I Encourage Japanese Nationalism

I was in the teacher’s room at the elementary school one day, and looked out the window to see the students lowering the flag after school. After they removed the Japanese flag from the pole, they simply threw it in a heap on the dirt ground while they lowered the town flag. Observing this, I asked the other teachers if flag etiquette in Japan was different than in the US.

The site of seeing the flag dropped on the ground was so common to them that it took them a while to understand what I was talking about. Then they debated briefly among themselves what the proper etiquette was, and finally a teacher said, “Actually, it’s probably bad manners even in Japan.”

“I don’t care,” I quickly said. “I was just curious, because this seems to be a point of difference between our two countries.”

But the teacher was already at the window, where he shouted to the students that they shouldn’t let the flag touch the ground. “Joel is very disturbed by the way you are treating the Japanese flag,” he told the students.

“No, really, I don’t care,” I tried to say. “I was just asking.”

The following week the principle apologized to me. “I’m sorry about what happened to the flag last week,” he said. “I heard you were upset.”

“Honestly, I didn’t care,” I said. You have to be careful what you say in Japan because of the tendency Japanese people have to read into your comments.

But it is interesting the difference in flag etiquette. That very evening I was in a bar with some other AlTs, and, without me even bringing the subject up, someone recounted what they had observed at their school that afternoon.

Interesting enough his story takes place in a high school, so the kids are that much older. Apparently a Japanese high school girl is lowering the flag at the end of the day, and then drops it in a pile in the dirt. Walking over to lower the school flag, she steps on the Japanese flag and gets her foot caught in a hole in the flag. She then does a bit of a dance trying to shake the flag off of her foot, and eventually succeeds in freeing her foot by stepping down on the flag with the other foot. Apparently no one else in the teacher’s room watching the scene thought it was the least bit out of the ordinary.

So there does appear to be some difference in etiquette. The teachers at the elementary school told me that since Japan lost the war, they don’t take pride in their country as much as we Americans do.
Shoko also offered a bit of an alternative explanation. As with the National Anthem, the Japanese flag is associated with the right wing and with the Wartime atrocities. There are a lot of people who think it shouldn’t even be at school in the first place, and so flag etiquette is not strictly enforced. “In America you love your flag so much,” Shoko said. “When I was in America, everywhere I went I saw the American flag. We Japanese are ashamed of our flag.”