Free The Land od the Rising Yen by George Mikes Page B

pushing a button. In other words: you cannot get into a taxi unless
the driver lets you in. If he approves of you he will open the door; if he
doesn’t he won’t. If he disapproves of you violently he will open the door
suddenly, just to hit you in the belly, close it again and drive off with a
happy laugh.
    (4) There are some periods of the day
(after lunch and at about 10.30 or 11 p.m. which is the surprisingly early
closing time for the Ginza) when it is impossible to get a taxi. Even if you
see an empty cab it will not stop; if it stops at a light or in traffic you
can’t get in (see previous paragraph). The only way to get a taxi at these
times without considerable delay is to wave a 1,000-yen note (£1.2op or $2.75)
as you stand on the pavement, indicating that you are prepared to give the
driver that sum irrespective of the length of the journey. Then taxis will
suddenly queue up for you. Japanese taxi-drivers refuse a shilling tip; but
they don’t mind being overpaid eight or ninefold. Pride has its limits. (If I
had their income, my pride would have its limits too; it has, as it is.)

    (5) In Israel, if a taxi stops for a
moment, the driver grabs a newspaper or a book and starts reading; the Japanese
taxi-man grabs a piece of paper stuck on cardboard, takes out his pen and
starts scribbling furiously. They all seem to be graphomaniacs, they keep
writing and leave Lope de Vega, with his many hundreds of comedies and
tragedies, and his thousands of poems and tales, at the post.
    In London I go almost everywhere by
car. I have always felt slightly guilty about it: I was driving almost as much
as a professional. Japanese taxi-drivers have put my conscience at ease and
redressed the balance: I drive more than they but they write more than I.

MANNERS
     
    A quarter of an hour in Japan will convince you that you are among exquisitely well-mannered people. People who live on a
hopelessly overcrowded island have to respect one another’s privacy — or
rather, would have to if they had any privacy. But they don’t. So courtesy has
a double function: it is courtesy and it is substitute privacy. Take, for
example, the little red telephones in the streets, shops, halls of hotels. The
instrument is situated on a table, or on a counter — they have no space to
spare for booths. You conduct your most confidential business transactions,
your intimate love-quarrels in public; yet in perfect privacy. Anybody, any
passer-by, could listen-in, but nobody does. A man’s telephone-receiver is his
castle.
    You will, of course, immediately
notice their mania for bowing. Everybody keeps bowing to everybody else, with
the ceremonious solemnity of a courtier yet with a great deal of natural and
inimitable grace. Bowing is neither less nor more silly than shaking hands or
kissing the cheek, but it is quainter, more formal, more oriental; it is also
infectious. After a few hours you start bowing yourself. But you bow too deeply
or not deeply enough; you bow to the wrong man at the wrong time; you do not
clasp your hands in front of you which is bad; or you do which is worse. You’ll
discover that the Japanese have a complicated hierarchy in bowing: who bows to
whom, how deeply and for how long. One of the American states had an early
traffic law which laid down that if two cars met at an intersection, neither
was to move before the other had gone. Similarly, if two Japanese bow, neither
is to straighten up before the other stands erect in front of him. A little
complicated to us; they manage it without difficulty and even the smallest
difference in rank, standing, age, social position will be subtly reflected in
that split second one man’s bow is shorter than the other’s. In many cases
there are clear-cut differences in position and no difficulties. The basic
rules inside the family: ‘The wife bows to her husband, the child bows to his father,
younger brothers to elder brothers, the sister bows to all brothers of whatever
age.’ 6