to give and to receive

A of big part of the Japanese language that is typically introduced in beginner's Japanese is all the forms of giving and receiving that abound. There's give, of course, ageru, and receive, morau. There's even a third one, kureru, which means "give to me," so there's an implied receiver of "me" built in to the verb. Pile on top of that the humble and honorific forms, causative and passive forms…it can be a mess. I remember when I first learned them, I was thinking what all the fuss was about, just two verbs, giving and receiving. They are not an integral part of the English language--or rather, they are not verbs that hold a status any more special than other verbs, like read, eat, sleep. It wasn't until very recently that I actively realized that the Japanese use those three give/receive verbs far more often than we in English use "give" and "receive." Of course, I knew that they were an integral part of the formal language of making requests and especially in customer service. But I also realized recently that it's not just customer service and requests/gift giving where you would naturally bring up "give" and "receive." Those three Japanese verbs can be tacked on to nearly any other verb to make up compound verbs. Contexts in which we would not normally think to include a "give" or "receive" as part of the sentence in English are natural in Japanese.

The example that really brought this to the fore was the ending of Shall We Dance, a fairly famous Japanese movie that is, more or less, about a middle-aged midlife crisis salary man who starts ballroom dance lessons without his wife's knowledge. Near the end of the movie, he and his wife are in the process of "making up" and his daughter commands (or beseeches) him to dance with his wife. In English, this would be an impassioned "Why won't you dance with her! Dance with her!" In Japanese, it came out to something like "odotte-ageru"--"odoru" = dance, and "ageru" = give. Upon further reflection, I think that a lot of phrases we would say "doing X for so-and-so" in English translate in Japanese with a give or receive verb. To my English-thinking mind, it seems as though it's the act of giving and receiving, rather than the giver or recipient that is emphasized.

Of course these are probably fine grammatical points that I should have grasped a long time ago. I'm no expert. I *still* can't effectively use ageru, morau, and kureru. But I think, more than the grammatical points, thinking about how these three verbs are used makes me think about how the Japanese fundamentally organize or conceive of their society. Such a great number of actions are conceived of as exchanges involving giving and receiving, something that I think is fairly absent in American society. Gift-giving culture is even more enormous in Japan than in America, particularly the souvenir culture. (Ok, this is a digression, but Chinese people give expensive gifts, but usually for a particular purpose, like social bribery. Japanese people give relatively inexpensive gifts and souvenirs to all sorts of people, all the time, not necessarily for a particular purpose but just to oil the social machine.)

It's true that I'm highly individualistic. I try not to make a mess, and when I do, I try to clean up after myself. This is because I don't want to clean up after other people, and don't expect them to clean up after me. One might say that I have a sense of boundaries about that. I don't litter, but I don't go around picking up other people's litter either. It's as though there's a strict separation: you|me. I do feel as though that separation is hazier here. People clean up after each other, and in a culture of such cooperators, there are surprisingly few defectors who free ride off of other people's cooperation (the only exception I've seen are some guys, and important-ish male people, like important-ish professors and such). But in groups of peers, people do each other's dishes, clean up together, bus each other's trays. The devastation of the auditorium at UCSF after us prospective students were done with it…the dropped forks, plates, paper cups, bagels cream-cheese-side-down on the beautiful carpet…what a far cry! It's offensive. It goes beyond individualistic; it's irresponsible. But of course, I didn't pick it up, either. Maybe I should have? I don't know.

So, anyways, I guess the not-so-original insight is that the interdependence of our society is reflected to some degree in our language. It shouldn't surprise me that giving and receiving is built so integrally into Japanese language in ways that my American mind had never considered. I don't think of my actions in terms of giving and receiving, so to think that way in Japanese and come out with natural Japanese seems like a part of being socialized into Japanese social interdependence.

Every step of the way here, I have relied on the kindness of strangers to help me out on critical things, from housing to classes to traveling. I think I've become somewhat less neurotic about being overprepared for every situation. I've learned to relax a bit, because I've started to trust in the kindness of strangers. I can ask for directions. People will help me. In some ways it's been a relief. I wonder if when I go back, I'll be reverse-socialized and go back to being a neurotic control freak again. To some degree I do believe that social ties are created out of favors done for and by other people. To be too independent, too self-sufficient is to cut oneself off in some ways, even though independence and self-sufficiency are traits that I admire.


Alright, I've run out of rambling thoughts about social ties for now.