Shoes Off and Shoes On

06/02/2002 English German

Edition # 40
San Francisco, 06-02-2002

Japan, Finally Aircraft as Arcade Tokyo Gastronomy Tokyo Fish Market Masks Beverages Beer Paper tissues Shuwattchi! Fashion Safety Technophilia Shinkansen Japanese speaking English Busy Bodies Rambunctious Youth Surveyed by Students Geishas Original and American knockoff Consumer Frenzy Japanese toilets Bicycles in Tokyo Train station in Tokyo Uniforms Taxis To Bow Shoes Off and Shoes On Hiroshima Ryokan Japanese Bath In the temple for AOL Koya-San Cemetery in Koya-San

Shoes Off and Shoes On

Figure [1]: Top priority: Take off your shoes!

Angelika Just as I always get a chill down my spine when an American clips their nails on the subway, a Japanese person shudders when a tourist doesn't take off their shoes at the right moment. In Japanese homes, Japanese restaurants, accommodations in Japanese style (traditional inns called Ryokan or Minshuku), and temples, it's customary to take off your shoes. If any type of shoes (even slippers) touch the tatami mats (tatami mats are straw mats that cover the floor like a carpet), a witnessing Japanese person turns pale with shock. Now, this might initially sound uncomplicated: take off your shoes -— no problem. But I tell you, it's a science in itself, because before you reach the room with the tatami mats, you switch to provided slippers at the entrance of the establishment.

Figure [2]: Provided slippers

An elevated step signals the impending switch to slippers. And so begins the balancing act, as street shoes must not touch the elevated step and socked feet must not touch the floor designated for street shoes. I sometimes found myself quite clumsy in this process, but noticed the same confusion among some Japanese teenagers. Shelves are available for storing the shoes. With slippers that were often much too small for us, we shuffled through the corridors, constantly reminding each other to slip out of the slippers when stepping onto a tatami mat. However, we often forgot to position the slippers so that we could step back into them without having to turn them around (as the Japanese do). A particularly amusing variant is the bathroom slippers. Yes, you guessed it: upon entering a bathroom, you switch to the so-called "bathroom slippers," hideous plastic items. We were just waiting for a faux pas to happen where we would accidentally wander outside the bathroom in the bathroom slippers. Miraculously, we never forgot to switch back to the other slippers. We remembered the story our Japanese teacher in San Francisco told us. She once trotted back into the temple wearing her bathroom slippers, prompting several monks to rush over and yank the "impure" slippers off her feet.

In our Japanese course, we also learned that Japanese people do not squat on the floor unless it is covered with a tatami mat. However, there seems to be a clear generational gap here. We often encountered schoolchildren and teenagers sitting on the floor. On the other hand, we observed middle-aged and older Japanese people who did not even place their bags on the floor and put a newspaper under their shoeless feet on the train to prevent their socks from directly touching the floor.