On 'Yoroshiku'

"Yoroshiku" is one of those untranslatable words we use all the time in Tea. It literally means something along the lines of "please be kind to me" and connotes something more like "I'll do my best, so please help me or be kind to me."
 It's so overused (or at least widely used) that in my Langenscheidt dictionary it's just listed as "well" or "pleased to meet you."  It's true we say this unfailingly upon meeting someone. Conjugated in different ways, people of all ranks say it to each other, all the time, and that goes triple in Tea. One internet commentator states, it "implies your respect and politeness to the people you meet, your good will and determination" (KEC Journal).

What a great way to start and end conversations, events, group endeavors of any kind. Here's the thing: we say it so much no one means it.

I was struck by this thought tonight while talking with my colleagues. We are all having a great time, this is an amazing opportunity, AND at the same time, there are certain things that are really hard.  I mean, look at us.  We are spending every day doing affective labor designed to make other people feel nice and to erase how much of our own work and suffering went into that.  This is an interesting thing to do with our time, and (perhaps not surprisingly) we can get hung up on the suffering, or hung up on the work, and forget about the feeling nice. Or we worry only about the nice feelings of the guest or the teacher (I mean, it's still an exceedingly hierarchical society) and trample everyone else (EVEN OUR GUESTS WHO ARE FELLOW STUDENTS) if they appear to get in the way of the form of things.

This may happen all the time no matter what you do with your days, but here we have the bizarre luxury of thinking about it all the time, without much distraction from doing anything, you know, material.  I don't need to produce anything at the end of the day except a person who can create more nice feelings.  So I have time to think about where I am creating good feelings and where I am creating bad. Or where my colleagues and sempai are creating such good or bad feelings.

This is not to say that anyone has bad intentions. Only that there are innumerable things happening at every moment and the impossibility of perfection has already been realized and simultaneously the impossibility of giving up an attempt at perfection has also been realized.  So far, same-o same-o. High pressure situation like many jobs people do everyday, and the stakes are low yet we let them become high (ie, in other situations, it is not a massive deal if towels are not neatly folded and stacked in a back room. Not so here.) Add to this also that here we are not individuals. We rise or fall, succeed or fail as a group, so people put pressure on each other, because one person's mistake will be everyone's fault. And yet how to make eight disparate people (and sometimes nine, and sometimes twelve) into a cohesive whole (who are imparting simultaneous correction AND good feelings to each other) is an unperfected science. Sometimes we do okay, sometimes it's a real mess.

Some would say this is a Western problem, but I don't buy it.  Japanese sociologists invented a whole schema for this:  Honne and Tatemae (true inner feeling and exterior). A whole canon of Kabuki plays are about characters torn between following their individual desires (running away with a geisha) and their duty (working and being good rather than getting into run-ins with the rich older guy who also likes the girl). I suspect us foreigners just talk about it more.

But, to go back: we say "yoroshiku" to each other all day long. We ask each other to be kind to us and we simultaneously promise to do our best. And still sometimes although we promised to be kind, we're not. It may of course be that someone else is not doing their best, but I've been around long enough to realize that I have no idea what it's like to be someone else, and I don't know what that person's best looks like from the outside. I have no idea how someone else is feeling, so it's better (and kinder) to abstain from judging whether or not someone deserves the kindness of the yoroshiku they asked for.  I would rather be kind and let the other person deal with whether or not they have earned it. Even though we succeed or fail together, and someone else may cause my embarrassment or my discomfort, that is when we have to hold up our end of the yoroshiku.

The kindness of yoroshiku may also be correction, but HOW the correction is done is the key, and it's probably the hardest way to successfully be kind. We do succeed at it-- flipping down each others' obi tails when they go wonky, telling someone of some mistake they've made so that a teacher or sempai doesn't see it (and perhaps correct with less kindness), but it's awfully easy to correct someone less than kindly, no matter how well one means.

And let's face it, sometimes it's hard to mean it kindly when we're all so tired, we're all so rushed, we're all in a position where we can't do everything just so-- because gravity actually still exists and causes something to fall over or not lie right, because there's no time, because my legs will actually physically, seriously not fold up and then extend again to sit down completely properly and stand up again just to take one thing that's right there. While I was still in New England, I swore to myself I would not pick up and put things down from a standing position (it's extremely frowned on) but would always get down and pick it up and get up again.  What I had not counted on was the amount of physical pain I would be in.  It's beyond the laziness and minor discomfort I occasionally succumbed to before coming here.  It's that I really can't do it sometimes.

So, how do we remember what yoroshiku means when we say it, rather than just remembering when to say it?