I usually enjoy Kate Elwood's Cultural Conundrums columns, even though they tend to be a bit naive on occasion. The latest is about another term she learned when she just arrived in Japan. (She must have been a freakin sponge. I can hardly rememeber anything from when I arrived and niether did most of the people I met who studied Japanese, then again not many people spoke English when she arrived I guess):
The word tennen in this sense can't really be rendered into English as "natural." Natural sounds good--basic, plain, pure, honest. Airheaded, silly, scatty or harebrained may be the innate characteristics of some people but they are not what spring to mind if we say a person is natural. Unnatural, artificial, simulated and synthetic, on the other hand, don't sound like very attractive traits, generally speaking.The late actor River Phoenix apparently said: "I like girls who are natural because I am natural in everything I do. If I meet a girl who is snobby and wants special treatment, she's not going to get it from me because she hasn't earned it. But I've been basically lucky because I've met mostly nice girls--and that's what attracts me."
In English "natural" suggests unpretentiousness. But the use of the word tennen for ditzy implies that non-ditziness requires enhancement beyond the natural state, a certain padding of pretense or at least social refinement.
The cultivated state may end up being considered the main, normal condition. The first time I heard the word tennen was many years ago when I first arrived in Japan one hot July. In those scorching days I was asked often if my hair, which had gone berserk in the high humidity, was naturally wavy. "Naturally wavy hair" is called a "natural perm" (tennen pa-ma) in Japanese. This perhaps reflects the fact that many, though certainly not all, Japanese people have naturally straight hair so that wavy hair may be first assumed to be the result of some chemical encouragement at the hairdressers. Nonetheless, it seemed strange to me at the time to speak of a "natural" permanent. One would not, for example, refer to a youthful-looking elderly woman who had not undergone plastic surgery as having a "natural facelift," after all.
I asked other Japanese students and friends about their images and associations with the word tennen in the way Keisuke had used it to refer to a person's personality. Typical words included keisan naku (uncalculating), ba no kuki o yomenai (unable to read a situation) and pin to konai (off-focus).
Students by and large did not view the word negatively, exactly. They tended to see it as slightly teasing but showing familiarity. Some suggested that tennen people were interesting because they were unintentionally funny. Middle-aged Japanese were more likely to regard the word as unmitigatedly critical, essentially meaning "stupid," pure and simple.
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