The Reasons a Foreign Owner of a Foreign Restaurant in Japan Criticizes Her Foreign Staff for Being Too Foreign

There is nothing remarkable about the Korean restaurant around a corner of the residential suburb that I live in. Toted as a family restaurant, the small space, with a row of counter seats facing an open kitchen is usually run by an elderly couple with little Japanese skills and their middle-aged children. In a neighborhood with few options for Korean food, the restaurant gets a steady stream of customers, at least on the weekday nights that I have visited. Given that many Korean dishes require lengthy preparations of putting together and boiling the ingredients, the proprietors of the restaurant were constantly occupied.

Perhaps that is why, when I visited the restaurant recently, one of the middle-aged daughters of the owner's family was training a group of new Vietnamese part-time workers, while the elderly couple was nowhere in sight. While it is certainly understandable that the elderly owners take a few days off from working in the busy restaurant, it must have been quite an ordeal for one family member to oversee regular operations, with its normally busy rotation of customers, all the while training the new part-time workers to handle the myriad tasks of keeping the restaurant ticking.

Clearly, the middle-aged daughter was frustrated and the way she talked to her new Vietnamese workers betrayed her impatience. While diners were eating all around her, she did not attempt to tone down her scolding of the new workers in a loud voice. "I don't like the way you Vietnamese write numbers, I can't tell the difference between your 4s and 9s, 7s and 1s," she boomed, "you need to only speak Japanese when working. Customers are not going to be happy when they hear other languages." As the Vietnamese workers nodded yes in silence, she openly criticized their apparent foreignness.

It is quite ironic to see that a member of a foreign family that runs a foreign restaurant that sells foreign food in Japan would be so vocal in opposing their staff members being foreign. Granted, this particular Korean restaurant does not blast Kpop in the background as many newer restaurants catering to younger crowds would. But still, the restaurant provides a rare opportunity for regular Japanese people living in a regular neighborhood with little international contact to at least get in touch with an element of exoticness in their backyard.

Given the irony, it may be possible to interpret the behavior of the middle-aged owner of the restaurant toward her staff in two ways. One is a belief in the "hierarchy of foreignness" within the foreigners' community in Japan. While the owner is not negating the Vietnemeseness of her workers, she reminds them that there is a "Goldilocks principle" when it comes to what level of outwardly displayed foreignness is considered appropriate when interacting with Japanese people. In her interpretation, the success of this Korean restaurant comes down to being Korean enough while still adhering to the cultural principles of the mainstream, dominant Japanese majority.

The other, perhaps more pessimistic interpretation, is that the owner fundamentally believes that the patrons of her restaurant, just as everyone else who lives in the neighborhood, really has no interest in anything culturally foreign and they just happen to like the taste of Korean food. The owner's public scolding of her Vietnamese staff in front of all the (mostly Japanese) customers perhaps allows her to signal to her patrons that, "look, I am on your side. So much so that I am upholding the principles of Japanese culture even as a foreigner running a foreign restaurant."

Either way, the biggest loser of the owner's behavior toward her Vietnamese staff is neither her nor the Vietnamese staff. It is the past, present, and future customers of the restaurant. In a society that often attempts to remain unwilling to talk about the growing foreign population and cultural differences the foreigners bring, seeing a foreigner scold other foreigners for foreignness only entrench inflated belief of Japanese cultural superiority into which foreign residents of Japan will simply assimilate into over time with no complaints or social problems.

But the reality of the foreigners' sociocultural relationship with Japan will always remain more nuanced. Some form of suppressed foreignness will always remain present, not simply as a lucrative gimmick to sell exotic food to the Japanese majority who are looking for an occasional change in the palate, but also as a form of the passing-down of knowledge among different generations of foreigners for them to survive and thrive in a society that often secretly harbors unfriendly attitude toward them. The Japanese clientele, blissfully aware of this underlying cultural negotiation, may only see expressions of Japanese cultural pride. How wrong they are.