About the Author: George Mikes

George Mikes (1912-1987) was a Hungarian artist, author, publisher, illustrator and journalist. He studied law and received his doctorate at Budapest University.

  • He is best known for humorous books about other nations and cultures, such as How to Be an Alien, Italy for Beginners, How to Be Inimitable, How to Scrape Skies and How to Tango. He also wrote The Hungarian Revolution, Uber Alles and Shakespeare and Myself.
  • The lesson combines excerpts from two of his books: The Land of the Rising Yen (on Japan) and How to Tango (on South America).

Travel writing. The textbook adds a note on the genre. Travel writing records one's experiences of visiting unfamiliar places. It is as old as the 2nd century, grew popular with sea voyages and royal patronage, and is still hugely popular on TV and the internet. Today scholars study it as part of cultural studies: travel writing shows how one culture represents another, and can quietly treat the writer's own values as superior.

[Exam Tip] — Mikes is Hungarian, not British or American. The Japan part comes from The Land of the Rising Yen; the Brazil part from How to Tango.

Summary, Part 1: Japanese Manners

Courtesy as privacy. Within a quarter of an hour in Japan you see that the people are "exquisitely well-mannered". Japan is a hopelessly overcrowded island with no real privacy, so courtesy works as a substitute for privacy. Little red telephones stand on open counters - there is no space for booths - and people conduct confidential business and "intimate love-quarrels" in public, yet nobody listens in. "A man's telephone-receiver is his castle."

The mania for bowing. Everybody bows to everybody with ceremonious solemnity and natural grace. Bowing is no sillier than shaking hands, but it is "quainter, more formal, more oriental" - and infectious: soon the visitor bows too, but always wrongly.

The hierarchy of bowing. The Japanese have a complicated hierarchy: who bows to whom, how deeply and for how long. Neither may straighten up before the other - like an old American traffic law where neither car could move before the other had gone. The smallest difference in rank, age or position shows in a split second's difference in the length of a bow. Family rules: the wife bows to her husband, the child to his father, younger brothers to elder brothers, and the sister to all brothers of whatever age.

Bowing everywhere. Babies on their mothers' backs bow when the mother bows. Stores employ bowing girls at the top of escalators. On the Tokaido Line between Tokyo and Osaka, two conductors bow ceremoniously before checking tickets. In Nara, a deer bowed deeply to Mikes - then jumped at him and snatched the food-bag from his hand. "In this, too, the deer was a true Japanese": people who bow politely at bus-stops turn into savages the moment the bus arrives, pushing and shoving.

Eating soup. In Japan you must make a fearful noise while eating soup - it shows appreciation. If you don't, the hostess thinks you are an ill-mannered lout; if you do, she thinks no well-brought-up European makes such noises - so you are an ill-mannered lout anyway.

Summary, Part 2: Traffic in Brazil

Nobody hurries in Brazil. It does not matter whether you arrive an hour early, a day late or not at all. The grey pavements of Copacabana are decorated with beautiful black mosaics - only a people alive to beauty, with plenty of time for leisurely walks, would decorate the pavements they walk on.

Behind the wheel. Yet as soon as these easy-going people hold a steering wheel, no speed is fast enough; gaining a tenth of a second seems a matter of grave importance.

Cars are expensive. Motor cars are extremely expensive because import duties are "crippling and murderous", and hardly anyone can afford one. Yet the number of cars grows "by leaps and bounds", as if they were given free to all and sundry.

Drivers and pedestrians. Drivers do care about pedestrians - they are on the look-out for them. A pedestrian stepping off the pavement is "fair game": the driver takes aim and accelerates, and the pedestrian runs for dear life. Neither is angry - hunter and prey smile amicably: "I win today - you will win tomorrow."

Drivers against drivers. The war between drivers is "murderous but good-tempered". They cut in, overtake on both sides and commit every road crime twenty times an hour - but they smile; there is no anger and no mad hooting.

Avenida Presidente Vargas. This is the worst place to cross: "how can crawling traffic proceed at such terrifying speed?" A man waves to a friend across the road and shouts, "How on earth did you get over there?" The friend replies: "How? I was born on this side!"

Central Idea

The lesson is a piece of humorous travel writing. Mikes observes two cultures from the outside:

  • In Japan, extreme politeness and bowing - courtesy even replaces privacy - but it can vanish in a scramble for a bus, and soup-eating etiquette can trap a foreigner either way.
  • In Brazil, a leisurely, beauty-loving people turn into speed-mad but good-humoured drivers.

Mikes uses exaggeration, irony and comic anecdotes (the bowing deer, the friend "born on this side"). His humour is gentle; he laughs at the contradictions in both cultures and at himself as a confused foreigner. The travelogue also makes us think about which of our own habits might look strange to outsiders.

[Exam Tip] — 2025 asked (statement-reason MCQ): "Motor cars are extremely expensive in Brazil" / "Import duties are crippling and murderous" - both true. It also asked (3 marks) to describe the complicated bowing hierarchy of the Japanese.