English Old Saying 29 April 1986
Trevor Leggett was head of the Japanese Department of the BBC.
This is one of his broadcasts to Japan
Zubari for 29 April 1986 (First drafted 13 June 1983)
‘You have to be cruel to be kind’. This is an old English saying. An example would be when a small child does not want to learn to read, and is very obstinate. The parents and teachers have to use punishments in order to get him to study – he will not do it for rewards. Now the child thinks that his parents and teachers are cruel. They are cruel; they make him cry. But their ultimate purpose is to be kind. They know that if he does not learn to read, his life will be very unhappy.
Recently, I read a short account by a Japanese of his first day in London. This was about thirty years ago, and he came to our BBC Japanese Section to work there. He had lunch in the BBC staff self-service restaurant with the Section members, and myself. He wrote that, afterwards, I had told him, “Customs differ in various countries. In Japan, it is usual to take soup with some air as well, to cool it. That makes a noise which is quite natural in Japan. But in England it is regarded as bad manners to make a noise”. He said in his essay that his face turned red and he felt very embarrassed; he evidently thought my remark was rather cruel.
But I believe that it would have been far more cruel to say nothing. After a while, he noticed that the English people always take the soup, and their tea, silently. He would have asked someone, and been told, “Yes, in Britain to make a noise is bad manners”. Then he would have thought, back over that month, or that year, and he would have realized that he had been displaying bad manners every day. How red his face would have been then! He would have thought, ‘Why did no one tell me? How cruel they were not to tell me.’
I can remember how when I first went to Japan I tried to eat soba without making any noise. I saw that the others were making a noise, of course, but the ingrained habit – that one must eat silently prevented me from sucking it up as they were doing. I felt embarrassed. Finally, a Japanese friend, who had noted that I was hardly able to eat any of it, said to me, quietly, “Here it is proper to make a noise when you eat spaghetti. In fact, it is bad manners if you do not.”
In certain countries of the Middle East, there is a strong distinction between the right hand and the left hand. The right hand is the pure hand, and the left hand is regarded as impure. So, it is very rude to pass anything to someone using one’s left hand. In Britain however, we do not make any distinction of pure and impure as applied to the hands. When I lived in Egypt, at a tea party the Egyptian host saw me passing a plate of food with the left hand. He told me, “Never pass anything with the left hand. It’s insulting to do so here.” I felt a momentary embarrassment as I quickly changed the plate to the right hand, but afterwards I felt tremendously grateful.
Best, of course, is to hear about the foreign customs beforehand. But one cannot learn everything. When I returned to London from Osaka, the plane was held up for a few hours at Narita, and all the passengers were given a meal at a hotel near the airport. I and John Newman were at a large table with some 15 others, all young Japanese. The first course was soup, it was served to me first, and I began to take it.
I noticed that the conversation round the table seemed to have stopped, but I did not pay any attention to that. Then John whispered to me, “They are all watching you and the soup.” Suddenly, I realized that they must all have been told about the ‘silent soup’ in Britain. This must have been the first demonstration of it that they had seen. So, I was like an actor on the stage – they were wondering whether I should make any noise at all, I suppose.
I managed to finish it without spilling any, and I felt I had passed the examination, so to speak. Nobody actually applauded me. But they all began on their own soup – in dead silence.
© Trevor Leggett