Yesterday I talked a little bit with the new cleaning lady that works on my floor in the office.
She’s a little intense.
She comes in pretty early but apparently not early enough to clean my room before I get there. This fact seems to bother her a little. Also, she is a little curious about me, and among the foreigners that work on that floor I am the only one who speaks Japanese. So yesterday she wanted to talk.
The weird thing was that while we were chatting she had a dust rag in her hand, and she was cleaning random objects within her reach. She didn’t really have a target for her cleaning, just whatever happened to be nearby, and she didn’t look at whatever she was cleaning – she just looked at me while we talked. When she left she cleaned switches, walls, and anything else in her path as she opened and closed the door. It was as if she needed to show that she was in fact working – not chatting with someone – just in case her boss showed up. Strange.
While walking to work yesterday morning I had a nice encounter with a person walking the other way. The woman smiled at me, said “Good morning” in English, and then commented that the weather certainly was hot these days, also in English. But actually I wasn’t surprised at this sudden outburst of English, because I have been working on this person for weeks.
For as long as I have been in Japan I have made it a point to be friendly and smile at people as I go to and from work. Call it my last stubborn effort to not fit in with all the serious looks everyone else wears. Smiles at strangers are reserved for the crazy people. But ever since I walked to Takasago Minami high school back “in the beginning” I have enjoyed the reaction a simple smile will get. At first it is ignored, but if I’m lucky it will be returned within a few days. After a week or so somebody might throw in a “Good morning” in Japanese, and if I’m really lucky in a month or two we might exchange some English.
What I’ve found is that most people want to be friendly, it is just considered bad form to do so out of hand. You have to follow formal steps to get to the smiling stage, and to cut right to it is not Japanese. Luckily, as a foreigner I get a free pass.
So I have various “projects” on my route to work. Some are in the early stages, some are more talkative, and yesterday was a very fulfilling episode for me. Now if she takes away from this that foreigners aren’t scary, that it is OK to smile at people when walking by – well, that’s just icing on the cake.
Anyway, this is my continuing project to loosen up Japan. Just 124 million people left to convert.
