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Life in the Uchi Lane
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20249 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
2,290 Words |
| Author
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Joan Mooney
Joan Mooney is a free-lance writer whose reviews have appeared
in the Baltimore Sun, New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia
Inquirer, St. Petersburg Times, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland
Plain Dealer, and Washington Times. |
LEARNING TO BOW
An American Teacher in a Japanese School
Bruce S. Feiler
New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992
321 pp., $19.95
It seems to have become a preoccupation for Westerners to try to penetrate the world of the Japanese--and not just by breaking down the trade barriers. Maybe it's the age-old fascination of the Far East, or the realization that in an increasingly global economy, we had better try to understand our neighbors--or just the challenge of trying to comprehend a culture so different from our own.
Anybody with a little interest in the subject knows the basic "discoveries" of Westerners about Japan from reading books like John David Morley's Pictures from the Water Trade, Lesley Downer's On the Narrow Road, and Leila Phillips' The Road Through Miyama. We learn from such nonfiction books that in many parts of Japan outside the major cities, people have never seen a foreigner. When they do meet one, they have a hard time believing a non-Japanese can speak their language or use chopsticks--despite the evidence of their own ears and eyes. In these books by Westerners, the Japanese are often depicted as an insular people.
In Learning to Bow, Bruce Feiler offers an interesting perspective on this subject. Shortly after graduating from Yale, he spent a year teaching junior high school in Sano, a small city a few hours north of Tokyo. It is in what the Japanese call inaka, the inland provincial region north of the capital--or, as Feiler says, what people in his native Georgia would refer to as "up the country."
He goes there at the invitation of the Japanese Ministry of Education, as part of a program for native speakers to teach not just the English language, but also something about American culture. This turns out to be much the more challenging part of his assignment. Feiler gets an inkling of how challenging when the principal of Sano Junior High School says to him, "I hear you come from Georgia. I like Gone With the Wind very much." He then shows Feiler a potted cotton bush but says the soil is not right to grow cotton in Japan. "Plus we don't have any slaves."
Throughout his year in Japan, Feiler is always conscious of being an outsider, partly because the Japanese never let him forget
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