The nail that sticks out

Ok, it's time for a extremely cliched blog about Japanese culture! Hopefully this experience is unique enough to justify its own post...

The Japanese society is about conformity. This is the stereotype the west has about Japan, and I'd more or less agree with it based on my experience in Japan (although not necessarily to the extent that it is portrayed). The Japanese themselves have an expression for dealing with non-conformers:

"The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."

I think the expression speaks for itself, so I won't explain it further.

I'm sure just about everyone who has met me would say I have a conservative appearance and mild personality. There's really nothing about me that should be causing problems. Unfortunately, I've had to learn the hard way that Japan has different standards.

It's not very fun being the nail, let me tell you. So far I've been hammered down in a wide range of situations, ranging from not finishing my squid and seaweed casserole at lunch to putting too much gel in my hair and violating the school dress code. These situations were uncomfortable, but by no means a big deal; however, there have been a couple of situations that have made me really upset.

The first case was a few months ago when I started growing a goatee. I had neglected to realize at that point that Japanese have a different view on facial hair than me: either you grow a full beard or nothing at all. I learned this during lunch one day when one of the older female teachers suddenly blurted out strange and ugly my beard was. Since I never asked her opinion I just gave her a quick glance and then ignored her comment. Then she started asking everyone else for her opinion, and everyone universally agreed that my goatee wasn't appropriate. She then actually asked the school principal to ask me to shave it off. He did so, saying that my goatee wasn't appropriate for a teacher.

I was surprised that this had become such a big issue, especially since I had been growing the goatee for several days without incident. That night, I decided to shave my goatee off against my own wished, not wanting my facial hair to be the topic of the daily gossip among the teachers.

An eerily similar situation happened during lunch at school yesterday, this time the topic of conversation was my new haircut.

This is the exact same haircut I always get. It's short. It's a little messy on top. It is in no way crazy, inappropriate or remarkable. For reasons unknown to me, the same old woman teacher pulled the exact same stunt to try and get my hair style changed.

All the kids had been making comments about how cool my haircut was all day (my hair had gotten pretty long and I think they were more interested in the change than the style itself). All the kids were talking about it while getting their lunch. Since I help the older female teacher dispense the lunch to the students, she heard all the students talking about my hair. I can only guess that this drew her ire for some reason because sure enough, she brought up my haircut at lunch.

She started it off the exact same way: by randomly blurting out how strange my haircut was at lunch. I then proceeded to ignore her. She then asked for all the other teachers opinions, and then...

The teachers actually disagreed with her! They universally stated that they thought my haircut was nice and then turned the tables on her, interrogating her as to why she thought differently. She meekly answered that "it was strange" and then sat there quietly for the rest of lunch.

I guess the nail the sticks up can go both ways...