CULTURAL CONUNDRUMS / Teasing out cross-cultural teasing

Kate Elwood / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

A short while ago, my daughters and I had dinner with a good friend and her elderly father, who I'll call Satomi and Mr. Sasaki. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, and at the end of it, my daughters and I agreed that it had been a long time since we had laughed that much. Thinking back to the conversation during the evening meal, I realized the basis of the mirth was the banter between father and daughter. And yet, at the same time, I realized that if their repartee were translated into English as a written document, many Americans unfamiliar with Japan would probably simply come to the conclusion that Satomi and her father felt a lot of antagonism toward each other that they had inappropriately vented in front of guests. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was good-natured and very amusing--but somehow different from typical teasing among English speakers.

Playful mockery may differ across cultures in function, form, and content. Educational researchers Eiko Ujitani and Simone Volet conducted a study of Australian and Japanese university students who all lived in the same international dormitory at a Japanese university. The students were asked to discuss "critical incidents" of an intercultural nature. Among the Japanese participants, more than a third of the reported incidents were related to joking and teasing. In one incident, remarked on in the interviews by many students of both nationalities, an Australian male student said to a Japanese female student who had taken a small portion of food at a party, "You are eating like a pig!" The student blushed and stopped eating. The interviews revealed that all of the Australians recognized that the man had been teasing, but none of the Japanese students had a clue what the intention of the student might have been in saying something so obviously inaccurate, even when reflecting upon the incident later.

Ujitani and Volet's study makes clear the difficulty in recognizing teasing conventions of another culture. A study by intercultural gerontology researchers Berit Ingersoll-Day, Ruth Campbell, and Jill Mattson similarly points to differences in the types of teasing between older Japanese couples and American couples. Japanese and American couples were asked to jointly tell a story about their marriage. The ensuing narrative interactions were then assigned communication codes such as prompting, questioning, echoing, contradicting, and teasing. The researchers found that couples of both nationalities engaged in teasing quite often, but the manner of teasing was different. According to their findings, the Japanese couples' teasing was frequently competitive, with, for example, acerbic comments about who was responsible for a child's positive traits. On the other hand, the American couples appeared to use teasing to "detoxify" difficult issues such as illness. The researchers further note that the Japanese couples were especially animated in their interaction during the teasing sequences of their narratives.

Applied linguist Naomi Geyer observes that teasing in groups in Japan often occurs when a social norm has been violated. Geyer made a discourse analysis of two teachers' meetings at different high schools in which one of the teachers at each meeting was teased. In each case, the light ridicule took the form of assigning the taunted teacher an unrealistic task. In the first instance, the head teacher announced the need for teachers to hold supplementary lessons during the summer for about three days. The other teachers made minimal responses of consent, but a young male teacher explicitly agreed with the announcement. The overt support was judged improper because it seemed as if he had the authority of contributing the last word on the matter, though no one stated this directly. Instead, the head teacher suggested the young teacher should hold supplementary lessons every day during the summer, a joking proposal that was taken up enthusiastically by the others at the meeting.

At the other meeting, a summer cookout was being planned. Another young male teacher asked who would make the teachers' meal. His question also was deemed inappropriate, and consequently he was first answered by the main teacher as if he were a child. This was followed by another teacher's suggestion that the teasing target would be the main cook. As in the other teasing segment, discussion of this facetious arrangement was swiftly continued by other meeting participants as a fait accompli.

While in Geyer's data the teasing is triggered by unwitting violations of conventions among teachers, communications researchers Lisa Mizushima and Paul Stapleton observe that teasing in Japan is often a ritualized interaction that may be deliberately initiated by the person who is subsequently teased. In one example, a man who has offered to give a friend's sister a lift suddenly asks in a comically low voice whether the sister has a boyfriend, an invitation for the others present to humorously criticize his bogus ulterior motive. In another instance, a speaker brazenly flouts convention by agreeing with praise, similarly triggering mocking disparagement. In this kind of playful condemnation, all of the participants, including the norm violator, are aware of the correct thing to do, which is reconfirmed through a humorous infringement.

At the dinner with Satomi and her father, at one point Mr. Sasaki, in discussing takeout meals, referred vaguely to French fries as jagaimo no kara-age ("potatoes deep-fried like chicken"). His rather fuddy-duddy way of talking about such a ubiquitous fast food provoked perhaps the greatest laughter of the evening--and further teasing from Satomi about her father's lack of knowledge of contemporary culture. Afterward, I couldn't help wondering if Mr. Sasaki had deliberately played up his outmoded persona with the express intention of heightening the guffaws and eliciting more playful ridicule. Calculated or inadvertent, it was all in good fun.

In a poem titled Conversation, the 18th-century British poet William Cowper writes, "Thus always teasing others, always teased/His only pleasure is to be displeased." The tone of the description in the poem is disapproving, and yet perhaps the words in another cultural context might be a positive, albeit slightly over-the-top, depiction of a very congenial and lively conversation indeed.

Elwood is a professor of English at Waseda University's School of Commerce. She is the author of "Getting Along with the Japanese" (Ask, 2001).