Americans Eat Fast Food

I often don't have a choice in the material I use in class, and many times there will be a section about guns, drugs, or racism in the US and I have to give a spur of the moment summary of the issue to a room full of Japanese people who just spent the last 45 minutes trying to master their new English phrase "What time is check out?"

Over the years I've noticed that a lot of the half-assed "old school" textbooks that are the favorites of high schools and adult continuing education here find the need to perpetuate and exaggerate stereotypes under the guise of culture. Imagine if your childhood history book summed up chinese culture with "chinese like to gamble, and they used to painfully bind the feet of their young.", "Germans enjoy math and taake great pride in their work.", "Italians think romance is the most important thing in life" and "Some african tribes kill albino babies..." and you get the idea of what passes for cultural factfinding by the ministry of education. These might be side notes in books that have chapters like "We must appreciate other cultures" and "The dangers of Stereotyping."

Honestly, I can't tell you how many times I've opened a book that has the approval of the Ministry of Education, only to find sections about how other countries are dangerous or Spanish people don't like work. It's one thing if your teacher makes opinionated remarks based on his long visit to Spain but it's another thing if the ministry of Education makes books with similar content I think.

Anyway, one of the topics that comes up a lot is: Americans eat fast food (and no one else does.)

Okay, it's true, Americans do eat fast food and a lot of the big multinational purveyors of junk food are US companies but (do I need to explain this?) it's wrong for so many reasons.

1. It ignores other large purveyors of junk, like local Japanese fast food chains, chocolate companies, big international ones Nestle, Unilever.

2. It overlooks the bad, homegrown eating habits in Japan, such as instant noodles and take out boxed lunches. Not to mention long time eating habits, that arent classified as fast food but in my book are: Izakaya pubs - I love them but everythng on the menu is wrapped is grease and salt. Or ramen shops? The list goes on... Why is fried chicken in Japan a fast food only if it's served by KFC?

3. It sums up the USA, a nation of over 350 million people into a few phrases, basically "Americans eat crap hamburgers all the time and we don't and we must resist them." Have a lot of Japanese vegetarian friends? I don't, but I know a lot of Americans who are.

4. And probably most important of all for me: even if the sterotype were 100% true, **what the heck is it doing in an English conversation book?**

My German textbooks had sections about famous prime ministers, how German Xmas is different than American Xmas, the story of the Berlin Wall. Japanese texts tend to have sections about Cherry Blossom viewing and haiku.

So what would you think about a publisher that instead made the little cultural highlights in his German texts be "The efficiency with which Germans gassed people" and "A nation of alcoholics?"

Or if publishers in the US or UK had chapters in their texts like
"Koreans: second class citizens" and
"Japanese toilet culture -- anal obsessions?",
"Anorexic mothers, fathers who go to brothels, bullying, teen suicide -- it's tough being a Japanese kid!" or
"Japan's passion for erotic fetish comic books" etc.

You'd say "Well, I guess those things exist in Japan, but what the heck is the publishers problem? Do they have an agenda or are they just stupid? Do they show a true portait of what life in that country is really like? Do they even try? And do 15 year old kids studying Japanese language getting their first exposure to the country really need to be persuaded of this?"

So anyway, below is a part of a text I scanned. The topic was "slow food" and how Italians, like the Japanese, appreciate it. Then in the corner was "Fun Facts" about how american's don't know a darn thing about eating right. -- Even if you can't read Japanese, you can easily note the steady procession of the following words: hamburger, pizza, cereal, frozen food, french fries... note the pudgy American kid at the bottom digging in to a big hamburger too.




This was not taken from a conversation in a bar. It is the "Fun Facts" section of a textbook used in a public continuing education class.