An Order of Pizza and Japanese Culture
Today is Inventory Day here at J-List, when we have to count the many thousands of excellent products we stock. It's quite a job, with our entire 15-person staff counting all the items throughout the day, so we make it fun by ordering lunch from Pizza Hut, which 99% of Japanese think is Pizza Hat. Anyway, we mis-calculated the number of people who'd be eating and didn't order enough quite pizzas, making me worried that there might not be enough food for everyone. However, I'd forgotten about the Japanese tradition of enryo (en-RYO), a word which means constraint, modesty or to refrain from doing something, and when we opened the pizza boxes and told everyone to dig in, it took five minutes or more for the Japanese staff to start eating. The girls would take one piece and say they were full, and we had to literally put the pizza slices on plates and press them into people's hands to get them to eat. In the end, there was just enough pizza to go around. It's difficult as an American to completely understand a concept like enryo, but part of the reason it was so hard to get everyone to start eating was, no one wanted to be perceived as being first to grab for food, so they stood around saying, "No, after you" to each other. This was probably due to having so many people in the same place at once. If there had been only 2-3 people and a single pizza, they'd have been less self-conscious.
We did not get the Macross Frontier pizza special they're running, because you have to order medium pizzas for that, and we needed larges this time. Are they implying that otaku don't have friends, or what?




8 Comments:
If I were in your office on pizza day, I would have had a very hard time restraining myself. I can put away an entire large pizza all by myself. I'm sure I would have been viewed as extremely rude for pigging out so.
9:09 PM
Heh, yes, that'd be weird here. I have a tendency to enter too many songs into the karaoke machine, too, and come across as rude that way.
10:44 PM
Hi Peter,
What the heck is on a Macross Frontier Pizza????
4:24 AM
The Macross pizza has Min-mayo on it, and corn.
Code Geass had many bits of product placement for Pizza Hut.
5:37 AM
It's some kind of limited edition thing they're running, a Macross box and entry into a contest for various stuff. The new Macross series is really quit good -- I'm watching it right now. A proper sequel to the Macross 1984 movie, without all the horrible comic themes of Macross 7. Very good desu!
5:52 PM
So Peter, With enryo, is there a way to sort of "break the chain" without appearing to be rude?
I mean, how many times do you have to cycle through the whole room telling each other "after you" before you get to eat? One time? two? Three? ten? At some point I would imagine that it begins to look a bit like the old Chip and Dale cartoons.
Perhaps what you needed was a "designated eater". Someone who can artificially be granted the role of "first person to eat" without having to feel like he/she was being rude. Then enryo is satisfied and everybody gets to eat before the food gets cold.
5:53 AM
This office is, unfortunately, held by the emperor.
6:50 AM
What Japanese might do is, someone (usually male) would just jump forward and start the action (eating, whatever), saying "Osaki ni shitsurei shimasu" (I apologize for going before you, which is also said in tea ceremony).
9:20 AM
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