of respect and discourtesy to the honored guests of the party.

Those of higher status in the party should be allowed to dominate the conversation most of the time. Others are the supporting cast in this production. They should pitch in from time to time to punctuate the conversation and make it more interesting, throwing in little jokes and light remarks now and then, but they should make sure to leave any punch lines to the honored members of the party so that the dominant role of the principal actors of this drama is unmistakable to anyone. Supporting cast roles in this play are, of course, to enhance the dominant roles played by principal actors. The latter should be allowed to speak longer, introduce new topics more often, and make somewhat belittling remarks about comments of the supporting cast. They are privileged to cut into sentences of others, but the others must politely listen until they finish their remarks. The supporting cast might play its role by asking questions an honored member can answer with authority, so that in answering them he can reassert his dominant role, for example, by giving a glowing report of his recent trip to a place no one else in the company has been to, or by divulging some secret information he happens to be privy to. Supporting casts are supposed to express exaggerated interest, surprise, and other appropriate effects.

The drama cannot be enacted only with the effort of the supporting cast, obviously. Principal actors must know their roles well and read their script without making errors. When hosts expect the guests to dominate the scene, they must dominate. In order to dominate, they must know how to dominate. They must know interesting topics of conversation and know how to make conversation interesting. At the same time, even if the guest’s talk is not too interesting, a good host would put on the appearance of being interested and attentive. In short, both sides-hosts and guests-must cooperate, saying what is appropriate at the right moment, giving cues to one another so that each knows when to offer a cup, pour sake, laugh, shake hands, etc. Seeing the appropriate and expected responses, others take this as a cue to proceed to the next scene of the play.

Flawless enactment of the entire drama and a smooth flow of each episode thus requires hosts and guests all be familiar with the rules. This insures that the scenario is read flawlessly by all actors. This is more difficult than enacting a real play since, unlike real plays, the script is not written beforehand, but is being written from moment to moment as scenes unfold. Without rehearsal, each participant must play his part. As for the script, each participant must improvise his lines without delay as the drama develops.

Rehearsal of the play and the practice of improvising the script are actually found in each participant’s daily living from time of birth. Learning to speak Japanese and learning all the hidden meanings and reversals of meaning, the meanings of hand and body gestures and the social system of hierarchy are all preparations for enacting the next drama of life.

When an American is invited to a dinner party in a ryootei, he naturally goes in without rehearsal and without the practice of improvising lines in the way appropriate to a Japanese social scene. He lacks the social accouterment necessary to act with grace and without flaw. The result is somewhat like anAmerican wrestler hving to play a match of sumoo with a sumoo athlete using sumoo rules. The result is a most awkward match. Since Japanese are too polite to tell their guests they are clumsy people, guests leave the scene believing they played their part according to script. But actually, as in a real play, when one actor cannot play his part well other actors must strain themselves to make up for the deficiency, making their cues excessively abvious and covering up the mistakes made by the clumsy actor. Having an honored guest who does not know his part well in a dinner party requires that others help him play his role so that they themselves can continue to play the host's role. If a clumsy actor is one who plays a minor role in the play, he can almost be ignored without causing much damage to the play. When the principal actor, which an American guest usually is, does not know the part and know the script, the amount of effort required by the supporting cast is heartrendering. It is almost like Fred Astaire trying to dance gracefully with a 200 pound woman who never danced before. After entertaining Americans, one often hears Japanese say they are all worn out. This is precisely becuse they try so hard to help Americans play the principal role without faux pas or try hard not to make faux pas look like faux pas and even try to make them look as though they are charming improvizations of the correct script. In short, they try so hard to make Americn guests believe they play their role like Fredric March that in reality the Japanese are the Fredric Marches heroically helping clumsy and inexperienced American actors

If you have read this article email me: bmori@calpoly.edu

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