Being a westerner in Japan there are times when cultural differences play a big part in the decisions I make and how I act. I call Japan my home now so I want to respect the Japanese way of doing things but it can be difficult at times when it goes against everything I believe or was taught as a child growing up in the UK. I’d like to use this blog to tell the story of a time when I recently found myself in such a situation. Saving face is a strong belief in Japan, I’ve heard about it many times but it wasn’t until recently that I experienced it firsthand.
I play the guitar and have played in quite a few bands back in the UK and a couple of years ago I played in a band in Japan. I recently went to watch my friend’s band and got chatting to him after the show about some of the bands I’d previously played in. I told him that I was thinking of starting a new rock back and he mentioned that a friend of his was a drummer who had no band at the time. I said I’d be interesting in meeting him and asked my friend to pass on my phone number to him. A week or so later I received a phone call from the drummer (Let’s call him Yoshi), we arranged to book a couple of hours at a local rehearsal room.
I was nervous when I arrived at the rehearsal room but as soon as the small talk was out of the way I found Yoshi to be a down-to-earth, friendly guy. We chatted about our common musical interests and talked about what style of band we wanted to form. Yoshi suggested we have a jam and “listen to each other’s stuff”. The jam went well; we ended up spontaneously playing a couple of covers, mixed in with the random riffs and beats of the jam session. I went home feeling quite good about my new band and immediately set to work writing a couple of new songs in the styles we’d talked about.
When we met the next week, for our second rehearsal, I told Yoshi about the songs I’d written and played the chorus of each one so that he could hear them. He seemed pleased so I suggested we start working the drums into them. We’d been working on the intro to one of the songs for about 10 minutes, we’d probably only tried it 4 or 5 times when he suddenly suggested we have a jam. I thought maybe he wanted to loosen up, go through some warm-up routine or take a break so I agreed and started to strum out a simple rhythm to match the beat he began to play.
When he came back into the room after his cigarette break I suggested we work on the intro to my other song (I was feeling a bit self-conscious that he hadn’t liked my first song), he agreed and we got to work. However, on only the third attempt he stopped and suggested we play another jam, I asked why and he told me that his old band wrote songs by jamming until something sounded good then they worked it into a song. It was at that point that I realized he wanted to be involved in the writing process and didn’t want to learn pre-written songs. So, we spent the rest of the session jamming and agreed to meet again for another jam.
I went home that night not feeling so sure about making a band with Yoshi. It had nothing to do with the guy personally. It was just that our styles of making songs couldn’t have been any different. It takes me a long time to write a song, I like to sit down with my guitar or a piano and mold, shape and explore an idea until I’m happy enough with it to take it to the band. The band then learns the song together so that we have a rough draft. It isn’t until this point that people start to add their ideas and input and the band works on the song as a group. The final song often sounds quite different from the first draft I take to the band but the basics of the song are the same. It has been this way in every band I’ve ever played in, whether I was the songwriter or not. I don’t claim to be an expert on songwriting and Yoshi’s preferred style of jamming until they chance across something that sounds like a song might be a valid technique and might have worked well for his previous band, but I just couldn’t see myself being able to adapt. For starters, I’m not that technically gifted on the guitar so jamming is quite difficult for me. Secondly, as I mentioned before, it takes me a while and a lot of chopping and changing to write a song. Therefore, I felt that it would have been a big waste of time to pay for a rehearsal space to simply stand around waiting for an idea to pop into my head.
I allayed these concerns to my wife when I got home from the second rehearsal and asked her to check a message I’d written in Japanese, thanking Yoshi for jamming with me, saying how much I’d enjoyed it but unfortunately I didn’t think I could form a band with him due to my style and his style being very different. I didn’t think it was a rude email and I certainly didn’t think it painted him in a bad light. In fact, I’d written it in such a way that it sounded like it was my fault for not being able to write songs in his style. My wife, however, was adamant that I shouldn’t send the message to him as it would cause him to lose face. He would see it as a rejection of his drumming ability, or even worse as a reflection of his character. I didn’t want to offend him so I asked how I was supposed to let him know that I didn’t want to make a band with him. “Don’t say anything. Then when he wants to arrange the next rehearsal tell him you’re busy” was my wife’s advice. Apparently, this way he would understand that I didn’t want to work with him without actually having to hear it from me, thus saving face.
I understand the reasoning behind it but I still felt incredibly rude when he mailed me a week later and I replied by saying I'd love to meet up for another jam but unfortunatly I have to work late every night this week. The point of this blog today is not about right and wrong. It isn’t about different songwriting styles and which one is better, they just happened to be the basis of the story. It isn’t about western culture being better than Japanese culture or vice-versa. It is simply an insight into one of the many cultural differences that western people and Japanese people experience when they come into contact with one another. The whole incident got me thinking about when students have suddenly stopped coming to lessons at my conversation school. At the time I thought they were incredibly rude for not telling us they weren’t coming any more, I mean how hard is it to call or email us? However, now I’m wondering if they were looking out for me and the other teachers, maybe they were trying to save our faces by us not having to hear that they no longer wanted to take our classes. Maybe….. just maybe…..
