I met Anya, a former Kyiv resident and still a very young girl, quite by chance - at the "dearly beloved" family get-togethers I always attend, on the occasion of someone's wedding. My wife dragged me there, and she also got Anya talking, knowing my professional interest in stories of this kind. The fact is that the girl had arrived for the "wedding" straight from Tokyo, where she has been living for two years now with her Japanese husband. In Kyiv she graduated from a pedagogical institute and even worked for a while in a kindergarten, but, of course, you can't make a living from a noble profession around here. Anya is very beautiful, with a great figure, so it was not destined for the children to enjoy such a teacher for long. Acquaintances helped her get into a dance revue, one that often went on tour. It was during one of these trips to Moscow that the intent Japanese squint of a sales manager from the Land of the Rising Sun - Reiti-san - noticed the pretty Ukrainian girl.
"Of course, I had no real idea about Japan and life there," Anya said. "Well, I knew from newspapers and television that the country was, so to speak, almost European - in terms of service, technological development, and at the same time it was clear that the Japanese certainly differed somehow from the Americans and Germans I often happened to see in Kyiv. It turned out they differ quite significantly. Moreover, you don't realize this right away. Probably, if I had ended up in Africa, I would have immediately been struck by many things, by some purely external features, I think. But in Japan, precisely because of its seeming similarity to European customs, the differences don't catch your eye at first. But when you immerse yourself in all this, you start simply living, constantly, day after day, among the Japanese, and you realize how much you are still not of this world. And with each month the feeling only grows stronger."
Reiti-san, Anya is now sure, is a typical Japanese man. You get the impression that they all have a chip inserted into their heads at birth, like the Terminator, and this chip programs their entire future life. Moreover, the slightest failure in the program can lead to catastrophe. So, at 18 a Japanese youth knows exactly that he must enter a university. Five years later, the life program provides for the start of a career in some modest position of "junior assistant to the deputy head of section No. 5 of department No. 2..." Then a series of promotions up the career ladder is planned no less clearly. By age 35, it is considered that a man has already achieved a sufficient position and saved the necessary amount of money to afford to have a wife.
Reiti-san also followed this path beaten by generations. Now he is 38 years old, and at his firm he heads a department dealing with economic relations with the countries of the former USSR. His working day is scheduled very precisely - from 9.00 to 17.00. Anya cannot recall any calls like "Darling, I'll be late today, urgent work," and, as she suspects, they are hardly possible at all. In this regard, everything is exactly like in our film "Office Romance," when with the expiration of the last working minute everyone is literally blown out of the institution. Moreover, this applies to the management as well. "On the one hand, this is, of course, not bad," says Anya, "you always know exactly what will happen in half an hour, no unpleasant surprises. But, on the other hand, to live without any surprises at all... Sometimes you feel like a prisoner of some conveyor belt stamping one day after another, similar to each other, like the Japanese themselves."
Reiti-san, as Anna now understands, long ago constructed his own model of family life and simply fitted his beloved woman to it. The relations between spouses within the home fully correspond to the Japanese proverb "Daddy, of course, loves Mommy, but he will never tell her about it." Japanese husbands absolutely do not consider it acceptable to compliment their wives or give them flowers. The possibility of such an emotional manifestation is initially absent in them. Yes, of course, they have seen many foreign films, read some books, and know about the existence of such customs. And they can even handle this task perfectly, for example, at a party or an official reception. But not at home.
Yes, we Slavs also do not spoil our wives with flowers. But, paradoxically, this most often comes from an "excess of feelings," when either you want to annoy her once more, or all emotions along with flowers and compliments have gone to the side (and many, in the euphoria of a successful affair "on the side," are even ready to please their wife with a bouquet). And, by the way, a domestic husband always (!) remembers this and, even without realizing it, feels guilt before the life partner he himself has deprived. And because of this, sometimes, by the way, he gets even angrier, annoyed at his own insensitivity, and as a result, instead of a compliment, he "doles out" the exact opposite.
A Japanese person is entirely free from such internal contradictions. He sincerely believes that he should not have to prove his affection to his wife in some additional way, since they have already become a family. And he does not know how to do this, even if he suddenly felt the need. According to Anna, the Japanese in general do not trouble their heads about how to court a woman and are not very good at communicating with the fair sex. In general, in terms of sexual development, they resemble high school students, and not our current ones, but those brought up in Soviet schools 30-40 years ago (Anna naturally knows about this from the stories of her own parents) - with all their complexes, timidity, lofty romanticism, and so on. It is probably no accident that Russian classics - Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky - are so popular in Japan. At the same time, Japan is by no means a puritanical country or a backwater when it comes to sex. On the contrary, the sex industry here is one of the most developed in the world, which greatly struck Anna in her first days of life in Tokyo. "Still, it is the East! I did not think that they were, well, not exactly depraved, but advanced, as it were. I thought everything would be more modest than in Europe or even in our country. Here pornography is sold everywhere completely freely 24 hours a day. Almost any store has special shelves with magazines and cassettes 'about that,' and at least five people are always standing near them. There is an abundance of all sorts of sexual computer games. Brothels operate openly, occupying whole districts in Tokyo."
And yet, despite such a huge interest in the issue, the Japanese do not know how to actually communicate with real, not computer, women and girls. They resemble overgrown teenagers who giggle among themselves about all sorts of obscenities, but in reality do not know from which side to approach a woman and what to do with her at all. True, these "teenagers" are quiet and not aggressive. "They are essentially afraid of women. Therefore, in terms of, for example, personal safety, it is reliable here. There are no maniacs at all, and you can communicate with these men quite boldly. That is, if a Japanese guy invites you, say, to go to a restaurant or the movies, then you can be sure - it really will be only a restaurant and only the movies and nothing more. They are not programmed for anything more in this case. And if you yourself start to be proactive, they may simply get frightened and retreat. So our girls with their liberated ways have a hard time here. Although people, as everywhere, are different. Maybe one should not generalize..."
Here I assured Anna that she is not a pioneer in her observations and need not fear offending the descendants of the samurai. The infantilism of today's Japanese men has even received a solid justification. The postwar generation, having made their country almost the most developed in the world (in the economic sense, of course), prepared too carefree a life for their children and grandchildren. In some ways this even resembles our native "stagnation." That is, the average Japanese need not worry about work or a corresponding salary. He sat through the end of the working day, carried out all the instructions of elders and superiors - and that's all there is to it; he can go have a beer, amuse himself with game machines, and flip through a comic.
Such a young man is very polite, smooth, tries in every way to show his ostentatious diligence (within the norm and without straining), observes the rules, does what he is told, etc. He cannot imagine that a moment may come when he will be fired, when unemployment benefits will not be enough, when to maintain a normal life he will really have to slave away at three jobs, discarding all etiquette. He is unable to imagine a world where there are no comics, beer with chips, and karaoke clubs. Those life difficulties, problems, and other obstacles, in overcoming which character is formed, a person matures, and a boy becomes a man, bypass him. (As is customary to write in serious works: quoted from: «Сексуальная патология и культуры народов».) Hence the famous Japanese politeness. Avoid direct conflict at any cost! Never tell an unpleasant truth to someone's face! A Japanese will invent all sorts of nonsense, excuse me, dodge and weave, lie, and generally squirm like an eel, just so that the stream of problems flows around him. He either cannot or will not stand up and bravely say what he needs - after all, that always involves risk, and he will not take risks.
In this society, it is bad form to flaunt one's individuality and somehow stand out from the crowd. But after all, it is precisely this that in all ages and among all peoples lay at the foundation of conquering a woman! So where, then, are such bright personalities to be found, if moderation in habits is elevated to a cult? It so happened, as they say, historically. This small country, surrounded by raging oceans and riddled with volcanoes, could survive only under conditions of universal frugality and the absence of social upheavals, including their embryo - domestic quarrels. Bright personalities who go towards their goals despite everything have always posed a huge danger to this country. And in families concentrated on a small living space, the ability to avoid conflicts was the only way to coexist. Thus, a species such as the "non-aggressive man" developed in Japan. And everything about him is, in principle, not bad. Only, excuse me, little remains of the male.
It is not surprising that Japanese women are increasingly favorable towards foreigners. Today, for a 20-year-old Tokyo woman, having an American boyfriend is about the same as it was for a 20-year-old Muscovite woman to do the same about 15 years ago. Moreover, descendants of Africans are especially popular in big cities. Well, imagine: all her life a girl is surrounded by nothing but insecure introverts of small stature, skinny, wearing glasses, with crooked teeth, always dressed in their tasteless gray suit with a white shirt, timid, shy, unquestioningly carrying out orders and obeying their elders. All their lives their mother follows them around like a servant, and they see no other purpose for a woman. They are embarrassed to dance - they come to a disco and sit in a corner, waiting for something.
And then a handsome black man appears, two meters tall, with a figure like Michael Jordan, a gold chain around his neck, sparkling white teeth, a baseball cap turned backwards, a catlike gait, and male hormones literally radiating from him for a hundred meters around... This one definitely knows what to do with a woman and how to do it. Japanese girls watch him dance and just fall in rows - point a finger at any one and «wrap it up, please, to go.» Perhaps that is why potential Japanese husbands, in turn, are starting to look for wives abroad?
But let us return to Anna. She herself is not very concerned either about her husband's emotional restraint or, even less, about Japanese young men's inability to court girls. «Actually, I am in principle satisfied with everything. My husband does everything he should - money, housing, necessary expenses... I doubt I would have gotten all this from someone in my own country. That is, in our country you can also get it, and even more. But then you would have to marry a gangster and constantly wait for some misfortune. And with a Japanese man, there is both prosperity and peace. And you can always come home at least once a year to let off steam.»