Conversation with an old Japanese man

This weekend, I went away on a snowboarding trip with a couple of friends. They are a couple and both of them are about one year older than I am. We're all in our mid-twenties. They wanted to hang out in the lounge of our hotel, I guess to mix with the locals. Usually, I'm not into that kind of thing because of the akward conversations that almost always ensue, but I could either go along with them or be anti-social in the room, so I decided to join them.

As we sat, waiting for dinner time to arrive, an old man came over to talk to us. Apparently he had already introduced himself to my friends before I arrived.

"Oh, is this your daughter?" the old man inquired. (For some reason, Japanese people have a really hard time telling my age. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I was once asked if I was my boyfriend's mother when I took him to the hospital.)

"Um, no," I replied. "I'm their friend."

"Ah, naruhodo." Indeed. "Are you engaged?" he asked me.

"Um, no."

"How would you like a Japanese husband?" Wink. Wink.

I'm all set, thanks. "Um, no, I'm not quite ready to get married yet." I'm pretty sure a 60 year-old shouldn't be interested in someone he thought was the daughter of a 26 year-old.

At this point, the conversation abruptly changes topics, thankfully.

"So you guys are from Australia? Australia's a rich country, isn't it?" he asked my Australian friends.

"Sure, but not as rich as Japan," Peter replied.

"Japan isn't a rich country," he said. We all tried to put together sentences in Japanese to disagree with him, but he continued before we could form any coherent thoughts (it takes us a while). "Japan has a lot of money, but it's not rich. There isn't any heart or soul. Everything's about money these days. Money doesn't make a country rich; heart does."

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Though somewhat trite, what the man had to say is true, and it's a sentiment rarely expressed by Japanese people. I've often heard Japanese people complain about how poor Japan is, but they're not talking about heart and culture; they're talking about money. They lament the state of the Japanese economy and talk about how we must conserve because Japan is poor. I'm all for conservation, but if they think Japan is poor, they clearly haven't seen how other people live. On the other hand, I think a lot of foreigners come to Japan because they think it is a country rich in heart and culture, where the ancient and the modern live side by side, where Geisha furtively hobble past temples, where the Japanese people are deep and hard to decipher and instead they get a concrete waste land where the internet goes down when it's windy, "culture" is as foreign to the Japanese as it is to us, and Japanese people are more or less like everyone else...but perhaps a little more fascinated by blue eyes than most.