Chopsticks

Dan's kindergarten is very big on shitsuke. It's a word that when you use it about dogs means something like "obedience training." For children, I'm finding, it means teaching them how to be good little Japanese citizens, with all the skills nicely brought up Japanese girls and boys are supposed to absorb by example from their well-behaved Japanese parents.

Every month Dan brings home a shitsuke sheet with that month's objective, a little drawing to color in each day to show he's practised it, and a space for my comments at the bottom. Once it's filled in, it goes back to the kindergarten for his teacher to add her comments, and is then brought home again to be tied together with its fellows with a cute little ribbon. Of course I always forget about it until the day after it's due, so Dan colors in the whole lot in one fell swoop and takes it in late with my apologetic little note added to the comments. (Like most of the kindergarten mothers, I'm now highly practised at little apologetic notes.)

At the beginning the objectives were pretty easy: "Let's get dressed by ourselves!" "Let's put our shoes on the right way round!" "Let's eat up all our supper every night!" Having been in daycare, Dan has been dressing himself since he was two and eats second helpings every night, so I've been patting myself on the back on staying ahead of the game. Until this month's sheet arrived.

"Let's use chopsticks properly!"

Now, chopstick use is something I've never completely mastered myself. That's despite all the times I get told "Ah, you're so good at eating with chopsticks!" One of the first things you realize about comments like this, not to mention "Ah, you speak Japanese so well!" if you open your mouth to say "Good morning," is that they're covert expressions of surprise that as a foreigner you can manage it at all. In fact, the better you get at speaking Japanese, the less you find you're complimented on it; and when someone does exclaim how well you speak, it inevitably means you've just made a mistake and your listener is covering up their embarrassment. It's rather shaming, then, that people still tell me that I'm good with chopsticks, because what that actually means is they're wincing at the clumsiness with which I'm curling my second and third fingers at the wrong angle, which grates on their sensibilities even if I do actually get the food in my mouth 99% of the time.

I didn't even try teaching Kei how to use chopsticks, hoping that as he went to daycare the teachers would take care of it there. They were fantastic at potty training and buttoning coats, but apparently chopsticks were't part of the deal: the way Kei holds them is far from the approved Japanese grip. (And this being Japan, there is of course only one approved grip; everything else, even if it works, is Wrong with a capital W.) My mother-in-law tries to reteach him every time we visit, but it seems it's one of those things that's really hard to relearn the correct way once you've learned it wrong.

So working on correct chopstick use with Dan is a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, having learned from my experience with Kei, when Dan was two I bought him a pair of training chopsticks, with loops to put your fingers through to hold them in the right positions. They seem to have worked, as my mother-in-law regularly praises him enthusiastically for his expert grip. Unfortunately they don't make them in large enough sizes for adult.

I console myself by reminding myself that not all Japanese people are perfectly proficient with chopsticks either, and by watching this video from the comedy duo The Rahmenz. Perhaps I should just give up and go with their "International Style"...