Completely isolated from the world for centuries, Japan has always been wary of outsiders. 'Treat a stranger like a thief' advises a Japanese proverb. Even native-born Japanese who live for awhile outside the country are no longer considered 'pure' Japanese, Lois Horn tells us in Outside Person. At the same time, she points out, the Japanese have enthusiastically embraced such typically American customs as baseball, western dress and fast foods.
A Seattle resident, Horn lived in Japan for a year as a Boeing wife, realizing a lifelong dream. She was fortunate in being able to enter widely differing Japanese homes and lives: a professor's one-room apartment, a Shinto priest's home, a centuries-old family residence within a walled compound in a thousand-year-old village.
"Traveling throughout the country, Horn, a UW graduate in Japanese studies with a master's degree in social work, was an unusually perceptive observer. Married just before Pearl Harbor, she studied Japanese at the UW at a time when few Americans knew the language. After teaching prospective language officers in the armed forces, she joined the Navy, working in Communications Intelligence.
"Thirty years later after a brush-up course with Berlitz, she went to live in Nagoya, where her husband was sent by Boeing to work with the Mitsubishi company on a pioneer cooperative project, producing aircraft parts......
"Horn is forever puzzling out what to do during unfamiliar rituals, from drinking tea after the elaborate tea ceremony to soaping up and rinsing off before entering a hot bath.
"Horn is a talented writer who brings Japan alive for us, using the sensory details of color, sound and smell, texture and taste. Her writing gains depth as she draws valuable conclusions from what she sees, describing her contacts with Japanese at all social levels.
"Whether you hope to travel in Japan, to live there, or only to be an armchair expert on that exotic, erotic country, Outside Person will help you understand more about a very special people......" -- Northwest Book Nook By Ann Saling
"Oddly when westerners write about Japan, and it is a hot topic these days, they tend to focus on just one aspect of the culture, business, art, family, or religion and idealize it.
"How do we get beyond the cliches, the aphorisms and megatrendy capsulations of Japan, to get an 'up close and personal' encounter with this marvelous culture as it goes about its daily business? Read Outside Person by Lois Logan Horn. Read this book. I know of no other way for a non-Japanese speaker to learn so much about who these people are. 'Horn-san' takes the reader on a most amazing journey, a Euro-American from the midwestern heartland, she settled as a young adult in Seattle just before the Second World War. Already a student at the U of W when war broke out she studied Japanese language and translated messages for the U.S. Navy.....
"Outside Person is a literal translation of the word gaijin, Japanese for referriing to anyone who is not Japanese; and it is Ms. Horn's\000\000m fascinatiing account of her travels and encounters during her year in Japan. The high adventure of motoring in Japan, treacherous roads of breathtaking beauty, incredibly ugly tollways lined with sex-hotels, routine visits to the grocery store and beauty shop, the unintentional comedy of manners that seem to attend every social encounter between Japanese and Westerners, even a furtive glance at Japan's invisible under-class, all are described in intimate eyewitness fashion. Ms. Horn is an excellent expert guide to a Japan we "would never even know to look for on our own. Suffice it to say that while other writers are trying hard to say something profound about translating Japanese style into American life, Lois Horn presents us with a magnificent journal of minutiae, the sum of which is a profound understanding of a world very different from our own." -- Bill Skubi Puget Sound Mail
Product Description
Outside Person is a frank, authentic account of expatriate life for Americans in Japan. It is personal, amusing, authentic and rich in details of everyday living in Japan. The author accompanied her husband to Nagoya, Japan, where he worked as a Boeing manager at the Mitsubishi Nagoya Aircraft Works. No definition of culture shock covers that of a red-blooded American woman, who, from the moment she steps off the plane from the U.S.A., lives in an out-of-sync world she will never understand.
Anyone not born and raised as a member of the Japanese "tribe" stays forever a gaijin, an Outside Person. The survival of an American woman in Japan, Man's Country, is the story told in this book. If you plan to live or travel in Japan, the book will guide you. If you already have had such an experience, you will identify with what happens in the book.
