Well, an episode may be due on Japanese humor. The Japanese do have a unique, if not rather extraordinary, sense of humor. Westerners say we Japanese laugh too much too often. Well, we do tend to laugh, at least giggle, at anything out of place, embarrassing – anything that does not fit to the occasion. Some of the best laughs you can get are when you say “I have no money”, or “I broke my leg skiing last week”. Embarrassment is the best sauce for laughter here. Life is full of embarrassments; so, when the Japanese can think of nothing sensible to say, we giggle. No intricate meaning to it, we think it helps to cover up our lack of knowledge or inability to say something that fits to the occasion.
That again must seem to outsiders to be another manifestation of that deep-set Japanese mentality of face-saving and wave-making I have discussed. True, the Japanese do subconsciously giggle, smile or laugh to tide over the moments of embarrassment.
That said, there’s yet another aspect of Japanese mentality I am anxious to call your attention to, a traditional art of humorous storytelling “Rakugo” and how it helps the Japanese brush up their art of giggling, smiling and laughing.
Heard of a “Laughter House” or “Yose”? No, you couldn’t have as it’s too deep a knowledge for a novice. It’s a place we go just for the whole purpose of laughing out loud. There we pay expert “humorists” for their time and effort to make us giggle, smile and laugh. What say you?
There, those expert humorists will come up on the stage in turn and talk, talk, talk to mentally tickle you into healthy laughter. The audience will train the art of giggling, smiling and laughing through the ways they tell “stories”. But then, those humorists are no humorists in the families of Red Skelton or Bob Hope, not at all. Humorists they might appear, they are in fact seasoned expert storytellers, “Hanashika”. Stories they tell are no ad hoc stories but well-refined, time-tested, classics.
Now, can you imagine Merchant of Venice, for instance, done by a single storyteller “performing” Shylock, Portia, Bassanio, Antonio, and all disguises from Balthazar to Stephano? Can you imagine half a dozen of such top-notch storytellers telling Merchant of Venice each in half a dozen different manners of speech? And can you image we Japanese gladly pay admission to enjoy listening to the same good old story as tastefully told in deliciously different manners of speech? No, absurd; no westerner would ever dare do that.
But, we Japanese do just that, not for the heck of it but for good reasons. My next episode will further explore this mystery.
Bye
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