Excerpts from Dave Barry Does Japan Random House, 1992.

I wrote my book "Dave Barry Does Japan" to try, in some small way, to make this world a better place for people everywhere, and for the generations to come.

I'm lying, of course! I wrote the book because I thought a trip to Japan might be pretty funny, especially since Random House had generously agreed to pay for the whole thing. This was a major factor, because I had heard that prices were pretty high in Japan. People who'd been there were always telling me horror stories.

"Oh yes," they'd say, "In Tokyo, Frank ordered two eggs over medium and the bill came to $16,500, plus $312 for the parsley sprig, and he wound up having to sell both of his corneas."

So in the summer of 1991 I filled several large suitcases with traveler's checks and went to Japan with my wife, Beth, and my 10-year-old son, Robert. We spent three weeks bumbling around in a disoriented, uncomprehending manner, The Three Cultural Stooges, because it turns out that Japan is an extremely foreign country, where you can never be sure whether the sign on the door you're about to open says:

RESTAURANT or: ENTER HERE FOR EXPRESS VASECTOMY SERVICE

My book is an account of that trip. Please don't misunderstand me: I don't claim to have become an expert on Japan in three weeks. The Japanese culture is thousands of years old; to truly grasp its incredible complexity and infinite subtle nuance, you'd need at least a month.

Ha ha! Just Kidding. I don't know if an outsider can ever really understand Japan, but I know I never came close. When I arrived there, my major objectives immediately changed from things like "try to determine attitude of average salaried worker toward government industrial policy" to things like "try to find food without suckers on it."

So this is not authoritative. If you want authoritative, go buy a real book. This is just a highly subjective account of our trip, with a lot of personal impressions, some of which may well have been influenced by beer, which by the way is another thing they do better than we do. In fact they do quite a few things better than we do, and I'm not just talking about cars and radios. But it also turns out that we are way ahead of them in some important areas, such as pizza.

My most important finding, however, does not involve the differences between us and Japan; it involves the similarities. Because despite the gulf, physical and cultural, between the United States and Japan, both societies are, in the end, made up of people, and people everywhere - when you strip away their superficial differences - are crazy.

I attempted to learn Japanese by reading a book called "Japanese at a Glance" in the plane from San Francisco to Tokyo. This is not the method recommended by experts. The method recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan.

The result of my language-training program was that I arrived in Tokyo speaking Japanese at essentially the same fluency as cement. I never did get much better while I was there. The only word I got really good at saying was "beer," which is pronounced "bee-roo," unless you want a big beer, in which case it is pronounced "BIG bee-roo."

Many Japanese people know a little English. But it's often very little. Japan is not like, for example, Germany, where everybody seems to speak English better than the average U.S. congressperson. In Japan, you will often find yourself in situations where nobody speaks any English. And the weird thing is, English pops up everywhere in Japan. You constantly see signs and advertisements with English words in them, and you constantly hear American rock music being played in stores and restaurants. But to the Japanese, the English doesn't seem to mean anything. It's there purely for decorative purposes, like a hood ornament, or a SPEED LIMIT 55 sign.

This can be frustrating. I remember being in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant (see footnote No. 1) in a small town called Beppu, trying to communicate the concept of "ketchup" to the young man behind the counter, who, like virtually every other Japanese person we met, was extremely polite and diligent. He was trying hard to understand me, frowning with intense concentration as I used the Official United Nations International Gesture for "ketchup," which is to pound the bottom of an upside-down imaginary ketchup bottle while saying Ketch-up? Ketch-up? Ketch-up? like a person with a hiccups-related nerve disorder. But I wasn't getting through, so the young man called two young women over, and all three of them solemnly watched me repeat Ketch-up? Ketch-up? Ketch-up? for a while longer, none of them saying a word, and all the while the store's music system was playing:

There she was, just a walkin' down the street Singin' do-wah diddy diddy dum diddy-do

And I wanted to scream, HOW CAN YOU NOT UNDERSTAND ENGLISH WHEN ALL DAY LONG YOU LISTEN TO DO-WAH DIDDY DIDDY DUM DIDDY-DO??

The important lesson for the English-speaking visitor to learn from all this is that in Japan, English words do not necessarily mean anything. Adding to the confusion is the fact that, even when English words DO mean something, it may not be what you think. The Japanese are not big on saying things directly. Another way of putting this is, compared to the Japanese, the average American displays all the subtlety of Harpo hitting Zeppo with a dead chicken. The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism often leaving important things unsaid; whereas most Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.

This difference in approach often leads to misunderstandings between the two cultures. One of the biggest problems - all the guidebooks warn you about this - is that the Japanese are extremely reluctant to come right out and say "no," a word they generally regard as impolite.

To the best of my knowledge, in the three weeks we traveled around Japan, nobody ever told us we couldn't do anything, although it turned out that there were numerous things we couldn't do. Life became easier for us once we learned to interpret certain key phrases, which I'll summarize in this convenient table:

But subtlety and protocol are not the the strong suits of Americans, which is one reason why the Japanese tend to view us as large, loud water buffalo, lumbering around without a clue, tromping and pooping all over their carefully arranged, exquisitely tended garden of a society.

On the Japanese ryokan and onsen baths:.

The Japanese like to soak in wooden tubs filled with extremely relaxing water hot enough to melt Formica.; this is one of the first things you're supposed to do when you get to the ryokan. I almost did this the first evening. I minced down the hallway to the bath area, and I started to go in, and although there was a lot of steam in the air, I was able to determine the following:

1. There were people in there.
2. I did not know these people.
3. These people were naked.
4. These people represented all of the major genders.

So I minced the hell out of there and back to our room, where I contemplated the beauty and natural wonder of people speaking Japanese on television.

On bowing:

This happened quite often. It started when we arrived at our hotel in Tokyo. As I was descending the steps of the airport bus, two uniformed bellmen came rushing up and bowed to me. Trying to look casual but feeling like an idiot, I bowed back. I probably did it wrong, because then they bowed back. So I bowed back. The three of us sort of bowed our way over to where the luggage was being unloaded, and I bowed to our suitcases, and the bellmen, bowing, picked them up and rushed into the hotel. We followed past a bowing doorman into the hotel, where we were gang-bowed by hotel employees. No matter which direction we turned, they were aiming bows at us, sometimes from as far as twenty-five yards away.

FOOTNOTE
1. Of course they have Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. Don't be an idiot.