Kate Elwood presents another interesting question in her Daily Yomiuri column Cultural Conundrums, in which she discusses the idea of "inverse returns" with Japanese proficiency:
Several years ago I was in the process of writing a book of advice for foreigners living in Japan. When the first draft was close of completion, the publishers handed the manuscript over to a proofreader I'll call Mike. To put it plainly, Mike didn't like the book. He kind of hated it. His antipathy seemed to be related to the book's basic premise--that understanding the dynamics of Japanese culture could take some time but was well worth the effort. Ultimately, the publisher found another proofreader and things went on smoothly.Hostile criticism is not easy to take, and for a while afterward I was prone to scoff crossly and dismiss Mike's comments out of hand. But the gist of one angrily scrawled comment stayed with me even as others faded over time. Mike wrote something like, "Ms. Elwood has completely ignored the benefits of being a gaijin in Japan."
I think Mike meant that I had put too much emphasis on the "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" attitude, and that declining to follow various cultural conventions was the smarter move for savvy foreigners. There are certainly proponents in Japan of Mike's position, which in its strongest form is sometimes called "playing the gaijin card." Some pragmatists see it as a quick and easy means of eluding pesky social rules. Others feel they have tried to fit in to no avail, and have reaffirmed divergence as the way to greater satisfaction.
Roughly 30 years ago the well-known linguist Roy Andrew Miller put forth a controversial claim about Japanese spoken by non-Japanese people, which he dubbed the "Law of Inverse Returns." He stated, "[The] better you get at the language, the less credit you are given for your accomplishments...[but] the less you can do with the language, the more you will be praised and encouraged by Japanese society in general and by your Japanese friends in particular."
A lot has changed in Japan over the last several decades, but the assertion persists, with its advocates and opponents. Those supporting Miller's stance had a great I-told-you-so moment in 1996 when Hiroshi Kume, the host of the popular TV program News Station said, "Gaijin wa katakoto no ho ga iiyone"("It's better if foreigners speak broken Japanese, isn't it?") after an Indian spoke fluent Japanese on the show. It was the kind of comment that made many non-Japanese throw their hands up in frustration.
The statement "Foreigners should not bother trying to become fluent in spoken Japanese" received almost exactly the same percentage breakdown. Similarly, 54 percent agreed that "Talking to foreigners in Japanese is enjoyable," 6 percent strongly agreed, 14 percent disagreed and no one strongly disagreed.
Taking a different tack, Shoji Azuma, a Japanese language researcher, asked 56 Japanese male employees at banks in the Tokyo area to listen to six recordings of a Japanese conversation. In three, a Japanese man spoke, once using honorific language correctly, once using it incorrectly, and once using the plain form instead of honorific language.
There was not much difference in the scores for capability, proactivity, and confidence, but for the eight remaining criteria, the American speaker received higher scores than the Japanese speaker. Regarding differences in the use of forms, the recording of the American using honorifics correctly received higher scores for the various criteria than when using the honorifics incorrectly or speaking plainly. Using the plain form was evaluated slightly more favorably than the incorrect honorifics but there was no statistically significant difference.
Yet, as in so much of life, with recognition comes responsibility and sometimes restriction. Applied linguist Amy Snyder Ohta made an in-depth study of five Americans fluent in Japanese. Based particularly on observations from two participants, Ohta suggests that the fluent nonnative speaker is "now treated more normally in Japanese society rather than receiving special treatment reserved for less proficient foreigners."
As such, there may well be a law of inverse returns but there is also a law of direct returns. Perhaps in the end it comes down to: choose your law, choose your life.
I cannot really say what it's like because I don't feel as though I am properly proficient in Japanese, but I am more proficient than most people I know and I continue to strive for proficiency. For me, it allows me greater autonomy in life as I can solve most of my own problems like finding an apartment, ordering goods to be delivered, making reservations, reading menus, and other doing other everyday tasks on my own without help from a Japanese friend. It is also important that i can communicate with Japanese people in their own language to learn about them and the culture through the language. Although it would be dishonest to say that I don't still use the "gaijin card" from time to time-pretending I didn't understand something or know better. I think that is one of the things that makes life easier here is that as a foreigner you are exempt from a lot of obligations and cultural behaviors that make life sometimes burdensome for the average Japanese person. It is something the late Donald Riche has written about, and he was a person that I would consider proficient in Japanese. I find it interesting to be outside the culture observing and comparing it to my culture. It has never been my goal to become integrated into Japanese society. Another observation I have made that it seems that some people who achieve a high level of proficiency in Japanese often find the culture distasteful when the fully understand the workings of the culture and choose to disengage from it. Of course this is probably a statistically small number, but significant enough to garner mention.
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