25 LOST Everyday Manners Japanese Working-Class Fathers Swore By Before 1965

25 LOST Everyday Manners Japanese Working-Class Fathers Swore By Before 1965 🔔 If you found this useful, you could subscribe. I will be here next week. In the spring of 1963, a sixteen-year-old boy stepped off an overnight train from Akita at Ueno Station with one suitcase and no one waiting for him. He was one of hundreds of thousands of middle-school graduates brought to the cities on group employment trains in those years, the boys the newspapers called kin no tamago, golden eggs. He was sent to a small machine shop in Ōta ward. The man at the next lathe was not his boss and owed him nothing. Within a month the boy was eating Sunday dinner at that man's table, and the old men at the public bath were saving him a stool. Nobody gave him money. Somebody gave him a way of behaving. We did not call them manners. We called them the things anyone would do. You turned your shoes to face the door. You greeted first. You let the passengers off before you boarded. You rinsed your stool at the bathhouse because the water belonged to the man after you. These were quiet rules, pressed into boys by fathers who never explained them and corrected them with a look. Then the years after 1965 came. There were the long commutes and the new apartment blocks where nobody knew the family next door. Fathers came home after the children were asleep. Nobody decided to stop teaching these things. There was simply no one at home to teach them, and a boy cannot copy what he never sees. Number nineteen takes two seconds and changes how a person feels about you for the rest of the day. Number eleven looks, to many visitors, like rudeness, and it is the exact opposite. And number two is the rule my father guarded more closely than any other. It held my parents' marriage steady for fifty-one years without a single grand gesture. Which of these twenty-five did your father or your grandmother do without ever explaining it? And which is the hardest for you to keep? For most people it is number one. I read every comment, and the ones you write decide what I speak about next. Articles and sources I used for research: