Bathing in Japan

I remember before I actually went to Japan, I'd always kind of known that Japanese families bathed together. And given my cultural background (and ignorance) I'd figured that was like what I did when I was really little, having baths with my mom. This is not how it works.

Let me start by saying there's a really terrific reason for taking baths in Japan, as opposed to showers. They don't tend to have central heating in their homes. This means that when I was living with my first host family, I had days when I woke up in the morning with my nose hurting from being so cold; once I checked with a thermometer and discovered it was 3 degrees C in my bedroom. Unfortunately, this was also the period when I didn't feel comfortable with the Japanese way of bathing, and I froze myself silly by trying to take showers. After I moved in with a family that took time to explain things and be friendly, I was sane and used the bath.

Every house or apartment I've visited in Japan, no matter how small, has had a bathroom. The traditional Japanese bathroom is all tiled (or at least water-friendly) and has water sources on the walls outside the bath itself. The bather goes in, washes head to toe in the bathroom, rinses off, and then at the very end steps into the bathwater, which is mostly for relaxing and warming up. It makes more sense (at least to me) for people to share the same bathwater when they're each getting clean first.

Some tubs have ways of keeping the water warm, and some don't. All the tubs are deep, though, because they're made for soaking, often up to the neck. I think the funniest thing that ever happened to us when my husband and I lived in Japan was that we each used the old-style bath belonging to some friends who lived on a tiny island off the north coast of Honshu. I was shocked to discover that the longer I sat, the hotter it seemed to get. I had no idea what to make of this, so I took a very quick bath; then my husband discovered the same thing. When we asked what was going on we were told that there was a real fire burning underneath the bathtub! Now I know what a lobster feels like... To make this particular bath pleasant you had to keep pouring in loads of cold water. Little did we know.

Then there are the public baths. These are mostly divided into men's and women's, but are not always. (In some natural hot springs you can even bathe with monkeys - now there's inclusiveness.) Many people will take a washcloth into the tub with them, to cover up critical areas, but in general I haven't noticed a great deal of embarrassment among the people who bathe together in this context. People can in fact be very friendly. I was adopted once by a group of elderly ladies who decided that as a foreigner I must not know how Japanese baths were supposed to work, and took it upon themselves to teach me. Because they were sweet and solicitous, I let them teach me even though I'd been through the directions a few times by then.

There is in fact some degree of modesty in the public bath context, but the taboo isn't about being naked. It's about having someone else see you get undressed. Outside the common bath area there are generally curtained stalls for the undressing part.

I decided to talk about this today partly because I found it culturally interesting, but also because I think it shows the degree of cultural difference that is possible surrounding a single activity. You see architectural differences in the bathroom; different shaped tubs; different ways of heating water; a separation of the function of the bathroom (washing) and the bath (soaking); different rules of behavior including gender separation, context for modesty, etc. This doesn't even include the rules about who gets to go first/next/last in the family bathtub.

So if you're working with an alien or fantasy culture, try putting some thought into the various details of activities in your newly created context. Including a "bath scene," or a scene that shows another common daily activity in detail, gives you a terrific opportunity to deepen the culture you're sharing with the reader.

Group activities and Spirit

I'm excited this morning because my Analog story is still "alive," even though it came out in May (in the July/August issue)... Rich Horton's year-end summary said it was a good story! Whee!

And speaking of cheering (yes, this is a segue)...

This week has been "Spirit Week" at my son's school. I guess you could also call it "get everybody to do strange things together week." In a four-day week we had pajama day, crazy hair day, Disney day, and school colors day. My son's been having a great time.

I remember doing this in my junior high and high school years. I loved it, too - even when I was generally feeling like the odd one out of most social groups.

There's something about doing things with other people. It feels good. It means something.

One of my most uplifting experiences ever was singing Mozart's Requiem with the university chorus when I was doing my Master's. I remember standing in the church and singing my guts out, but I also remember feeling almost as though I wasn't the one singing, that I was being borne up on the music and carried along, and that I could have sung forever. (This is of course not true, as I would have lost my voice before too long).

This is how I imagine the feeling of the House of Leaves in "Let the Word Take Me", where all the Gariniki are speaking and shouting out together.

My husband had an interesting experience concerning group activities when we were living in Japan. An American guy asked him how he could get along better with the Japanese members of the company, and my husband suggested he should 1. get drunk with them, 2. have a bath with them, and/or 3. sing karaoke with them. There's that singing thing again, but in the case of karaoke, it's not a question of joining your voice to the great song. Karaoke is all about expressing a joint willingness to humiliate yourself - and there's also a trust that comes with it, that no one will make fun of anyone else later. When another American fellow in the office went out for the first time for karaoke, the word that he was cool took about five minutes to run through the entire office the following morning, and suddenly even the people who hadn't been there felt better able to relate to him.

I'll talk about the bath thing tomorrow - it's just too wonderful a topic not to give it its own entry.

Group activities really help to define the nature of social groups. My husband has never experienced a "spirit week" before; his schools always had competition by House to help organize group spirit. For all those of us who have read Harry Potter, that should sound awfully familiar! Hogwarts wouldn't be Hogwarts without it.

So let's think for a minute about worldbuilding, since I always do. You've got a population, now how do you let everyone know what they're like? This is a great opportunity for "show don't tell": either dramatize, or make reference to, a type of group activity that is highly indicative of their spirit in social behavior. Is it attending sports? Is it watching gladiators fight to the death? Is it going to church? Is it eating together with the members of the nuclear family - or with all the members of the extended family? Is it shapeshifters melting together into the "Great Link" as it was in Star Trek DS9?

Ask yourself how a group defines itself, what its members do together, and what those activities mean to them. You'll take yourself instantly beyond the surface level, into a much more interesting place.

Pick your species/Pick your tech?

This is such a common thing that I don't think I really have to point it out to anyone, but here it is, a phenomenon common to both science fiction and fantasy to varying degrees:

People pick established species on which to base their alien races, and established time periods on which to base their technology.

There are a lot of great reasons to do this. One excellent reason is an idea I talked about earlier, that of the conceptual "set." If you pick a preexisting set of characteristics for an alien and its technology, one that people are familiar with, then readers will not have to work as hard and they can use their instinctive expectations to guide them in understanding the story. A related reason is that the alien and its behavior will seem more "natural" if you match behavior to species and physiology and extrapolate it into the realm of culture.

On the other hand, as a writer you don't have to feel bound by these constraints. Not necessarily.

Sure, if you're pulling features of physiology, behavior, culture and technology from all over the place, it'll feel like a hodgepodge and not make any sense. That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm just saying that there are novel combinations of elements that can be used with internal consistency.

How do you go looking for a new way? I'd suggest starting with the understanding that physical setting influences physiology, and also influences culture, which also influences technology. As long as it's all connected, you can play around. Changing one aspect of physical setting will create ripples throughout the system. Changing an aspect of technology can be linked back to cultural preferences.

Let the elements of the world grow together organically and they can change each other. Let there be a reason for every departure from the set, and you may find your readers will trust you all the way.

Are you being invaded?

Have you ever had one of those conversations where you're being chased? The other person takes one step too close to you, and you step back, and they step forward, and before you know it, the race is on?

This is one of the difficulties that can arise from different concepts of personal space.

It's not a visible, but an invisible line between people, and when someone crosses it, you know. Not everyone's invisible borderline lies in the same place - and not every borderline stays in the same place all the time.

In Japan, typically people maintain a borderline that is further from them than ours here in the US. It's very practical. If you're both going to be bowing, and potentially bowing all the way to the horizontal, you have to take that into account when deciding where to stand, or you could sustain a head injury! So I guess it's okay to stand closer to someone when you're of about the same status and you won't have to bow low, but standing further away might be best with someone much older or of higher social status.

The one that always surprised and amazed me in Japan was the way the personal space borderline moves. If you're in a work or home situation, in a place where established social relationships exist around you and must be maintained, then the borderline falls at a distance. But if you're walking the Tokyo streets or traveling the subways with strangers, the borderline moves inward - to the skin. I was always amazed at how people in Tokyo would walk straight through me, constantly jostle and bump and never seem to notice they had done it.

To sensitive little American me it felt like a constant assault, and somehow I could never entirely turn it off, even after I got used to it. When I had just gotten back to California a woman in the supermarket apologized to me and at first I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized she was apologizing because the invisible path in front of her cart had accidentally entered the invisible path in front of mine.

I was tempted to give this woman a hug for being so considerate - but I wouldn't have wanted to invade her personal space. :-)

Why you should love grammar

Grammar isn't really that stuff they teach you in school.

Call that stuff, "textbook grammar." Not that it's bad, per se, but it's tuned for a very specific purpose: that of separating people from a style of communication that roughly matches their spoken words, and engaging them in more academic-voiced stuff.

For those of you who know me (in person or on forums) you know that I've written quite a bit of academic stuff. What I remember most about that is how I had spent years trying to remove the word "I" from my texts, and then had to go about reintroducing it. My dissertation talks about "I" and what "I" did in my study, because it's as important to know who the researcher is and how her perspective influences the way the study was conducted as to discuss the results themselves. Talking about researcher influence and its possible ramifications is one of the ways to reduce its effects on actual results.

The grammar I love is real grammar - descriptive grammar, you could say. And it's used differently in speech from the way it's used in academic work, and differently again in fiction, but it's powerful stuff.

Grammar is what frees you from context.

Start, as one of my professors once did, with a doctor in the surgery room. Everybody in that room has highly congruent training; everybody in that room is there for an express purpose, one that they all are familiar with; everybody in that room knows who is in charge. So when the doctor says "scalpel," that's all he or she needs to say.

Or take children learning to talk. Most often they babble and point first, and then they move to the single-word stage. One word that my kids both made great use of was "that." When you think about it, it's a great word. The child says "that" and the parent following after them has to guess from their actions, facial expressions and physical context what they want. Believe me, it's not always easy to tell what "that" is, when an array of possible objects is present.

Okay, so what about writing? Words on a page, divorced in time and location from their initial use, depend on grammar to show relations that would ordinarily be shown by context. Who is doing an action, what they're doing, and what they're doing it to - there's subject, verb, object. It goes on and develops in complexity from there.

Imagine a written message taped on someone's door:

"Meet Julie at 1:00 at Borders bookstore."

The context of the note hanging on the door makes us guess that the note is intended to be read by the person to whom the door belongs; the sender is unknown, but could be the same as the receiver (a reminder note) or someone else. Julie is quite a likely candidate. Notice also what isn't present in the note: the date.

This is where things start to get interesting, because pragmatic implication comes into play. If any piece of information is missing from the note, the reader will automatically infer that that information is already known to the sender and receiver. The lack of a date implies the nearest instance of the hour 1:00 - i.e. today. The appearance of Borders Bookstore implies the nearest instance of that particular bookstore (or alternatively, one known to the receiver of the message).

Let's change another piece.

"Meet me at 1:00 at Borders bookstore."

Now we know for sure that someone is supposed to meet the sender of the note, but we no longer know who that is. We can also infer that the receiver must know who "me" is, because otherwise that information would be specified. This is related to the maxim of quantity in Grice's cooperative principle, which essentially says "give as much information as required, and no more than is required."

Let's change another piece.

"Meet me at 1:00 at the bookstore."

Notice that it wouldn't work to say "a bookstore" because the two people would never meet. "The" implies that the meeting will take place at a bookstore that both people are familiar with.

Let's change another piece.

"Meet me at 1:00."

Now because the information about location is suddenly missing, we are forced to assume that the two people have already agreed on a location for meetings, just that the meeting time must be specified.

Let's change another piece.

"Meet me at the bookstore."

With no time information present, we must conclude that a time has either been agreed upon, or that the time should be the nearest time available, i.e. "now."

So while grammar's purpose is to supply missing context, it actually can do as much in its absence as it does with its presence. In these examples, we use our instincts to fill in and draw conclusions about what kind of information must be known by the sender and receiver of the message in order for it to be a "well-formed" message, or one that can be successfully interpreted by the intended receiver.

This is why I love grammar.

What do you think about it?