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$&*#, !*%%#$, and *&”#$$%’”#$

January 20, 2010 Living in Japan, Working in Japan

Believe it or not, I had a terrible habit back in Canada.  It wasn’t one with drugs, alcohol, women, or even excessive weight gain.  Instead it was something much more insidious. Something that, once you’ve been bitten, it’s very hard to break: swearing.

I loved to swear.  Not so much for its therapeutic results, but for the sheer complexity behind crafting the perfect insult.  Anyone could call us an insensitive a******, a f******* idiot, or the like, but it took brains to craft an insult that at first seems harmless but later an affront to everything good and rational in the world.  And this is where I excelled.

Considering how I have memorized almost every word to every CD released by Eminem, Dr. Dre, and their crews, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Yet, whenever I mention this fact to people, they seem genuinely surprised.  How can a man who refuses to step on the train without his tie being perfectly aligned to his belt buckle enjoy listening to such hate-fueled lyrics?

I’d like to know the answer to this, myself.  That said, since moving to Japan, the practice of lacing verbal communication with explicit subtext has waned to such an extent that doing something as innocuous as dropping an “F”-bomb seems like a strange and foreign concept to me.

But what has caused this sudden change in heart?

Do All Immigrants Swear?

An interesting thing that I had noticed while growing up in Canada is that most newly arrived immigrants always seemed to have an incredible knowledge of swearing.  While the phrases they uttered would often have some convoluted grammar forms or misplaced verbs, the context was always understood.  At first I had thought that they received a crash course in “Everyday English” at the airport before making their way to the workforce, but now I see the real reason immigrants in Canada are so willing to curse a blue streak: it’s part of the culture.

Swearing in Japan is, to be completely honest, just not done.  Sure, we’ll hear the occasional person curse under their breath when they see a foreign man with a Japanese woman, or when the trains are late/full/on-time, or when they’re driving, or when any of the day’s aggravating events transpire … but it’s really not that often.  I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard a Japanese person swear while I was in earshot this year … and we’re 20 days into it.

Thinking back to the few Japanese people I knew back in Vancouver, I can’t think of a single one that didn’t curse about one thing or another on a daily basis.  Earshot or no, they were well aware of the various explicit words and how they should be used in the various noun, verb, adjective, and adverb forms.

Is this the reason I’m not swearing anymore?  Because it’s not part of the culture, the Japanese music I listen to, the TV I watch, the books I read … it’s not part of my daily lexicon, either?  That seems quite odd … even to me.

So let me ask those of you who have migrated to another country, even if it was a temporary thing: did you notice a change in how you used language?  Am I the only one who thinks that swearing in English sounds completely foreign here in Japan?

Tags: Japan, language, swear