You enter a hotel, and a bell boy puts his hand against an automatic door and moves in unison with it as if it is him, and not the gears and sensors making it slide open. He then grabs your bags, almost forcefully, and walks you to the counter saying words that make you feel uncomfortable – you don’t deserve such treatment. As if that isn’t enough, he rushes ahead across the hall to call the elevator for you, holds the door that otherwise might jerk in an attempt to close, takes you upstairs and walks you to your room. When you think it is over, the boy follows you inside and gives you a tour of the room with detailed explanations of how to use the TV, flush the toilet and brush your teeth.
Laugh if you want, but if you think this is an imaginary story then you would be wrong. This is exactly what happened to me on my last business trip to Nagoya a couple of months ago, as well as the trips before that one to other regions of the country.
Politeness of shop assistants, airport and hotel staff in Japan is almost proverbial and sometimes borders obsequiousness. First, I was fooled to believe it was a personality trait encoded in the genes of Japanese people. Then I thought it was a deeply rooted sociocultural norm. And only some time later after that I realized that it was a sociocultural norm consciously blown out of proportion.
You see, deep inside that bell boy can’t care less about you. He simply knows that babysitting his customers is exactly what his job is about. And he knows it not only because he was told to do so, but because this is exactly how he himself has experienced service in Japan.
Japan has an unwritten rule-book of behavioral norms for various situations. Politeness is an overarching concept, the title of the book if you wish, that penetrates every single behavior Japanese people ordinary tend to resort to in interactions with people they don’t know or with people of higher status. This behavior is etiquette, a perfected art of making you feel genuinely important, welcome, and valued. If you have a chance, come over for a week or two and see for yourself!
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