Glossary and Detailed Explanation

Glossary

Detailed Explanation, Part 1: Courtesy and Bowing in Japan

Courtesy has a double function. Because Japan is so crowded, there is no privacy. People create privacy through good manners: they simply do not listen to what is not their business. The open telephones prove it - a person can quarrel with a lover in public "in perfect privacy". Mikes twists the English saying "a man's home is his castle" into "a man's telephone-receiver is his castle".

Why bowing is complicated.

Mikes compares this with an old American traffic law: if two cars met at a crossing, neither could move until the other had gone - a comic picture of deadlock.

Why it looks quaint to a foreigner. For the Japanese it is natural; for Mikes it is puzzling because he bows too deeply or not deeply enough, to the wrong man at the wrong time, with or without clasped hands - "which is bad … or you do which is worse".

Humour through exaggeration. Babies bow "condescendingly, from his majestic height"; the conductors' bow is "slightly theatrical"; even a deer bows - and then snatches the food, just like the gentlemen at the bus-stop who bow serenely and then turn into savages when the bus comes. Mikes shows that politeness has limits.

The soup trap. Whatever the foreigner does is wrong - silence is rude by Japanese standards, noise is rude by European standards. The joke is on the confused outsider.

Detailed Explanation, Part 2: Traffic in Brazil

The contrast. Brazilians are leisurely - "nobody hurries" - and love beauty: they decorate even their pavements with mosaics. But at the wheel they become speed-mad, as if a tenth of a second mattered greatly.

The paradox of expensive cars. Cars are very costly because of import duties, and everyone complains they cannot afford one - yet cars multiply "by leaps and bounds". This is typical Mikes irony.

Hunter and prey.

Murderous but good-tempered. Drivers cut in, overtake on both sides and commit "the most heinous crimes of the road", yet always smile - no anger, no hostility, no hooting. The oxymoron "murderous but good-tempered" sums up Brazilian traffic.

The punch-line. On the Avenida Presidente Vargas, "crawling traffic" moves at "terrifying speed" (another paradox). The friend's reply, "I was born on this side!", exaggerates the idea that it is impossible to cross the road.

Mikes's attitude. He is not hostile; his humour is affectionate. He exaggerates what looks strange to an outsider, and laughs at himself as much as at the people he visits. Still, the textbook's note reminds us that travel writing can show one culture through the eyes of another and subtly treat the writer's own ways as normal.

Vocabulary (textbook exercises)

Synonyms

Word forms

Expressions from the travelogue