We were sitting in a booth in the Burger King rest stop on the turnpike when I was struck with oour situation’s coincidental similarity to japanese rice walls.
The couple in the booth behind us had three children, boys from what I could tell. The father was doing his best to keep the children at an even keel - something at which I have personally been doing a poor job during this excursion.
I forget exactly what he was doing, partially because I was staring off toward the restrooms, but he noticed my gaze and returned a look of “why are you staring at me?”
I wasn’t really deterred by this, because I really wasn’t paying attention to him, but I was left to wonder what cultural phenomenon makes it inappropriate for me to observe others in situations like this.
We are truly party to enforcing this behavior. When at a restaurant, we tell our children to face forward and to stop bothering the other people who are eating their dinners. It’s reminiscent of Japanese rice paper walls.
In Japan, or so I’ve gathered from watching subtitled movies, the inside walls of some homes are made of thin rice paper. Since it is nearly impossible to carry a conversation in one room without everyone in the house hearing it, a social rule has taken the place of thick walls - If you are not in the room, you don’t “hear” the conversation.
And like Japanese people might not hear a conversation on the other side of a sheet of paper, we don’t hear the conversations of the people around our table when we’re out to eat. We erect an imaginary wall between our two tables, one that we’re not supposed to look or listen through.
This is obviously not a global social rule. All of my guidebooks for France spoke of how the French will be curious enough to stare at anyone, and while this is socially acceptable in their country, it is often a contributing reason why foreigners think the French are rude.
I’m not really advocating changing these social rules, I just wonder what things would be like without them. What other behavior do we enjoy because we can assume that nobody is “watching”? To cite an extreme example, can we get away with picking our noses at a restaurant while sitting behind these socially constructed partitions? How thick are these walls?
