Sucking, grinding, and slurping Japanese

[matsuki]

No..not those ones, I'm talking about their disgusting table manners...



Lately, my boss has taken to drinking canned soda and beer while working next to me. Like a giant fat baby with a bottle, he literally sucks at the can...which is really annoying if you're trying to concentrate on something. I've never met anyone who violently sucks from cans like him but he knocks them out faster then I ever drink...followed by a burp/exhale/ahhhhh and his wife chiming in with 「kora! gyogi warui!!」I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before but he aggressively chews gum like a goat, eats with his mouth open...and the lip smacking is so loud, it can be heard from across the room. Lastly, he always has shit stuck in his teeth...go for a toothpick? Nah, just keep sucking and slurping til you dislodge the stuff. Disgusting old Japanese man, yeah, plenty of them here so what's the big deal?

Maybe I had just tuned the sounds out before (I really find it disgusting) but after eating in the car/tent with a few lemurs recently (basically, in silent places) I noticed many of them slurp at a whole lot more than noodles. (I'm talking about food!!) Slurping ramen and other noodles fine....but several of them slurp pretty much everything they eat/drink that's slurpable. WTF? I thought it was just one lemur at first but then I notice many others also tend to chomp down on their own teeth when they chew (not talking about snaggle teeth) as in you literally hear tooth on tooth hammering as they chew. I tried gently bringing up the touchy subject with one and it was like I insulted her very being. (she stopped eating, got up, and left haha) Am I crazy or is this as common as it seems?

[Coligny]

1- resign from your job at the farm.
2- i usually dine with my felines, they effectively have much better table manners...

[Salty]

Get some earplugs.... face away....

[Russell]

I always get criticized by the Missus for my enthusiastic manner of eating my dessert, with clanking sound of cutlery and all.

I usually respond that I'll improve my manners as soon as she is ready to stop slurping her noodles. Always makes her angry, because "that's the way it is being done in Nippon!"

[Grumpy Gramps]

Depends on how badly you need your job, I guess. If it was me, I would probably tell him to shut up if he wants to live, but then I don't need your job very badly

Luckily, wifey lived many years in Murkinstan and Europe, so she has learned the correct table manners. And if she really wants to slurp, then she can always eat at a different time/place from me; if she wants to live that is

[Takechanpoo]

when i use chopsticks, i slurp not only noodle but also everything similar to noodle, pasta and so on)
when i use fork and knife, i never slurp anything.

[Coligny]

when i use chopsticks, i slurp not only noodle but also everything similar to noodle, pasta and so on)
when i use fork and knife, i never slurp anything.

Daguerreotype for those not believing Takechimp:

image.jpg

[matsuki]

when i use chopsticks, i slurp not only noodle but also everything similar to noodle, pasta and so on)

Why?

[kurogane]

Luckily, wifey lived many years in Murkinstan and Europe, so she has learned the correct table manners. And if she really wants to slurp, then she can always eat at a different time/place from me; if she wants to live that is

Never understood the issue people have with Japanese eating Japanese food the way Japanese food is meant to be eaten, but it doesn't fly very far if we're eating Foreign Food. What choko is talking about would drive me bonkers. That's just bad manners. Also, let's remember, chopsticks are irrelevant; it's what you're eating that counts: noodles slurpy slurp okay. No sucky sucky rice or entree, no splurpy slurp drinks of any kind. I have never been allowed to finish off a milkshake or cold drink with ice the proper way, never mind blowing the paper cover off the straw like we were taught to. Those are Japanese manners anyways.

If reason doesn't work, buy earplugs. Or feign being hard of hearing, telling him your ears are still ringing from his most recent feast.

[matsuki]

Kuro seems to get what I'm saying, I understand with hot ramen noodles it's supposed to cool them down or whatever. If we're eating ramen, everyone is slurping, no big deal. I'm talking about stuff like soup where we'd normally blow on each spoonful or sip from a mug or cup...many of the lemurs here noisily slurp it up. Hot curry rice? Blow on it? Nah, many of them slurp it. I've also heard the whole argument about it frothing up and adding to the taste but if the food was soo much better frothy, it would be prepared that way, no?

My boss is obviously the extreme example, considering how often his wife is yelling at him, he's really impolite by even the local standards. (grin and bear it...turn up the music is what I usually do at work) I'm also not claiming every Japanese does this shit as I know many that find it as disgusting as me...I just find it interesting how it's "tolerated" by people that have better manners and when you call someone out on their unreasonably noisy slurping, chewing, etc. they get suuuuuuuper defensive about it.

[Yokohammer]

Yeah, I can handle slurping noodles, sorta, but that's about it. People who do it with coffee and tea come close to triggering my gag reflex. Same with people who talk while chewing. That's just gross. And excuses that "it's the Japanese way" are just plain wrong. Ask anyone who has a clue about traditional Japanese manners. It's just an excuse to be a lazy slob. Blech.


~ Tapatalking ~

[kurogane]

Miso is slurp friendly, but Western Soup is a grey zone, as is the taste of most Japanese soup FTM, but your other examples are just bad manners. OTOH, according to The Native Code possessing proper manners does not empower you to then impress upon those less blessed unless there is full intimacy (i.e family), to do so is both presumptuous and exceedingly boorish in its own right, and the correct response is to grin and bear it, as befits a masochistic ethos based peoples. Remonstration is a sin of indulgence whereas bad manners are a sin of ignorance, and if I remember my Boodah indulgence always trumps ignorance on the sin scale. The best example I know is the old adage that the only thing worse than bad grammar is that ilk that feels the need to correct it.

I prefer their stoic forebearance to our presumptuous public pedantry (in NA we really have completely lost the plot and are just pandering to the mental case cat ladies) but I also avoid noodle shops and such if I know their clientele is particularly plebby and cacaphonous in their consumption. Any slurping in proper places of repast get the Gaijin Death Stare, though that never works anyways because people too boorish to know better are usually too stupid to figure it out.

As a test, next time you're out with a well raised, intelligent lemur (the wife???) and somebody is being a boor try raising the issue quietly to her. Betcha you get almost as much crap for broaching it as the boor should get for doing it.

CONCLUSION: they're a weird people, man. And seriously, get some ear plugs. Ko-nan or wherever sells 'em for 4 bucks. Get the corkscrew type.

These work: http://www.kohnan-eshop.com/shop/g/g4948953551193/

but these might get the point across: http://www.kohnan-eshop.com/shop/g/g4977292394741/

[Yokohammer]

Tell ya what gets on my goat: TV commercials for non-noodle type foods that the "talent" snorts and scarfs down with a piggish vengeance, apparently in an attempt to make the food seem delicious.

Just ... vomitous ...

And precisely the sort of thing that makes such behaviour seem status quo in the minds of the tube-numbed public.

[matsuki]

Yeah, I can handle slurping noodles, sorta, but that's about it. People who do it with coffee and tea come close to triggering my gag reflex. Same with people who talk while chewing. That's just gross. And excuses that "it's the Japanese way" are just plain wrong. Ask anyone who has a clue about traditional Japanese manners. It's just an excuse to be a lazy slob. Blech.

That's even more what I'm getting at...the stuff that bothers me is considered bad manners here as well but seems like the "but everyone else does it" mentality has taken hold to the point that they think it's "Japanese style."

according to The Native Code possessing proper manners does not empower you to then impress upon those less blessed unless there is full intimacy (i.e family), to do so is both presumptuous and exceedingly boorish in its own right, and the correct response is to grin and bear it, as befits a masochistic ethos based peoples. Remonstration is a sin of indulgence whereas bad manners are a sin of ignorance, and if I remember my Boodah indulgence always trumps ignorance on the sin scale.

I think the natives with manners tend to grin and bear it but if you broach the subject with them after mr/mrs slurpy has left, it opens the floodgates. "I know, right?!!" That being said, I indeed grin and bear it but when it's a lemur that I'm with, that's not going to fly. (or maybe it does til I have a bad day, only to sit down to eat with them)

[matsuki]

Tell ya what gets on my goat: TV commercials for non-noodle type foods that the "talent" snorts and scarfs down with a piggish vengeance, apparently in attempt to make the food seem delicious.

Just ... vomitous ...

And precisely the sort of thing that makes such behaviour seem status quo in the minds of the tube-numbed public.

The fact that those situations are followed be either "oishii" or "umai" 99.999999999% of the time bothers me more that the terrible acting. You'd think non-oishii food doesn't exist in Japan if you only went by the TV-shows...and based on how many Japanese I've met that think LA is just like the movies, there is power in that.

[kurogane]

Tell ya what gets on my goat: TV commercials for non-noodle type foods that the "talent" snorts and scarfs down with a piggish vengeance, apparently in an attempt to make the food seem delicious.

Just ... vomitous ...

And precisely the sort of thing that makes such behaviour seem status quo in the minds of the tube-numbed public.

It amazes me what boors so many celebs are. The ones I met in southern Okinawa were often genuine trash at the table, and often not even polite to the staff　
This guy, though、is a frickin' mother's dream


Ishii????
That's true back here too, but fortunately we never have to watch them eat on TV. And Amen to that last part. What better way to defend your own boorishness than pointing out that Naffy-kun from Poodle Boys does it.

The only time I remember seeing anybody not say Oishiiiiiiiiiii is when they're eating foreign food, often rather bland, pedestrian fare, usually from a food truck or stall in a foreign location. The whole Media Studies Nihonjinron conspiracy argument certainly looks stronger then.

[matsuki]

The only time I remember seeing anybody not say Oishiiiiiiiiiii is when they're eating foreign food, often rather bland, pedestrian fare, usually from a food truck or stall in a foreign location. The whole Media Studies Nihonjinron conspiracy argument certainly looks stronger then.

Lest you forget that in the land of MSG, most anything edible with mint get's labelled as "tastes like chemicals"

[kurogane]

Eeeek. You might have a point there. MSG really fecks my taste buds for sometime after. One TV show I remember was one of those wimpy wispy poodle boys in New York eating some proper NY slice pepperoni pizza. It looked really nice and just greasy enough, but when he claimed that Japanese pizza was more delicate and nuanced I remember thinking: The Fix is In!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have had a few perfectly edible yuppie pizzas in Japan but they don't even compare to a proper NA slice joint, esp when they're all fagged up with weird sauce and toppings, never mind a wood oven yuppie joint.

Oh, there's a wood oven pizza joint in Oi-machi, in case anyone has a hankering. I liked it, I think.

[Samurai_Jerk]

It's funny that some of you guys think blowing on your soup is OK but not slurping it. It's essentially the same thing. One day some Japanese guys in my office were laughing about the gaijin they had seen at the ramen shop at lunch that kept blowing on his noodles. They didn't find it disgusting but they though it was ridiculous.

I've always though the Western obsession with not making noise when you eat was stupid. There are limits though. Choko's boss sounds pretty gross and I agree with Yoko about the commercials. I don't like the big gulping sounds in commercials when they drink either. Not because I find it disgusting but because it reminds me of the way a thirsty 4-year-old drinks.

[matsuki]

SJ - Like you say, it's mostly about noise but it's not like we're expecting perfect silence (which would be ridiculous) just not like pigs (yes literally) with no consideration to anyone around them.

[Coligny]

I prefer their stoic forebearance to our presumptuous public pedantry (in NA we really have completely lost the plot and are just pandering to the mental case cat ladies)

I will not let my Priestess insulted without consequences...

You'll die third...

Painfully...

Slowly...

Eaten by a legion of kitten as their first taste of solid food...

(You have no known illness and all your vaccinations are in order, right ? Don't want a kitteh with tummy ache because of you)

[kurogane]

Slaughtering kittens would be a light mornings work. All that fluff stuck to the scythe blade is like a dandelion pancake.