Americans generally describe their customs with “In the US, you tip waiters”.

Japanese generally do the same with “We don't tip waiters”.

No word on whether I ought to or not.

In line for one of the attractions at a well-known local theme park the other day, I noticed something quite peculiar.

In line, clumped together like an island of occidentalism in an eastern sea, was an American high school tour group. I know they were American by their accents; I know they were in high school by their too-sarcastic-for-this-song attitude; and I know they were a tour group because they were wearing, down to the last man, bright red shirts with a big SAMURAI 侍 character slashed calligraphy-style across the front.

Now, it's not unusual for tourists to wear shirts bearing such obnoxiously stereotyped cultural icons, but what struck me is this: they were the only ones wearing anything with any Japanese written on them at all. The Japanese tourists around them, again down to the last man, quite properly adorned themselves in random slogan-like English phrases of varied grammatical accuracy. You could feel the waves of 憧れ (longing for something you can't have), East-West and West-East, rubbing against each other in their diametrically opposite vectors, and creating what could only be called an “Only in Japan” type of rather awkward friction.

Nationalism strikes at an early age here. Just the other day a 6-year-old asked me what country I was from and what language we spoke there. Granted, this is a particularly precocious 6-year-old, the type who'd have an advanced sense of the world regardless of the country in which he'd been born. But his precociousness is in this case a bellwether of exactly what type of national consciousness is going to hit him, and most of his peers as well, not too much later in life.

I remember back when I worked at a preschool far west of here, I had another experience that rattled me ideologically much like this one. I was visiting the older kids as they did some deskbound work later in the afternoon, while the younger kids took their naps. An older fellow, probably a groundskeeper made teacher by default, was lecturing the kids on how to write proper-looking kana, and then observing them as they went about trying to copy the examples he produced on the blackboard. This may just be some social variant on the physical principle of not being able to observe anything without changing the result, seeing as my presence in the tiny classroom was about as clandestine as a one-man-band in a public library, but there was a very noticeable odor of ethno-nationalism to his explanations – and I hyphenate that word to emphasize that Japanese nationalism is almost always also ethnocentrism and racism. At least while I was there, hiragana was explained as not simply the written word, but written documentation of the beauty and uniqueness of Japan. Learning to write and appreciate it was not just something fun or educational, but a point of pride “as a Japanese”. These kids were 4 to 6 years old. No wonder by the time they hit 10 or 11 they think only Japanese eat rice or use chopsticks.

Now, of course this was all anathema to my diversity-embracing Californian mind. Nay, the worst kind of anathema – the kind against me! I'd be remiss not to admit, though, that as ideologically and plain logically wrong as I find teaching kids to justify their individual actions against the image of the idealized Japanese, it does produce people less prone to outrageous acts of selfishness than teaching kids to justify themselves only against privately held beliefs, which may be influenced or produced by society but are not expected to be regularly vetted against it.

The ugliest side of this way of thinking, at least to those whose appearances might not fall within designated Japaneseness parameters, is that Japan the nation is assumed to be ethnically homogenous, and the singular Japanese ethnicity is assumed to be physiologically (some would say “racially”) homogenous (some would say “pure”). That allows people to make quite a few conjectures about what a person is NOT based on first glance. Since I don't look Japanese, I must not be Japanese, and hence I must not speak Japanese or know anything else Japanese people are taught is unique about their culture – including such greatest hits as the existence of 4 seasons and Father's Day. Unfortunately, it's easier to teach culture as a visual mnemonic (people who look X act Y) than as a system of symbols shared by a group of people. The latter definition still allows for different-looking people not to be assumed to be also culturally alien, but is a more difficult concept for young minds to grasp. Youngsters need some moral imperative to study, and for many people, an easy-to-picture idealized Japanese in their heads they're expected to compare themselves with.