VISITORS TO JAPAN are impressed not only by the social order and the cultural beauty of the country, they also remark most favorably upon the quality of the service. Waiters perform with a willing alacrity unknown in other lands, bar hostesses are solicitous to a degree foreign to the rest of the world, elevator girls bow to everyone, and the geisha, as is well known, have transformed ingratiating service into a high art—the art of pleasmg.
In the West one hears of the customer being always right, though he somehow never seems to be. In Japan, on the other hand, he definitely is. Almost any request is promptly gratified and a waiter has never been known to say: “Sorry, this isn’t my table.” Even the unruly customer is right. The bartender will accept an insult with a smile, the waitress accommodates public rudeness with affability, and no one, from the taxi driver up—or down—expects a tip.
It seems, to the first-time visitor at any rate, as though the art of pleasing is for its own sake—as though one portion of the population has elected to devote itself to creating a sense of powerful well-being in the other portion, and all for no ostensible extra reward. In Japan one is treated not only to superb service but also service with a perfectly sincere smile.
This fact has much intrigued foreign visitors and has long taken its place among the mysteries of inscrutable Japan. Actually, however, there is nothing mysterious about it. The life of service has a venerable history in Japan and the attitudes proper to it have long been codified. An understanding of how it works, and what it means, demands only that one sees the phenomenon from the Japanese point of view.
Japan, a country given to categorizing, traditionally divides its working force into two parts. The numerically larger half comprises the professions, white and blue collar alike, and all the crafts and industries attendant upon them. This half is sometimes—and in contradistinction to the other half—characterized as katai shobai or, as we might paraphrase it, “steady work.” The second half is given over to the service professions—and these include those occupations which, for various reasons, katai shobai finds unsteady: actors, waiters, musicians, most of the traditionally female professions from coffee-shop girl to geisha, and many, many, more. This kind of work is called mizushobai, literally, “water work,” the implication being that these occupations are fluid, formless, unstable as water itself The terms have further nuances as well: katai shobai is considered respectable work; thus, by definition, mizushobai is not considered proper or fitting; it can even be disreputable. The man who drops out of the company in order to open a snack bar has committed an act close to social indecency.
Given this attitude one might wonder what attractions the mizushobai life could have for its members. Actually, the attractions are considerable. Decent, hardworking Japan is so very katai (this time in the word’s other sense of being hard and unyielding) that the rat-race, rabbit-hutch life, no matter how respectable, begins to lose its value.
The very fluidity of the mizushobai life is thus one of its major appeals. One works as one likes, one takes time off as one can afford to, one no longer has a big-brother company looking over the shoulder demanding a proper attitude—proper marriage, proper children, proper schools to send them to. In a sense mizushobai is a vast ghetto, and in this context ghetto life is attractive.
Certainly, also, the world of the mizushobai offers occupations to millions who, underprivileged in various ways, cannot find proper and fitting work. In particular, women who want to work have no place else to go; professional women are a token minority in Japan and even then they are expected to make the daily tea for the office, in itself a mizushobai-like undertaking. How much more attractive the life of a bar hostess is, where one can make in only one evening as much as during a month in the office and all without—contrary to public opinion—having to please to the full extent of the customer’s wishes.
The unmindful assumptions of the respectable public, and even the occasional insult, is a small price indeed for mizushobai folk to pay for the freedom and—once one is in the upper reaches of this work—the monetary rewards of those professions. (The lower reaches are not too rewarding.) If one owns a lucrative bar or snack shop, if one becomes a famous screen or TV entertainer, the rewards are great and the public’s attitude not too difficult to bear.
In addition, the mizushobai professionals, like the medieval guild members they resemble, have their own ways of being decent and taking a proper pride in their work. Tips are never demanded and are accepted only in return for extraordinary services—the porter who has had to go all the way to the station for one’s trunk, or the geisha who, having received four fur coats and two convertibles, decides to give in.
Mizushobai thus offers the hardworking Japanese an alternative to the big-business style of life that is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. In this it is no different from what it has always been. The “willow world” of the Tokugawa period with its actors and wrestlers and courtesans and palanquin bearers was much the same and performed the same services.
Mizushobai remains a way out of the samurai/businessman life and, at the same time, offers the means to a well-paying profession. The art of pleasing, with its own standards, its own integrity, lives on.
—1981