Take My Samurai . . . Please
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 1, 2000; Page A17

OSAKA, Japan ––Try as it might, Osaka is not a very funny place. It's in Japan, after all. For the Japanese, the scowling visage of the samurai is a cultural icon; the implacable expression the armor of everyday life.

So it would seem an odd place to hold the International Humor Conference. But here, last week, was Masumi Muramatsu, a respected interpreter, trying to warm the crowd with jokes about his countrymen.

"For Japanese," he said puckishly, "there's not much difference between humorous and humorless." Drum beat, pause. Did you get it? he asks. Japanese have trouble differentiating English "r's" from "l's." His moon face dissolves into laughter.

Muramatsu, 70, cannot resist this gag. He has a bag full of such lines, delivered with Bob Hope zeal, collected in his long career as an interpreter for Japan's prime ministers and top officials, where translating a foreign visitor's joke into Japanese was the ultimate challenge.

The Japanese do have a sense of humor, he insists. But it is well hidden behind a dour reputation and straight-faced facade. Even Muramatsu can't help but mock his own theory with the title of his talk: "Japanese Humor: An Oxymoron?"

The conference was not a collection of folks in fright wigs with handshake buzzers who traded punch lines. These were mostly academics who came to listen to scholarly presentations such as "Cognitive and Epistemological Paradoxes of Humor."

Don Nilsen, a linguistics professor at Arizona State University and executive secretary of the International Society for Humor Studies who has organized the humor conference every year since 1982, has the good humor to be a bit sheepish about it. "We have lots of good academics who can tell you the structure of humor, but can't tell a good story," he acknowledged.

But they try. Alfons Deeken is a professor at Tokyo's respected Sophia University, "named after Sophia Loren," he deadpanned. Deeken is a 41-year resident of Japan who until recently wrote a column on humor in Japan's economic newspaper because, after a decade of recession, "they need some laughter there."

So he teaches humor? Nope. Thanatology--the study of death. Deeken says he uses humor "to keep my students awake." The mind boggles with too-easy lines: The death of humor? The life of the party? Deeken welcomes it all. In fact, he thinks there is a direct connection between humor and death in Japan, where there are more than 30,000 suicides a year.

"If you are dead serious," he said, unabashed at the pun, "and you have no sense of humor, when you have a crisis, you lose perspective. You just jump in front of the train."

Some Japanese humor is about death. A famous rakugo, or comic tale, relates two lovers contemplating suicide. Use a razor, the young man asks? No, says the woman, "the cuts take too long to heal."

Japanese do smile. Persistently. But a smile does not mean they get the joke. "It has different meanings," said Deeken. "If you are in a difficult situation, it can just be an agreeable escape."

And, of course, the Japanese laugh. But not often in public. Many Japanese women still cover their mouths with a hand if they laugh, to be polite.

"Especially older Japanese were taught that to laugh was not to be serious. It is too frivolous," Deeken said. "And to be frivolous is to lose face. Everyone is told as a child you are not to lose face."

There is long tradition behind this. The samurai soldiers, as much idols to Japanese as cowboys are to Americans, were expected to scowl to maintain their authority. "It was said that it was enough for a samurai to smile once in three years. And then only with one cheek," said Muramatsu.

But this serious image is misleading, some at the conference contended. There is Japanese humor; it's just different.

"Americans tell jokes to break the ice with strangers, or just for the fun of laughing. Japanese don't do that," said Kieme Oshima, an instructor at Meikai University in Tokyo. "We are polite and serious on the first meeting. We tell a joke only after we have a good relationship with someone. A joke is told between friends to assure that we can laugh at the same things and have solidarity."

In formal relationships--which include work, school and just about anything in daylight hours--laughter is risky behavior, said Hiroshi Inoue, head of the Japanese Laughter Society, which takes an academic look at the subject.

"People living in a vertical society are always aware of their place in society. The greatest fear is being laughed at, so they always suppress laughter," he said.

How, then, to explain Japanese TV? Turn on any late-night show, and one can see entertainment with the silliest of antics. Or go into a Japanese bar late in the evening, and one can find tables filled with Japanese businessmen getting falling-down drunk and laughing uproariously in the process.

"It's such a structured society, you have to do that," theorized Nilsen. "The humor is a little embarrassing, a little silly, a little exaggerated. It's after hours when you've had a couple of sakes, and you are letting your hair down with your boss."

Muramatsu recalls rejoicing 15 years ago when the Foreign Ministry asked him to prepare a joke for a minister's speech to some foreign guests.

"I thought it was the dawn of a new era," he said. He dreamed up four respectable gags, but was crushed when they weren't used.

"We sent them around to all the other ministries," the Foreign Ministry later explained, "and not everyone approved."

It is hard to be funny by committee, Muramatsu said. "What Japanese government needs," he concluded, "is for every prime minister to have a gag writer."

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

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