Op-Ed Columns

My buddy Gena asked me to speak to a bunch of students from Japan who had just arrived at Jacksonville State.

"Happy to," I said. "What do I talk about?"

"Southern culture."

She gave me 45 minutes.

Now, friends, how do you explain the South to some youngsters who don't know Dixie from doodley-squat (much less what doodley-squat is) and in just more than half-an-hour?

So I thought and I thought.

And thought these kids, being from somewhere else, are a lot like Yankees, and you know what William Price Fox said: "The average Yankee knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about the Lord's plan for salvation."

Which might be more than you think, but who knows — except the hog and the Lord?

But then, I thought, these kids — 18 and 19 years old — are going to be looking for things that are familiar, things that may be Southern, but still stuff someone from Japan can relate to.

So I devised a little game — which you can play at home or in the office. It's called "My culture is like your culture, except where it ain't."

On the given day, I went in and told them the rules.

I would pick out something that both Japan and the South had, and then we would go looking for what was similar and what was different.

Then I wrote "HISTORY" on the board. (You knew I'd start there, didn't you?)

Then I looked out at the room full of Asian students and asked, "How is Japan's history like that of the South?"

Polite silence.

"Well," I continued, "both the South and Japan fought a war with the United States and lost."

They looked surprised. I don't think they expected anyone to mention this similarity — especially on that particular date, which was the anniversary of when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (though I expect I was the only one in the room who knew it).

I quickly added, "both Japan and the South, like Gone With the Wind."

Blank stares, and I realized how much had changed over there. For years after The War, GWTW and its story of defeat and recovery was widely watched and deeply understood by the Japanese, but none of these students had seen it. (Not that I should have been surprised, 'cause most Southern students their age haven't seen it, either.)

So we moved from history to something more concrete — food — and discussed the merits of sushi (which I have eaten) versus barbecue (which they hadn't up till then, but will have before they go home) and why one is eaten by an island people and the other by farm folks with hogs (that might or might not know what the Lord has in store for them).

Then music — only it seemed that they listened to pretty much the same stuff that their American counterparts listen to.

And the landscape, the land, and what people build on it — a southern Greek Revival mansion and the Palace of the Emperor — a big front yard and a small, secluded Zen garden.

Then plants — how cotton shaped the South just as rice had defined the culture of their homeland.

At which point I decided to get cute with them and tell of the great cross-cultural exchange that took place more than 100 years ago when some Southerners saw a Japanese vine that grew on trellises and thought, "now that would be nice back home."

Kudzu.

They looked baffled. Then one of them typed Kudzu into her little hand-held Japanese-English computer dictionary and her face lit up.

"Kuzoo," she pronounced it, and they all laughed.

And while we were on cultural exchanges, we talked about Japan's most popular sport — baseball. (I started to mention how the South loved Japanese game shows because Dixie is full of good-ol' boys and girls willing to risk life and limb making a fool of themselves, but I wasn't sure how "good-ol' boy" would translate into Japanese culture, so I let it go.)

And we moved on to language, where I explained the beautiful flexibility of the word "y'all" and the subtle distinction between "fixin'" and "gonna."

At which point I nimbly skipped over religion, for even Southerners get confused over faiths other than their own. How could I compare Baptists and Methodists to Shinto and Buddhism? Much less how could they? And what if they ask me what to say when someone asks them, "where do you go to church?"

I didn't know, so I avoided it.

And I finished up with literature, pointing out to them that Southerners also write Haiku, and to prove my point I left them with this wonderful example of Dixie's ability to work in that classic poetic form.

A New Moon

Flashlights pierce darkness
No nightcrawlers to be found
Guess we'll gig some frogs

After that, I know they felt right at home.