There are only 2 that really matter, those marked with "serious" because they remind of funeral rites (passing food from chopsticks to chopsticks or sticking them in rice).
Japanese people will tell you about those because they really don't like seeing people do it.
Interesting. Some of these are big deals (particularly the ones mentioned as important) but others I have seen Japanese people in Tokyo do quite consistently. Soroebashi - not on the table, but I've seen chopsticks aligned by pushing them against the plate hundreds of time. I've also seen them used to stir miso soup, etc. plenty.
Others I don't know that I would have much of an inclination to do and haven't seen but am not sure if it's because it really is a faux pas or just because no one else really tends to do it either.
I think if you were to do an Osaka version of this, the list would be limited to maybe 4 of these (licking, chopsticks upright in rice, passing between chopsticks, and pointing esp. toward a senior would be taboo).
Whereas when I had a date with a girl from Kyoto, one of the first things that happened when we went to eat was she had to stop me from picking up my chopsticks impolitely and show me the proper way of doing it.
Suffice it to say my Osaka-learned table manners and speech patterns meant there was no second date.
I'm not sure I'd put it down entirely to Osaka versus Kyoto. My impression is that these things often have at least as much to do with upbringing, formality, and social background as with region.
I don't know where you're from, so apologies if this is an unfair assumption, but in countries like the US or Australia people often seem less attuned to social class, whereas in places like the UK, France, and indeed Japan, those distinctions can carry more weight, even if they almost always go unspoken.
In general, upper-classish dining probably used to be more formal in the US in terms of cutlery type and placement and other things. May still be in some circles but no one I know worries about such things and even very decent restaurants don’t. And when was the last time you saw a fish fork?
My mother-in-law always used to get annoyed at me for using my knife and fork in the European manor instead of the American way. She said it was boorish. I don't know anybody else here in the US who cares in the least which way you use your knife and fork, so I always interpreted it left over behavior from her upper class DC upbringing in the 1930-40's.
(I did try to explain to her that it was more related to my being left handed than my attempting to emulate European behavior. It didn't seem to make much difference to her.)
I thought this would simply be about the knife and the fork switching hands, but holding the fork tines up or down (spearing vs scooping) is new to me.
On the other hand, I don't think Americans ever pick up food with their fork and switch the loaded fork to the other hand, especially if the food is scooped, not speared. A lot of food would be dropped in the process.
As a non-conformist, I taught myself to use my knife in the non-dominant hand so that the fork is used in the same hand regardless of knife usage.
This is bonkers. Just cut the food with your non-dominant hand. If you're so weak that you cannot cut the food with your non-dominant hand then you're either a small child, elderly, or you have a medical condition.
Just guessing here, I'm left handed also. I don't trust myself to cut a piece of steak using the knife in my right hand. So, after cutting with my left hand, I put the knife down and use my left for forking.
Or, it could be what my English son-in-law does, he uses his fork and knife, in different hands to aid in pushing food onto his fork. (He's right handed, not that it matters in this case.)
Some of them of course are invented whole cloth. British Received Pronunciation was invented and needs to be learned and is the standard of the upper class. It's neither right nor wrong but it's there to differentiate.
RP isn't really a thing any more, except among some of the older aristocracy and Tories and a few legacy BBC Radio shows.
Most people have settled into Estuary, which has split into a high/corporate/media Estuary-tinged dialect, and low street Estuary. The BBC has its own special neutral version.
Fifty years ago the difference between upper class/BBC/RP and street English was almost hilariously obvious. Watch a BBC show from the 50s and 60s - even something like Dr Who - and everyone is speaking a unique RP dialect that doesn't exist any more.
Idk. I’m in my early 40s, not a Tory, not aristocracy, and I speak with RP, as do many others I know. Maybe a product of schooling, but I wouldn’t say it’s dead.
In media, you’re quite correct - it has become rare bar presenters who are now in their 80s or older.
You say “needs to be learned” but that’s no more so than any other accent.
We just grow up with it because it’s how our parents and the parents of our friends speak.
If you want to change your accent you can, of course, get elocution lessons but most Brits do not. We just have a large variety of accents of which RP is one.
Maybe some of them may have had a purpose. With this one, if you were used to putting your elbows on the table and there were more people around, you just took up too much space and made it unpleasant for others around you.
Mind you, I'm not saying that standards must be followed. I am just saying the same thing I tell my kids:
- the standards are there, wishing they didn't exist doesn't invalidate them
- the reason rules and standards came to existence might or might not be applicable to our current context, but some people will expect you to follow them regardless.
- If a rule or standard seems silly to you, make your best attempt at understanding why people would still follow it. (Chesterton's fence)
- You are free to not comply to some rules, but always be ready to accept the consequences of your decisions.
- What your friends are doing or not doing is not reason enough for you to change your behavior or choices.
> the standards are there, wishing they didn't exist doesn't invalidate them
But not observing them does. There are standards no one in the world follows anymore. They may still “be there”, but are only used for mocking purposes.
> If a rule or standard seems silly to you, make your best attempt at understanding why people would still follow it. (Chesterton's fence)
The corollary to that is that anyone who rebukes anyone else for not following a standard must be able to explain why it exists. “Because it’s rude” it’s not good enough, explain why it’s considered rude.
It seems like you are making a different point than the other posters. If the majority of a group does not follow an etiquette standard, it is reasonable to say that the group does not hold that standard. Your point that if any group holds an etiquette standard, then that standard exists is true, but is more tangential to the other point that a rebuttal of it.
"Appeals to public opinion are valid in situations where consensus is the determining factor for the validity of a statement, such as linguistic usage and definitions of words."
And the point of etiquette is to signal conformity and social status.
I had a friend who came from a working class culture where social aspiration was measured by tiny nuances, like whether someone put milk in their tea before or after pouring it.
Outside of that culture these nuances were irrelevant. Middle and upper class people had a completely different set of etiquette markers - as well as more or less obvious displays of wealth - which the working class aspirers were oblivious to.
I remember being blown away when I was in a Kyoto Familymart after a few months of living in Osaka after they handed me my fried chicken very delicately with both hands like it was a business card!
I guess that’s the cultural divide that occurs when one community is fishing and trading while the other does, like, competitive perfumed calligraphy or whatever.
Similar in Spain between Andalusia doing trades since forever across the whole Mediterranean Sea vs the inner provinces (the Castille-s) and the chilly Atlantic North regions with Celtic/Basque substrates.
I dated many foreign girls and it was always fun to discover the cultural differences.
There are similar faux-pas in France but, really, nobody with an ounce of common sense cares. You like your red wine cold as I do? Someone will maybe mention that you will be loosing some aroma znd that's all. You add sugar and ice? This is probably not a drink for you and you will get some laughs but that's all.
I eat my starters after the main meal in the company restaurant, nobody cares.
You are there to have pleasure, this is not West Point
Fun fact: "chambrer le vin" i.e getting (usually red) wine from storage temperature to "room temperature" comes from a time where said room temperature was well below 20 degC (more like 13-15 degC), not the comfortable 20+ degC that people like to enjoy these days.
One of my favorite alcoholic drinks is port + ice, which it sounds like the only difference here would be that wine + sugar + ice would be much weaker in terms of alcohol content.
I wonder what Ms. Kyoto would tell me to do to properly pick up my chopsticks, given that I’m left-handed, and yet it is apparently a faux pas to lay down the chopsticks pointing to the right.
Do you know how serious "chopsticks upright in rice" is? I had a Chinese teacher who mentioned the taboo (with regard to China, not Japan), but she also said that while people recognize that it's something you're not supposed to do, it's not taken seriously either.
I do. My parents (americans) lived between HK and Taiwan for a decade before I was born, and growing up, I was fortunate enough to have my folks teach me a bit of chinese. We'd regularly go to a local Chinese restaurant where the staff would speak to me in Chinese so I could practice speaking. Seeing as some of the staff were significantly older, my dad taught me to be hyper aware of customs surrounding dining norms and etiquette. One day I accidentally left my chopsticks in the rice bowl while there was still rice in it, and the waitress (an older Chinese lady) saw it - poor lady nearly fainted.
I did not make that mistake ever again.
For context - it's a way of saying "death to your family" or something akin to that.
I use to have a routine with a friend where we paid close attention to the table manners of his wealthy upper class relatives. Then when they did something wrong we would point it out loudly as if it was the end of the world. Best was 3+ mistakes in a row. Bonus points if you can point out the mistake and add something like we are not in Belgium!
The difference between the American and European styles has been used as plot point in fictional works, including the 1946 film O.S.S. and the 2014 series Turn: Washington's Spies.[5] In both works, using the wrong fork etiquette threatens to expose undercover agents.
Nuts. Apparently I have been a German spy all this time. I don't have time to waste swapping a fork around.
I’m not even sure what the technical etiquite is. As a right handed American it just seems more natural to have my knife in my right hand but if I’m just using a fork I tend to switch that to my right hand. Didn’t even think about it until right now.
I've always just done the cutting at the beginning of the meal then set the knife to the side. All of the etiquette patterns I've heard about seem wrong to me compared to just cut first and then put the knife down.
I’m right handed, but eat with the fork in my right hand and knife in the left.
Is the issue that people have difficulty cutting with their left hand? Because if you can the process of eating is pretty efficient: hold with fork, cut with knife, move food on fork to mouth …
I'm in Europe and I did the same as a child because it just felt the most natural. But you better believe our teachers in school would try to force the opposite. The argument was that imagine if everyone cuts with their right hand, but then you cut with your left and cause a lot of annoyance by bumping your elbow info your table neighbor's elbow.
Absolutely a non-issue in reality obviously. But nowadays I do hold my cutlery "properly" as a result. To me it now feels natural to bring the fork to my mouth with the left hand. Or the right one, really, but I default to holding it in the left.
Ahh! Yeah, my teachers were equally unimpressed - but none of them gave the argument you mentioned, which could at least be understood (like elbows on tables).
Fascinating. The difference of the American style where you switch the fork between the left and right hands reminded me of a similar difference in fishing gear - where Americans (to my understanding) mostly cast with their right hand and then switch the rod to their left hand when retrieving, while in Europe (or at least in Italy) you usually just keep the rod in the right hand instead of switching.
Its always extremely funny reading wikipedia articles about a countries customs. For the UK:
>Bread is always served and can be placed on the table cloth itself
This is extremely rare, to the point where I can't remember the last time I saw it. Is bread really.. always served?
> In the United Kingdom, the fork tines face upward while sitting on the table.
Tines down isn't uncommon in the UK either
>if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
>it is permissible to place a small piece of bread at the end of the fork for dipping
Its also 100% fine to dip bread in a sauce with your fingers. Putting bread on a fork if you've licked the fork and then dipping the bread would cause everyone to hate you, so *don't do this*
At any kind of formal dining? Yes, absolutely, I would expect there to be a bread roll & a pat of butter served at the beginning of the meal. Both in restaurants & formal dinners in my experience.
It's not an absolute rule though & you generally wouldn't expect bread to be served like this at home in the UK. I think the French are more likely to serve bread at home as well.
> >if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
> I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
So the norm is that if you're eating one-handed, you use your non-dominant hand? That seems really counterintuitive to me; is it because you're so used to having the fork in the non-dominant hand that it feels awkward the other way? Which hand do you use when eating with a spoon?
Spoons always go in the right hand (eg fork and spoon), but yes I'd say people usually use the fork in the non dominant hand. Fork in the right hand is slightly 'uncouth', possibly due to its american associations
Yes! Hardly anyone knows it all, and even people who know the basics adjust their behavior based on the situation. Eating out with your high school buddies requires a different level of observance than the dinner at which your girlfriend is introducing you to her parents.
This makes total sense to me. There is no monolithic “culture”— there are multiple related cultures, differing little in essence but differing greatly in the details. And each individual is usually only partially ignorant anyway.
Culture changes, too, and asymmetrically. So the “done thing” may be done be very few anymore.
For some reason, you're reading things into the original statement that are not there. "An etiquette exists in a culture" does not mean everyone has to follow or even be aware of it.
If mentally adding an "s" to the original comment enables you move past this issue and actually consider the comment as it was intended, then I would say that is well done and worth the effort to get to this point. :) Have a great Sunday!
I feel like there was a brief period when middle class came to existence and started mimicking customs of the upper class, which were very complicated because the upper class was mostly bored and had invented this shit to kill the time. Then two things happened:
1. Upper class stopped being formal because formality stopped being a signal of upper class.
2. Middle class stopped having social gatherings in general.
So, like, "it is a part of the culture" in the same sense as traditional outfits are a part of the culture - most people have very vague awareness, nobody really cares.
This is unnecessarily flippant, trivializing, and reductive.
The upper classes had the time and position to refine manners. I think one mistake people make is to think manners are arbitrary nonsense. But manners, when fitting, honor the self and others with conduct that suits the dignity of the human person and functions as a sign of that dignity. You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.
I’m not one for stiff artifice especially when slavishly applied, but I don’t think manners as such are arbitrary. That nobody cares would explain why so many people look like slobs and behave like boors.
If we begin with human nature and then view the virtues as perfections that actualize the fullness of that nature, then it becomes clearer that some behavior is more fitting and honored better by certain practices.
One of the true markers of being upper class is that you can get away with literal atrocities (see Epstein and co) as long as you're discrete enough and/or polished enough when talking to underlings and wannabes.
The upper classes in the UK regularly practice tone policing, where legitimate dissent is waved away as uncouth, even though what they say and do is far worse in private, and sometimes in public.
If you're looking for human dignity, I don't think this is its natural home.
This phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because what one considers basic etiquette another considers a theatre. The end result is often that people gather in order to perform the spectacle of manners rather than use manners to facilitate a social gathering.
Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan, but since the language is difficult to learn and frankly speaking nobody cares about Poland, barely anyone even knows this.
Also lots of corporations prefer "american style" approach of just refering by name (even to the CEO), so this dissapears.
Probably could write few pages about this, but nobody would care to read.
I wonder what will become of our honorifics in upcoming decades. Our language changes so much under influence of English, imported sociopolitical trends that surely made some of our bards spin in their graves.
On a side note, I find interesting is that Czech language still naturally uses that plural form we abandon due to popularity of pan/pani forms.
I'm interested in learning more about this! As a Finn I love Poland and have been there multiple times (most recently just two weeks ago). I don't know the language, but details like honorifics reveal interesting tidbits of the culture and society. I guess I should prompt an LLM about it.
>> Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan
> I'm interested in learning more about this!
It's very simple, actually.
For strangers, you use the third person and the title « Pan » or « Pani » (Sir or Lady). You avoid pronouns, « The Lady has forgotten the Lady's purse on the table ».
For friends, you use the t-form ("ty", thou), and use a diminutive rather than the full name. « Johny, you've forgotten your bag on the table ».
For work colleagues, you traditionally use « Pan » or « Pani » with the full form of the first name. « Mister John, the mister's bag is on the table ». This is perceived as old-fashioned, and is increasingly being replaced by the t-form.
The v-form has fallen into disuse, as it was promoted by the Communist regime.
(The old-fashioned honorifics still exist, but they are only used in administrative correspondence: the only time when you're "the respectable gentleman" is when you need to pay taxes.)
Calling someone Sir or Madam also exists in English and is nothing special.
You left out most of the interesting things.
For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing. Someone from Finland can actually understand this topic, since Finnish has multiple cases - more than in Polish language (meanwhile English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two).
> You left out most of the interesting things. For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing.
The grammar is changing in many ways (for example, the inanimate masculine is being replaced with the animated, kroić kotleta), but this was about honorifics.
It's possible in Polish to use "pan" in vocative "panie" form with strong vocal emphasis not followed by name or last name, to give it more rude sounding - but it won't be an insult.
There's nothing more humiliating than a Warsaw taxi driver who looks at you as you try to work out how to operate the door handle and says "Panie!" with a left-bank accent.
Yes, true, I've heard that, it's like putting emphasis on the fact that you want someone to pay attention or something like that. A bit like the guy saying 'Sir!' in the Blues Brothers restaurant scene but not quite the same.
If you are a Fin in Poland and a lot into nerd stuff, in Polish language some words are spelled with letters "h" and some with "ch" - where both have the same pronouciation now, but supposedly 150 years ago there was a difference.
Supposedly in Finish language you retained this difference and it can be heard in some words e.g. "raha" ("money" in Finish?).
Personally I never "heard" it - sounded as a regular "h" sound for me.
While historically Polish honorifics are one of the most elaborate in Europe because of its noble culture, I wouldn’t say they are as elaborate as the Japanese, at least not in the same manner.
I assume this is one of those cases where if you're in the culture, you'll know which rules you're allowed to break (and when) vs if you're on the outside it's easiest to just follow all the rules all the time.
Reminds me of an episode on youtube of How The British Upper Class Live | Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over where the presenter eats her eggs "wrong", much to the dismay of her posh host who tells her (in his subtle British way) that she should "sort that out".
Half of this list feels about as important as remembering the order of spoons on a table. Something that probably meant a lot 100 years ago but is mostly forgotten now.
I've seen those too. I was going to say that I've seen people put the bowl to their mouth and shovel food in with chopsticks, but now that I come to think about it that might well actually be from the series Tokyo Diner and Takeshi Kitano films, and may be deliberately uncouth characterisations...
I'm under the impression this is a Chinese vs. Japanese difference. Shoveling food into your mouth is perfectly acceptable in Chinese etiquette but discouraged in Japanese. Accordingly the Japanese cook their rice to clump together so it's easier to pick up using your chopsticks so that you don't have to resort to shoveling.
So what are you expected to do with the last few sauce-soaked grains of rice that would at best be able to be plucked grain by grain from the bowl, and even then would likely slip from between the tips of the chopsticks? Just leave them in the bowl?
I've heard that clearing the table of food would be considered rude in China, as it means you didn't get enough to eat, almost exactly opposite to the only food-related rule I was ever taught growing in the US - never waste food or serve yourself more than you can eat. That's probably just a "my family" thing though. I get the impression that even saving leftovers is rare among Americans these days.
I haven't been specifically informed as to either question, but I find that idea surprising, since noodles are infinitely easier to pick up with chopsticks than rice is.
it's like western etiquette: upper class, fine dining traditional practices are not what you'll see everyday even among polite society. the spectrum of behaviors will also depend on one's company.
I assume this must be the case here because I'm familiar with a lot of different etiquette contexts in the US and I have the impression that Japan has far more of that sort of thing than we do. Off the top of my head there are (at minimum) the way we were expected to eat in front of my grandparents, a more "regular" dinner with the extended family, a small gathering at a tex mex joint or chain restaurant or whatever, a fast food joint, and whatever slovenly things I do while sitting on my couch in private.
Anyone from a particularly wealthy family can probably add an additional couple contexts on the high end. Every single one of those situations has slightly different "rules" for what's acceptable.
I mean... I've consistently seen people chewing with their mouth open, talking while chewing, biting their fork, and so many others, just in occidental places, and it didn't seem to bother anyone but me. so, why would it be different in Japan?
The original reasons for not putting your elbows on the table (limited space, as well as some others) just don't apply anymore. There's no reason _not_ to put your elbows on the table other than "that's how it's always been done". As such, at least in my opinion, the rule no longer applies.
I see lots of people do things that are commonly written off as rude too. I don't know if there is much of a monoculture around what's rude or not, if people don't care (then is it truly rude?), or maybe the writings like this are simply outdated.
Yeah? How are you supposed to line up the sticks? And stir the soup? I think the "Mawashibashi" faux pas is to whip the soup like a madman, or to aimlessly swish it, and the translated listicle doesn't convey that.
When I first moved to Taiwan and was just getting a handle on Chinese, I asked a waiter "請給我一個筷子" - not yet being familiar with proper measure words.
The waiter (who had a bit of a sense of humor) brought me exactly ONE chopstick. I laughed and repeated 請給我另一個筷子 (Please give me another chopstick) and he brought out another one.
Of course later my friend told me that I should have used 雙 to indicate I wanted a "pair" of chopsticks.
> Of course later my friend told me that I should have used 雙 to indicate I wanted a "pair" of chopsticks.
That's hard to guess. There are three common measure words meaning "pair"; 副 is for "pairs" that are connected, like a "pair" of scissors in English, but 双 and 对 are basically identical in significance as far as I know.
> The waiter (who had a bit of a sense of humor) brought me exactly ONE chopstick.
Slightly unfair, since 一个筷子, beyond being semantically anomalous, is more or less ungrammatical too. If you actually wanted one chopstick, you'd say 一只筷子.
What kind of path did you take that taught you how to say 另一个 before you learned about measure words?
I think they were just poking a bit of good natured fun at me. Many foreigners new to Chinese just kind of blindly use 個 for everything when they're starting out.
> What kind of path did you take that taught you how to say 另一个 before you learned about measure words?
The article does a good job calling out the more serious offenses, although I’d personally argue that nigiribashi is just as bad as the other two. Most Japanese people would probably react with a bit of shock to those.
That said, chopstick etiquette is definitely evolving. Something like chobujubashi isn’t enforced as strictly anymore, especially with more awareness around left-handed users. Kaeshibashi, on the other hand, is becoming more common, and in some social circles, not doing it can actually come across as rude.
Hashibashi - does this mean it's okay to place the chopsticks across the top if it's not to show you're finished? I heard that was okay as long as you align them not to point at another person (not across the table). If there's no chopstick rest I'm not sure where else you're supposed to put your chopsticks.
Also I'm not sure how you're supposed to eat e.g. fried rice without yokobashi or kakibashi.
Also! I thought kaeshibashi was a good thing. I've definitely seen people do that at parties.
For anyone else curious after reading "-bashi" 40 times:
(Not gonna direct quote because the damn site doesn't allow copy-pasting so they don't get a link, paraphrased):
Kirai-bashi would be literally translated to "dislike-chopsticks" and means bad chopstick table-manners. Hashi is chopsticks and bashi is the voiced form of it.
So the bashi suffix/word on the end of all of these just means chopsticks it seems.
To add to this, voicing is also a way for Japanese words to become more “coherent”, the same way you write “dislike-chopsticks” as one combined noun, and not “dislike chopsticks”.
Someone downvoted this, but the poster is correct, so there was absolutely no reason for downvoting.
Rendaku, i.e. the voicing of the initial consonant, happens in the native Japanese words (i.e. not in the Japanese words of Chinese origin), in most cases when they are a part of a compound word and they are not the initial word. This serves indeed to distinguish a sequence of unrelated words from a compound word.
There are exceptions when rendaku does not happen, but typically whenever a word like hashi becomes a part of a compound word it will be voiced to -bashi.
"H" is a special case among the consonants, because in old Japanese it was pronounced as "p", which is why it is voiced as "b". Later, in initial positions the pronunciation was changed to "f" and even later the pronunciation was changed to "h". The "f" pronunciation has been retained only before "u", like in Fuji. In non initial positions, the original "p" has become later "v" and even later "w".
These pronunciation changes happened after the creation of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, so they were not reflected in writing. The orthographic reform that was forced after WWII has brought the written form of the words closer to the pronunciation, e.g. by writing consistently "w" where it is pronounced so. Before WWII, many words written now with "-wa-" were still written with "-ha-", a spelling that has been preserved now only in the particle "wa" (like the spelling corresponding to the old pronunciation "wo" has been preserved for the particle "o").
While the Japanese orthographic reform had some positive effects, in simplifying a little the Japanese writing, it also had the effect that for someone who knows only the modern written Japanese it is difficult to read the Japanese books published before WWII, where many different kanji are used and also their hiragana transcriptions are different.
I assume that this was actually an effect intended by the American occupation forces, as a similar policy was applied by the Russians in all the territories of the Soviet Union (except the Baltic countries), where they forced the native populations to change their writing systems to the Cyrillic alphabet, in order to make difficult for the younger generations to read anything dating from before the Russian occupation.
> The "f" pronunciation has been retained only before "u", like in Fuji.
Well, there is a convention that syllables starting with h- are spelled with f- (in foreign transcription) if the following vowel is -u. There's not much difference in the pronunciation itself; maybe there was more of one when the spelling convention was set.
I was shocked to find it's a faux pas to rub disposable chopsticks to remove potential splinters. I was taught this is what you're supposed to do with disposable chopsticks.
It's rude if it's a nice establishment, as it conveys your belief that the chopsticks are of low quality. So that's what you're signaling with that. If everyone already knows they are cheap (e.g. disposable), then have at it.
You come to my house to have food. I serve the food on obviously unclean dishes. Is that not rude as well? Do you just use the obviously dirty, nasty, used dishes out of not wanting to appear rude?
Do I just use chopsticks that will put splinters in my mouth just to not appear rude?
In your metaphor the equivalent would be that you see that the chopsticks have splinters and are cleaning it
But everyone I met who does splinter cleanup does it _every time_ even without a cursory inspection. So the metaphor is… maybe more apt that you are cleaning a plate despite not seeing whether it’s clean or not first
Why don’t they just serve proper chopsticks then instead of break apart ones? Cheapobashi - serving your customers disposable chopsticks when they’re paying for a good experience.
I once witnessed a local admonish another (younger) local for exactly that at a bar. He replied with a bratty "Not my fault they're using crappy chopsticks..."
I ate at a very nice restaurant (think The Menu) in Kagaonsen last week and the main course was served with lacquered chopsticks but another course was served with disposable chopsticks and the waiter actually broke them and rubbed them together for me. I think the social faux pas is making a show of doing it.
You know you're at a fancy restaurant when the waiters have an entire dish emulating what the poors are eating. Reminds me of a restaurant I used to really like in NYC called 'Peasant' :-/
I had a friend from Korea who thought it wasn't necessary/was improper to rub chopsticks together. This wasn't a matter of offending the restaurant, since we were eating in a university cafeteria.
I always rub mine together, but I suppose it would be interesting to know if you didn't, how often would something bad happen? Is it more likely to hurt your mouth or your fingers?
The splinters come from where they break apart and there's not really any reason to have that part of the chopsticks touching your skin.
But you move away from break apart disposable chopsticks in Japan long before you get to high etiquette dining. In my experience, basically every restaurant in Japan that isn't of, like, fast food tier, provides actual chopsticks instead of disposable ones.
I had mostly disposables but they were actually lathed wood. The crude rectangular cut chopsticks are terrible -- usually not for splinters, but they often break imperfectly, leaving you with two sticks with different lengths.
For those cheap chopsticks, I've found the best way to break them is to grasp them at the very tips, then move your two hands away from each other briskly without twisting, just straight apart. I haven't had many break badly since I started doing this.
Most of these are common sense. As a tourist foreigner, you also aren't expected to know all the customs but it's appreciated when you try. The one about which direction to NOT point the chopsticks in was new to me. If you just watch what other people are doing, then try to do the same thing, you're probably on the right track.
Related to eating, one pro-tip I got from a local is that when you're ready to close your tab or get your check at a bar or restaurant, you can make a small X with your index fingers.
A lot of them are not common sense at all. Even the 'serious' ones require cultural knowledge to understand. Only a subset of the rest would be un-ideal across cultures, which is what I would use to measure 'common sense'.
It's like how in some asian cultures it's rude to bring the bowl closer to you by lifting it off the table, and in others it's the opposite. And of course there's some just-so story for why, that seems to make sense if you don't know about the opposing just-so story.
Things like that aren't what I'd call common sense.
Using your fork, knife, or spoon to point at a person is absolutely considered rude. Gesturing with utensils likewise (because you can shower others with cast off detritus.)
A quick Google search will turn up hundreds of results corroborating this.
Or just consider the “asshole dinner guest” trope that appears in so many TV shows and movies. They will always be talking too loudly and gesticulating/pointing with their cutlery.
1. I have seen Japanese people do approximately half of the things on the list.
2. The two listed as "serious" are related to Japanese funerary rites, and so are clearly culturally specific.
3. Several of the things listed are perfectly acceptable in other chopstick-using cultures. Many are also perfectly acceptable to do with a fork and/or knife in cultures that use forks and knives. I think I would go so far as to say that there is not a single thing on there for which it would be widely considered rude to do in all cultures.
The use of incense to remember ancestors was spread widely across Asia by Confucianism. Chopsticks look quite similar to incense sticks, so it makes common sense to have this tradition.
Both of the serious ones are not specific to Japan, I got told off in China for standing chopsticks up in rice. I suspect anywhere with a significant Buddhist population will have the same taboo.
when you're ready to close your tab, you can make a small X with your index fingers
In the UK, we have the mime of "writing a cheque". I wonder how widespread that is, and if/when it'll fall out of relevance with the following generations who have never seen a cheque-book?
> To use the chopsticks to pick something out from near the bottom of the dish.
I think there must be some bits that are lost in translation for some of these. This makes it sound like you can't eat all of the food in a bowl with your chopsticks.
Yeah, could be - that's kind of what I mean in terms of being lost in translation. It feels like there's missing information / context in quite a few of them.
Edit: In fact I think you're completely right - "picking out" something near the bottom of the dish does suggest that.
Let me check but I think it refers to a shared dish; at an izakaiya you often order a bunch of shared food plates and then serve yourself from them.
It is definitely rude to use chopsticks that you just put in your mouth to go rooting around for something in those. You are supposed to take from the top and ideally turn them around using the back end. Some people frown on using the back ends however as it may have been touched by your hand...
Edit add: It means to dig food out, either from your own dish or a shared one. Like mixing the food up to look for something you like in it.
Kinda sad for me to know this because one of my favorite things about chopsticks is their precision. I can pick exactly the piece of food I feel like eating in the next moment. This makes it sound like I'm not supposed to be picky.
> To keep putting the chopsticks into the same side dishes. It is proper etiquette to first eat rice, move on to eat from a side dish, eat rice again, and then eat from a different side dish.
More about politeness to other guests in the context of a shared meal than being picky (and probably also with some similar logic to the TCM theories of how and what to eat, and maybe giving face to the host).
Technically in the USA: It is impolite to begin eating without first washing your hands, rest your elbows on the table, chew with your mouth open, double dip in shared dishes, leave your napkin on the table, and also all sorts of rules about which spoon to use when. None of these rules are followed by your average American and nobody really cares, I imagine it's similar to these.
The two about death are the only ones that matter. You also get a huge pass on a lot of social expectations for being a foreigner, especially if you make even a small attempt to conform and be polite.
Some of these sound just as made-up as a lot of Western dining "rules." Maybe someone more familiar with the culture can say whether or not these are true faux pas in an everyday ramen shop or similar.
No one is going to get mad at you for violating these, but they will judge you. If you're trying to get along with a person from a proper Japanese family, you'll fail unless you know all of these and more. For example, placing bowls/plates on the table too hard, or not trying hard enough to pay the bill, not serving others, pouring your own drink...the list goes on and on. Most people think these things are silly, but some absolutely do not and will treat you accordingly if you're making these mistakes. Whether or not you care is up to you and the situation. This is all also true in almost every other culture, by the way.
Even expensive restaurants in Japan use disposable chopsticks. And you only get splinters on your chopsticks because you're rubbing them in your hands and making pieces break off.
In all my decades of using chopsticks, I've never had a splinter poke me. But I've seen people rub their chopsticks then complain about splinters.
I was really confused by this because I've spent about 6 months of my life in Tokyo and got very very very few disposable chopsticks at restaurants a tier above, like, shokken ramen shops.
But the internet informs me that the composite chopsticks that I am used to seeing went away during covid and now disposable wooden chopsticks are the norm.
I don't exactly know the system for which restaurants pull out of the disposable chopsticks but I think that for example "normal" tempura, katsudon, or like soba restaurants will tend to be those.
I almost associate the cheapo reusable plastic chopsticks with some food courts or Matsuya at this point.
There are the ones that are partly rounded and only attached for a cm or so at the top. They are fine. Then there are the square ones that are attached for half or more of the length and don't always break apart cleanly. They have never poked me, but they have shed bits into my food before that I had to pick out. I will stop cleaning up the ones that don't actually need it. I didn't realize it was offensive.
he he... is that the equivalent of when I was a kid we differentiated by "drive-in", "paper-napkin restaurant" and "cloth-napkin restaurant" in order of how much trouble you would be in if you embarrassed your parents.
Fairly much common sense advice, with some cultural taboos like resting chopsticks pointing to the right.
I have always been a little embarrassed by my own use of chopsticks. When I was three or four years old a waitress in a Chinese restaurant helped me figure out a way to hold them that worked for me. Long story short, I am in my 70s and I have very effectively been getting food efficiently into my mouth with chopsticks my whole life - with horrible style.
Some of these are considered rude, but ibd
I do a lot of them, anyway e.g. rubbing disposable chopsticks to remove splinters, because a chopstick splinter in the gums is miserable, and using chopsticks to cut apart food. They seem less like faux pas and more like strategies.
Plus, not Japanese.
It is definitely not appropriate. If you break the chop sticks and use them correctly your fingers will never touch the surface where there are splinters.
I always do it under the table; something I instinctively do without ever being told to. Now I wonder if I might have picked up on nonverbal cues at some point in the past. If I were someplace where chopsticks were the norm, I would probably just carry my own as I find the disposable wooden ones very off putting. I have to wonder if there is a rule about using your own chopsticks though.
Somewhere on the page they mentioned that there are separate serving chopsticks. Turning the eating chopsticks around is probably more normal when there aren't separate ones.
I once see someone's chopsticks taken away from them and replaced with a knife and fork. I've always wondered what they did wrong. Now I see they probably covered half this list. Haha
Sheeet, seen quite a few people do it (not sure if Japanese or another culture) and just ingrained it as proper (just like slurping is in Japan). Gotta rethink that, lol.
Does it bother anyone else when people use their teeth to scrape food off a metal utensil (rather than lips, or teeth to food)? I wish English had a specific word for that affront.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by this.
I was once at a table with someone who was eating tomato soup by putting the spoon into their mouth, bitting it, and then pulling the spoon out. I was losing my mind listening to it.
Dip, ting, dip, ting. Dip, OUCH!.
They chipped their tooth. They chipped a tooth eating tomato soup.
Always interesting to see the analogs of island vs continental culture when comparing UK <-> America and Japan <-> China. Seems like islanders, due to their reliance on trade, naturally get specialized and autistic about their craft so they can have a comparative advantage, and their obsessions carry over into stuffy traditional practices.
>Always interesting to see the analogs of island vs continental culture when comparing UK <-> America and Japan <-> China.
when America was settled/founded by Britains, etiquette had not been standardized in GB either so the differences are due to parallel development, not island vs continent. That probably holds even more for differences between Japan and China.
Don't all younger Americans do this? Cutting food and pushing it onto the fork requires less dexterity than conveying it to one's mouth. I know Boomers who put down their knives after each cut (never using them to push) and swap their fork around before using it tines-down, and I think it's more comically affected than the tea–pinky thing.
You're not supposed to use the fork like a shovel, is the thing. The tines are to skewer the food, which is why tines-down makes sense. Otherwise, why not a spoon?
Also, the at-distance interaction between two tools requires much more dexterity than making your hand meet your mouth. The latter you should be able to do with your eyes closed.
If I were eating a stereotypical British meal – say: meat, potatoes, and peas – I would use the fork as a "shovel" for the peas: guide the peas onto the fork with a knife, then raise and eat from the fork.
I wouldn't switch from a fork to a spoon to eat the peas.
Well I don't personally mind, but this would be seen as poor form in the sense of the original article. You're 'supposed' to kind of spear them onto the end of the tines using the knife.
Also, with the scoop method, if the peas are hard enough, I would think they're at great risk of rolling around and off the fork. If I were going scoop style, I'd have to mash or at least flatten them a little first to prevent this.
How rude is it? When the food is not well prepared for chopsticks it’s really useful. But I do see why it’s rude, because it does imply that the food is not quite right. The Chinese restaurants in my country seem to have a problem making properly sticky rice.
> To keep putting the chopsticks into the same side dishes. It is proper etiquette to first eat rice, move on to eat from a side dish, eat rice again, and then eat from a different side dish.
So keto itself is a faux pas?
> 返し箸 Kaeshibashi (also known as 逆さ箸 sakasabashi)
> To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.
>> To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.
> Ewww. I’d rather be rude than share germs.
I think this means you should use something other than your chopsticks to share food, and not just assume that "the back of my chopsticks are germ-free, I'll use that"
You will quickly learn the first one because if you keep eating the delicious side dishes you will be only left with large amounts of bland rice to eat last.
Keto diet doesn’t exist in Japanese cuisine. If you’re going to a keto friendly place, it’s something trendy and contemporary so this traditional advice obviously doesn’t apply. It is not a faux-pas to eat non traditional / non Japanese cuisine.
Fascinating culture and raises numerous questions arising from my subsequent confusion:
1. > 返し箸 Kaeshibashi (also known as 逆さ箸 sakasabashi)
> To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.
Does this mean it is preferable to use the tips that may have touched mouth to then serve more food? Or is this considered fine because it's also taboo to touch the tips to your mouth? (which only a BARBARIAN would do!)
2. > こすり箸 Kosuribashi
> To rub waribashi (disposable chopsticks) together to remove splinters.
Just proceed to eat some splinters, then? What is the good etiquette way to handle low quality el-cheapo chopsticks?
---
I have been guilty of the above as well as:
Chigiribashi - Hold one chopstick in each hand and use them like a knife and fork to tear or cut food into smaller pieces.
Soroebashi - Hold chopsticks together and tap them on a dish or the top of the table to align the tips.
Namidabashi - Allow sauce or soup to drip from the tips of the chopsticks when eating. Namida means “tears.”
Nigiribashi - Grip both chopsticks in a fist.
Neburibashi - Lick the chopsticks.
Hashibashi - Place the chopsticks like a bridge across the top of a dish to show one is finished. Chopsticks should be placed on the hashioki (chopstick rest).
Furibashi - Shake off soup, sauce, or small bits of food from the tips of the chopsticks.
Mogibashi - Bite off and eat grains of rice that are stuck to the chopsticks.
Yokobashi - Line the chopsticks up together and use them like a spoon to scoop up food.
.. growing up my mom used to say, "What are you, raised by wolves!?" .. apparently, yes!
The preference is to use a separate pair of communal chopsticks that is not used directly for eating.
> Kosuribashi
I have heard that this one is because it's considered to be an insult implying that the chopsticks are low-quality. (That said, if your chopsticks are indeed low-quality, then avoiding splinters is probably preferable to then visibly plucking splinters out of your fingers.)
> Just proceed to eat some splinters, then? What is the good etiquette way to handle low quality el-cheapo chopsticks?
Well first of all the chopsticks are joined at the non-eating end, typically. So the splinters would be bothering your fingers more than anything.
It's rude because it insults the host, in a way. Anywhere that would care about you doing it should not be giving you the cheap chopsticks in the first place. If you're in a place that gives you them, they probably don't care about you doing it.
The metal chopsticks are pretty much only get used in Korea. The shape and material of the chopsticks varies by country so you can make a good guess as to where someone is from based on which chopsticks they use.
I think it's important to point out that these are good manners for eating with Japanese people, not good manners for eating with chopsticks. There is no requirement to emulate Japanese eating manners if you're not in Japan and not anywhere near a person raised in Japanese cultur. There are other cultures that use chopsticks that do not necessarily have these manners.
This is definitely true - but some of these are fairly universal, or at least that is my understanding. I believe the 'no sticking chopsticks upright in rice' one is shared between Japan, Korea, China, etc. for example - it looks like funerary incense/joss sticks in all three due to the shared aspects of their cultures, for example.
Glad to know I haven’t picked up any seriously bad habits, but how the heck do you keep the chopsticks aligned without tapping them somewhere?
Most of these seem related to health/sanitary practices/being considerate more than anything. Just avoiding contaminating what others are going to eat with your own utensils is an easy way to describe several of them.
You can just slide them with your fingers, even one handed, and it's not like they need to be perfectly aligned.
But, yeah, I tap them to align them all the time, have seen Japanese people do it day in and day out. I've even done it in some fine dining places in Japan. No one yelled at me, but I am a gaijin, so...
I think that one refers to doing so when there is no food on the chopsticks. Picture tapping the chopsticks against your lips to show you’re thinking, if conversing while eating. The overarching rule being that you should put the chopsticks down whenever you’re not in the middle of picking up/moving food with them.
(Unless you want to come off as imitating a Rakugo storyteller. If you do, then go ahead and use them as a talking prop. But maybe make it clear that you’re not eating with those ones, so people don’t worry you’ll flick sauce at them!)
Some of these I’ve been told are taboos in the opposite way. For example, the one about serving or taking food from the opposite end of the chopsticks, I was told, is polite. But here they say it is taboo. Maybe they meant it’s taboo not to do that?
Yes, it’s weirdly ambiguous. But even that is performative, as you’re still using an unsanitary part - the part that has touched your hand vs the part that has touched your lips.
I married an Asian woman I met at work. Our boss called me in to ask if I was serious about marrying her and I said yes. He asked if I wanted any advice and I sincerely answered that I did. Our marriage was necessarily disruptive because it meant that she would also defect. That would cause problems up and down the management chain. His advice was for me to learn how to use chopsticks. that’s it. Nothing else.
I spent months learning how to use them properly in secret and finally deployed my skills when I thought I was pretty good. She didn’t notice. I then realized she almost always used a fork. In high school and college their meals were always served hastily and the students always brought a fork or spoon. they would eat standing up and had maybe five minutes to get the job done. No time for chopsticks.
When her parents came out to visit us after we got married I frantically asked her advice about good chopstick etiquette. I very much did not wish to cause her to lose face. She didn’t give a flying fuck. I honestly think I married one of the freest spirits in Asia, which is not necessarily a compliment.
She said I was doing fine and literally refused to give me any feedback at all, incorrectly claiming she wasn’t even that good. In fact, I think she only started to resume using chopsticks because I ended up finding them useful and now far prefer them to silverware.
I ended up having to learn most of the customs by watching people in restaurants. Just learning how to set them down right took additional months because I noticed far too late that they set their chopsticks down in a sort of V shape which is much harder than one might expect. Also, I am left-handed, but taught myself to do it right handed on the theory of that would also help me not lose face in front of the in-laws. It turns out they are also highly unconventional and probably didn’t care about my chopstick use one way or the other.
When we had kids, I would learn that Asian children who don’t learn to use chopsticks represent another way to lose face. It results in titanic power struggles within the family and makes everyone miserable. It’s a little like forcing kids here in the USA to eat their vegetables. By this time I had learned of her disinterest, so neither of us bothered to teach them. All of our children naturally picked it up with no apparent effort, including one who is very severely developmentally disabled.
I feel like a lot of this is culture and class specific. I can't speak for Japan, but in China there are at least as many different levels of chopstick-using skill as anywhere in the west. Kids and elderly who can't pick up a peanut or a cherry tomato, people who find it entirely unproblematic to stab a slippery dumpling, people who think it's stupid to waste time trying to get fried rice into your mouth with chopsticks and just grab a spoon instead, people who dredge their way through the hotpot to find the treat they're looking for...
I often get the sense that foreigners getting stressed about (or feeling pride in) how well they use chopsticks is a weird kind of orientalism. Because, like, who cares if someone shows up in a western restaurant and uses a spoon instead of knife to saw through something, or grabs a big hunk with a fork and takes a bite, leaving the rest on the fork? Maybe you wouldn't do it if you were having dinner with the queen, but any other context nobody cares. I'm sure parents still try to teach their kids to eat polite way, and maybe even feel a bit embarrassed if their kids show themselves to be less well-behaved than the neighbors', but that's a universal thing so, eh.
lol describing me as an Orientalist will amuse my family to no end but you made some cogent observations. All I can say is: face is a big thing in China. I respect my in-laws hugely. I did not want them to lose face nor to be made to feel uncomfortable on my behalf if I could help it. As far as I can tell Orientalism and pride had nothing to do with it. Or maybe you’re right and I am a deeply closeted chiaboo. I’ll watch some anime or whatever and get right back to you.
The thing I find interesting with orientalism is that it has a mirror in chauvinism from the other direction, both sides reinforcing the idea that there is something special about the cultural norms of people from East Asia in particular. It's almost as if there is a deliberate effort to reify cultural differences in a way that feels counterproductive.
I think these forces are especially noticeable living as a migrant to this part of the world, in that you sometimes find people gushing over you for being able to use what is actually a pretty unremarkable set of utensils or occasionally shitting on you for not knowing an obscure bit of etiquette that locals rarely perform. Either way it's just another form of the "western people like this, Chinese people like that" discourse which at best is vapid and at worst straight-up racist. I don't think it really helps to build a common sense of humanity.
Anyway, I feel like this kind of article is representative of the problem, in that it serves to create anxiety that there is some secret etiquette that must be performed in order to not be seen as an uncultured barbarian. Again, I have no experience with Japan so maybe they really are just That Damn Serious about how they use their chopsticks, but I doubt it. At least for me it was quite reassuring to find that - outside of the folks who really did hold chauvinist and/or racist views - most people in China cared no more about how I ate than how anyone else ate, and that the range of what was socially acceptable eating for all people was wide enough to make it clear that these sorts of articles tend to be either deliberately divisive or out-of-touch.
> it was quite reassuring to find that - outside of the folks who really did hold chauvinist and/or racist views - most people in China cared no more about how I ate than how anyone else ate
OK I agree completely. You will see atrocious manners in an average bar there. But my in-laws are brilliant scientists and thoughtful, gracious people. My mother in law is my hero. If I can reduce any friction in her life I will. Likewise when they visited us they were always closely observant of my behavior.
I think some of what you are characterizing as chauvinism or Orientalism is what I view as courtesy? I could very well be wrong on that one or misinterpreting you.
I think the confusion may be in a situation (regardless of culture) where one knows that a loved one’s family has a high regard for courtesy and manners, and you’re willing and eager to please them, sometimes this desire could be mistaken by others for an obsession or “reification” of the specific culture of the family.
I have enjoyed the politeness of the comments from you both and appreciate your courtesy!
I lived in Japan for nearly 6 years and found that concern for faux pas such as these for hashi (chopsticks) are way way overblown. I used at least one thousand disposable pairs of chopsticks in Japan and never had the desire to smooth them -- they are higher quality than Panda Express offerings. I knew about this "taboo" prior to arrival and it was simply irrelevant. Avoid the obvious symbolic references to makura gohan (bowl of rice offering to the deceased) at the end of your meal and you are probably golden. If you have kids in Japan, gaijin passing food with chopsticks to their children in a restaurant is going to be seen in a neutral or even sympathetic light. The Japanese may silently judge but they rarely sneer or harass. If you spend a lot of time with modern Japanese families you might be surprised to discover Western stereotypes of Japanese taboos are sometimes outdated and even incorrect. They are very aware that foreigners will not understand all of their customs, and many of those customs have decreasing importance as their culture evolves.
Passing food by placing it directly on someone else's plate or bowl is fine. The taboo is specifically about two people holding onto the same thing at the same tine with chopsticks, the way cremated bone fragments are placed into the urn at kotsuage.
Other than that, I agree. It's kind of like trying to apply Emily Post's etiquette to TV dinners: many of these "rules" would be viewed as prissy by Japanese and some (eg. giving your miso soup a swirl with your chopsticks before drinking) are very, very commonly ignored.
The main one for me is not putting your chopsticks on top of the bowl rim or putting the chopsticks sticking up from the rice. Those are both intuitive natural actions for me. In the US I rarely see chopstick rests so I'm always wonderting what to do with them when I'm not using them.
There's a fine line between making ppl civilized and fascism-like level of control. And I believe Japan errs on the other side too much with their ridiculous number of such rules in all areas of life. Even though I recently visited Japan, I can't really speak to how happy they are, but the stereotype is that they are not the happiest ppl out there. I believe their obedience to all such societal rules has a role in it.
I'm curious for a native's opinion on how important these are. The etiquette I was taught growing up in the US is a mix of:
- several things that are often quoted as good etiquette but nobody follows (elbows off the table, correct order of dishes)
- lots of things that are customary but nobody cares if you don't follow it (napkin on lap, placement of silverware)
- only a few things that actually matter and would be considered rude by normal people (don't touch shared food with used silverware, keep your mouth closed while chewing)
Of these several dozen "rules" for chopsticks, how many actually fall into the last category of things that actually matter?
Native here. I'd say only about 6 out of the 47 listed actually matter (Awasebashi, Urabashi, Kamibashi, Jikabashi, Tatebashi, and Neburibashi).
Most of these are only for formal settings. Honestly, I haven't even heard of some of them.
Aside from Tatebashi (sticking chopsticks in rice), they’re mostly avoided for hygiene reasons. As for Nigiribashi (clutching them in a fist), it just looks a bit strange for an adult to do.
People told me to avoid placing chopsticks upwards in a bowl before I even went to Japan so that is the only one I’d keep in mind.
Given how many of these are clever tricks that I learned from seeing Japanese people eat, like aligning the chopsticks quickly in a plate or cleaning waribashi from splinters by rubbing them together, I’d not take all of these seriously, but it’s cool to know nonetheless.
I also understand that in the US it is the etiquette to cut your food up all at once, and then put the knife down, and then move your fork to your right hand, and then eat all the pieces using just the fork.
Yeah it's a pretty flexible rule, but it's at least something to think about, unlike a lot of other "rules" that you're allowed to completely disregard for your entire life. I probably was too strict in describing that last bullet point.
My partner and I share everything we eat. I think we have passed food between chopsticks before. What's the "proper" way to do this? Just reach in to the other bowl?
Also wondering how many of these apply in a Chinese setting or any other chopstick culture. Are there a different set of taboos?
Sure, and American table manners are the cause of rising fascism, there's a whole Wikipedia article on all their rules. [1] They're more worried about elbows on the table than the increase in authoritarianism.
So it's the age of AI. And this seems like a great new benchmark! Lots of text, structured but each item a separate "task". Each thing requiring its own new image + textual representation.
I copy + pasted the whole article (minus the few included images) and added this prompt in Gemini 3 Pro:
> Take each of the following and add an image representing the act being described. The image should be very basic. Think of signs in buildings - exit signs, bathroom door signs, no smoking signs, etc. That style of simplicity. Just simple, flat, elegant vector graphic lines for the chopsticks, hands, bowls, etc.
I think this is pretty dang good for a one-shot run. I also ran this through Claude Opus 4.6 Extended (doesn't generate images directly, so it made an HTML page and some vector icons). Not as good as Gemini IMO. See here if curious: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8b6589b3-4da4-4fd5-b862-c...
Anyone able to do this better with a different prompt or model (or both)?
Japanese people will tell you about those because they really don't like seeing people do it.
The rest, well, don't worry about it.
Others I don't know that I would have much of an inclination to do and haven't seen but am not sure if it's because it really is a faux pas or just because no one else really tends to do it either.
Whereas when I had a date with a girl from Kyoto, one of the first things that happened when we went to eat was she had to stop me from picking up my chopsticks impolitely and show me the proper way of doing it.
Suffice it to say my Osaka-learned table manners and speech patterns meant there was no second date.
I don't know where you're from, so apologies if this is an unfair assumption, but in countries like the US or Australia people often seem less attuned to social class, whereas in places like the UK, France, and indeed Japan, those distinctions can carry more weight, even if they almost always go unspoken.
(I did try to explain to her that it was more related to my being left handed than my attempting to emulate European behavior. It didn't seem to make much difference to her.)
This explains the difference. The European method seems the most optimal.
On the other hand, I don't think Americans ever pick up food with their fork and switch the loaded fork to the other hand, especially if the food is scooped, not speared. A lot of food would be dropped in the process.
As a non-conformist, I taught myself to use my knife in the non-dominant hand so that the fork is used in the same hand regardless of knife usage.
Or, it could be what my English son-in-law does, he uses his fork and knife, in different hands to aid in pushing food onto his fork. (He's right handed, not that it matters in this case.)
It went underground - those who know just note that you're nekulturny, and move on.
They don't bother telling you about it, nowadays nothing good would come of that.
Most people have settled into Estuary, which has split into a high/corporate/media Estuary-tinged dialect, and low street Estuary. The BBC has its own special neutral version.
Fifty years ago the difference between upper class/BBC/RP and street English was almost hilariously obvious. Watch a BBC show from the 50s and 60s - even something like Dr Who - and everyone is speaking a unique RP dialect that doesn't exist any more.
In media, you’re quite correct - it has become rare bar presenters who are now in their 80s or older.
We just grow up with it because it’s how our parents and the parents of our friends speak.
If you want to change your accent you can, of course, get elocution lessons but most Brits do not. We just have a large variety of accents of which RP is one.
I didn’t have lessons for it and I don’t know anyone else that did. It’s just how we speak.
How so?
You don't have to follow them, but you do you should be ready to accept the consequences of your choice.
In the area I grew up in, caring too much about useless aesthetic stuff like “elbows on the table” would have a social cost.
Mind you, I'm not saying that standards must be followed. I am just saying the same thing I tell my kids:
- the standards are there, wishing they didn't exist doesn't invalidate them
- the reason rules and standards came to existence might or might not be applicable to our current context, but some people will expect you to follow them regardless.
- If a rule or standard seems silly to you, make your best attempt at understanding why people would still follow it. (Chesterton's fence)
- You are free to not comply to some rules, but always be ready to accept the consequences of your decisions.
- What your friends are doing or not doing is not reason enough for you to change your behavior or choices.
But not observing them does. There are standards no one in the world follows anymore. They may still “be there”, but are only used for mocking purposes.
> If a rule or standard seems silly to you, make your best attempt at understanding why people would still follow it. (Chesterton's fence)
The corollary to that is that anyone who rebukes anyone else for not following a standard must be able to explain why it exists. “Because it’s rude” it’s not good enough, explain why it’s considered rude.
Are you just looking for an argument here?
Not quite. My original comment was in response to "I see people violating rule X anywhere, even though I was told it was 'wrong'".
All I am saying is one shouldn't be basing their behavior solely on what they see others "getting away with".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
I had a friend who came from a working class culture where social aspiration was measured by tiny nuances, like whether someone put milk in their tea before or after pouring it.
Outside of that culture these nuances were irrelevant. Middle and upper class people had a completely different set of etiquette markers - as well as more or less obvious displays of wealth - which the working class aspirers were oblivious to.
If people act like a standard doesn't exist, then the standard actually doesn't exist, because that's the only thing that defines a standard.
Standards are not absolutes.
I guess that’s the cultural divide that occurs when one community is fishing and trading while the other does, like, competitive perfumed calligraphy or whatever.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/1026+CD+Durgerdam/@52.3790...
I dated many foreign girls and it was always fun to discover the cultural differences.
There are similar faux-pas in France but, really, nobody with an ounce of common sense cares. You like your red wine cold as I do? Someone will maybe mention that you will be loosing some aroma znd that's all. You add sugar and ice? This is probably not a drink for you and you will get some laughs but that's all.
I eat my starters after the main meal in the company restaurant, nobody cares.
You are there to have pleasure, this is not West Point
Fun fact: "chambrer le vin" i.e getting (usually red) wine from storage temperature to "room temperature" comes from a time where said room temperature was well below 20 degC (more like 13-15 degC), not the comfortable 20+ degC that people like to enjoy these days.
One of my favorite alcoholic drinks is port + ice, which it sounds like the only difference here would be that wine + sugar + ice would be much weaker in terms of alcohol content.
Jarvis Cocker-san.
I did not make that mistake ever again.
For context - it's a way of saying "death to your family" or something akin to that.
I don't think an elderly person who lives in a different country is actually a good guide to modern practice.
Also, I was asking about Japan. I believed my Chinese teacher (in China).
> For context - it's a way of saying "death to your family" or something akin to that.
Nothing so specific. It is felt to resemble something you'd see at a funeral.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_utensil_etiquette
Edit: The wiki on chopsticks has an etiquette section broken down by country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chopsticks#Chopstick_customs,_...
Strange that the wiki implies you set the knife down after each cut.
Is the issue that people have difficulty cutting with their left hand? Because if you can the process of eating is pretty efficient: hold with fork, cut with knife, move food on fork to mouth …
Absolutely a non-issue in reality obviously. But nowadays I do hold my cutlery "properly" as a result. To me it now feels natural to bring the fork to my mouth with the left hand. Or the right one, really, but I default to holding it in the left.
>Bread is always served and can be placed on the table cloth itself
This is extremely rare, to the point where I can't remember the last time I saw it. Is bread really.. always served?
> In the United Kingdom, the fork tines face upward while sitting on the table.
Tines down isn't uncommon in the UK either
>if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
>it is permissible to place a small piece of bread at the end of the fork for dipping
Its also 100% fine to dip bread in a sauce with your fingers. Putting bread on a fork if you've licked the fork and then dipping the bread would cause everyone to hate you, so *don't do this*
At any kind of formal dining? Yes, absolutely, I would expect there to be a bread roll & a pat of butter served at the beginning of the meal. Both in restaurants & formal dinners in my experience.
It's not an absolute rule though & you generally wouldn't expect bread to be served like this at home in the UK. I think the French are more likely to serve bread at home as well.
> I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
So the norm is that if you're eating one-handed, you use your non-dominant hand? That seems really counterintuitive to me; is it because you're so used to having the fork in the non-dominant hand that it feels awkward the other way? Which hand do you use when eating with a spoon?
If people don't even know it, it's not part of the culture.
This makes total sense to me. There is no monolithic “culture”— there are multiple related cultures, differing little in essence but differing greatly in the details. And each individual is usually only partially ignorant anyway.
Culture changes, too, and asymmetrically. So the “done thing” may be done be very few anymore.
Add an s and it gets a little better.
What do you think "reading" means?
1. Upper class stopped being formal because formality stopped being a signal of upper class.
2. Middle class stopped having social gatherings in general.
So, like, "it is a part of the culture" in the same sense as traditional outfits are a part of the culture - most people have very vague awareness, nobody really cares.
This is unnecessarily flippant, trivializing, and reductive.
The upper classes had the time and position to refine manners. I think one mistake people make is to think manners are arbitrary nonsense. But manners, when fitting, honor the self and others with conduct that suits the dignity of the human person and functions as a sign of that dignity. You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.
I’m not one for stiff artifice especially when slavishly applied, but I don’t think manners as such are arbitrary. That nobody cares would explain why so many people look like slobs and behave like boors.
If we begin with human nature and then view the virtues as perfections that actualize the fullness of that nature, then it becomes clearer that some behavior is more fitting and honored better by certain practices.
The upper classes in the UK regularly practice tone policing, where legitimate dissent is waved away as uncouth, even though what they say and do is far worse in private, and sometimes in public.
If you're looking for human dignity, I don't think this is its natural home.
This phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because what one considers basic etiquette another considers a theatre. The end result is often that people gather in order to perform the spectacle of manners rather than use manners to facilitate a social gathering.
Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan, but since the language is difficult to learn and frankly speaking nobody cares about Poland, barely anyone even knows this.
Also lots of corporations prefer "american style" approach of just refering by name (even to the CEO), so this dissapears.
Probably could write few pages about this, but nobody would care to read.
On a side note, I find interesting is that Czech language still naturally uses that plural form we abandon due to popularity of pan/pani forms.
> I'm interested in learning more about this!
It's very simple, actually.
For strangers, you use the third person and the title « Pan » or « Pani » (Sir or Lady). You avoid pronouns, « The Lady has forgotten the Lady's purse on the table ».
For friends, you use the t-form ("ty", thou), and use a diminutive rather than the full name. « Johny, you've forgotten your bag on the table ».
For work colleagues, you traditionally use « Pan » or « Pani » with the full form of the first name. « Mister John, the mister's bag is on the table ». This is perceived as old-fashioned, and is increasingly being replaced by the t-form.
The v-form has fallen into disuse, as it was promoted by the Communist regime.
(The old-fashioned honorifics still exist, but they are only used in administrative correspondence: the only time when you're "the respectable gentleman" is when you need to pay taxes.)
You left out most of the interesting things.
For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing. Someone from Finland can actually understand this topic, since Finnish has multiple cases - more than in Polish language (meanwhile English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two).
The grammar is changing in many ways (for example, the inanimate masculine is being replaced with the animated, kroić kotleta), but this was about honorifics.
Supposedly in Finish language you retained this difference and it can be heard in some words e.g. "raha" ("money" in Finish?).
Personally I never "heard" it - sounded as a regular "h" sound for me.
Reminds me of an episode on youtube of How The British Upper Class Live | Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over where the presenter eats her eggs "wrong", much to the dismay of her posh host who tells her (in his subtle British way) that she should "sort that out".
Anyone from a particularly wealthy family can probably add an additional couple contexts on the high end. Every single one of those situations has slightly different "rules" for what's acceptable.
_grape scissors_
If you must mix soup, there is a spoon, or you simply bring it to your lips and it will mix as you tilt and sip from it.
Just like the next term on the list does not prohibit eating food on the bottom but rather digging into the bowl instead of eating in top down order.
The waiter (who had a bit of a sense of humor) brought me exactly ONE chopstick. I laughed and repeated 請給我另一個筷子 (Please give me another chopstick) and he brought out another one.
Of course later my friend told me that I should have used 雙 to indicate I wanted a "pair" of chopsticks.
That's hard to guess. There are three common measure words meaning "pair"; 副 is for "pairs" that are connected, like a "pair" of scissors in English, but 双 and 对 are basically identical in significance as far as I know.
> The waiter (who had a bit of a sense of humor) brought me exactly ONE chopstick.
Slightly unfair, since 一个筷子, beyond being semantically anomalous, is more or less ungrammatical too. If you actually wanted one chopstick, you'd say 一只筷子.
What kind of path did you take that taught you how to say 另一个 before you learned about measure words?
> What kind of path did you take that taught you how to say 另一个 before you learned about measure words?
The self-taught kind. :)
That said, chopstick etiquette is definitely evolving. Something like chobujubashi isn’t enforced as strictly anymore, especially with more awareness around left-handed users. Kaeshibashi, on the other hand, is becoming more common, and in some social circles, not doing it can actually come across as rude.
I was always under the impression this was the polite thing to do.
"""
Jikabashi
To use one’s own chopsticks instead of serving chopsticks to take food from a large serving dish.
"""
Also I'm not sure how you're supposed to eat e.g. fried rice without yokobashi or kakibashi.
Also! I thought kaeshibashi was a good thing. I've definitely seen people do that at parties.
(Not gonna direct quote because the damn site doesn't allow copy-pasting so they don't get a link, paraphrased):
Kirai-bashi would be literally translated to "dislike-chopsticks" and means bad chopstick table-manners. Hashi is chopsticks and bashi is the voiced form of it.
So the bashi suffix/word on the end of all of these just means chopsticks it seems.
Rendaku, i.e. the voicing of the initial consonant, happens in the native Japanese words (i.e. not in the Japanese words of Chinese origin), in most cases when they are a part of a compound word and they are not the initial word. This serves indeed to distinguish a sequence of unrelated words from a compound word.
There are exceptions when rendaku does not happen, but typically whenever a word like hashi becomes a part of a compound word it will be voiced to -bashi.
"H" is a special case among the consonants, because in old Japanese it was pronounced as "p", which is why it is voiced as "b". Later, in initial positions the pronunciation was changed to "f" and even later the pronunciation was changed to "h". The "f" pronunciation has been retained only before "u", like in Fuji. In non initial positions, the original "p" has become later "v" and even later "w".
These pronunciation changes happened after the creation of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, so they were not reflected in writing. The orthographic reform that was forced after WWII has brought the written form of the words closer to the pronunciation, e.g. by writing consistently "w" where it is pronounced so. Before WWII, many words written now with "-wa-" were still written with "-ha-", a spelling that has been preserved now only in the particle "wa" (like the spelling corresponding to the old pronunciation "wo" has been preserved for the particle "o").
While the Japanese orthographic reform had some positive effects, in simplifying a little the Japanese writing, it also had the effect that for someone who knows only the modern written Japanese it is difficult to read the Japanese books published before WWII, where many different kanji are used and also their hiragana transcriptions are different.
I assume that this was actually an effect intended by the American occupation forces, as a similar policy was applied by the Russians in all the territories of the Soviet Union (except the Baltic countries), where they forced the native populations to change their writing systems to the Cyrillic alphabet, in order to make difficult for the younger generations to read anything dating from before the Russian occupation.
Well, there is a convention that syllables starting with h- are spelled with f- (in foreign transcription) if the following vowel is -u. There's not much difference in the pronunciation itself; maybe there was more of one when the spelling convention was set.
Do I just use chopsticks that will put splinters in my mouth just to not appear rude?
But everyone I met who does splinter cleanup does it _every time_ even without a cursory inspection. So the metaphor is… maybe more apt that you are cleaning a plate despite not seeing whether it’s clean or not first
I always rub mine together, but I suppose it would be interesting to know if you didn't, how often would something bad happen? Is it more likely to hurt your mouth or your fingers?
But you move away from break apart disposable chopsticks in Japan long before you get to high etiquette dining. In my experience, basically every restaurant in Japan that isn't of, like, fast food tier, provides actual chopsticks instead of disposable ones.
Related to eating, one pro-tip I got from a local is that when you're ready to close your tab or get your check at a bar or restaurant, you can make a small X with your index fingers.
Really useful in a busy bar!
A lot of them are not common sense at all. Even the 'serious' ones require cultural knowledge to understand. Only a subset of the rest would be un-ideal across cultures, which is what I would use to measure 'common sense'.
It's like how in some asian cultures it's rude to bring the bowl closer to you by lifting it off the table, and in others it's the opposite. And of course there's some just-so story for why, that seems to make sense if you don't know about the opposing just-so story.
Things like that aren't what I'd call common sense.
A quick Google search will turn up hundreds of results corroborating this.
2. The two listed as "serious" are related to Japanese funerary rites, and so are clearly culturally specific.
3. Several of the things listed are perfectly acceptable in other chopstick-using cultures. Many are also perfectly acceptable to do with a fork and/or knife in cultures that use forks and knives. I think I would go so far as to say that there is not a single thing on there for which it would be widely considered rude to do in all cultures.
There are people in Japan who are rude or who do not have as good manners or etiquette when they are eating alone!
If everyone followed all manners all the times they wouldn't really be encoded woould they?
I suspect it mostly affects left handed people.
> To use the chopsticks to pick something out from near the bottom of the dish.
I think there must be some bits that are lost in translation for some of these. This makes it sound like you can't eat all of the food in a bowl with your chopsticks.
Edit: In fact I think you're completely right - "picking out" something near the bottom of the dish does suggest that.
It is definitely rude to use chopsticks that you just put in your mouth to go rooting around for something in those. You are supposed to take from the top and ideally turn them around using the back end. Some people frown on using the back ends however as it may have been touched by your hand...
Edit add: It means to dig food out, either from your own dish or a shared one. Like mixing the food up to look for something you like in it.
To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.
> 移り箸 Utsuribashi (also known as 渡り箸 wataribashi)
> To keep putting the chopsticks into the same side dishes. It is proper etiquette to first eat rice, move on to eat from a side dish, eat rice again, and then eat from a different side dish.
More about politeness to other guests in the context of a shared meal than being picky (and probably also with some similar logic to the TCM theories of how and what to eat, and maybe giving face to the host).
In all my decades of using chopsticks, I've never had a splinter poke me. But I've seen people rub their chopsticks then complain about splinters.
But the internet informs me that the composite chopsticks that I am used to seeing went away during covid and now disposable wooden chopsticks are the norm.
I almost associate the cheapo reusable plastic chopsticks with some food courts or Matsuya at this point.
I have always been a little embarrassed by my own use of chopsticks. When I was three or four years old a waitress in a Chinese restaurant helped me figure out a way to hold them that worked for me. Long story short, I am in my 70s and I have very effectively been getting food efficiently into my mouth with chopsticks my whole life - with horrible style.
It is definitely not appropriate. If you break the chop sticks and use them correctly your fingers will never touch the surface where there are splinters.
Huh, this is something that I did consistently, believing it to be good etiquette.
That made me chuckle
I was once at a table with someone who was eating tomato soup by putting the spoon into their mouth, bitting it, and then pulling the spoon out. I was losing my mind listening to it.
Dip, ting, dip, ting. Dip, OUCH!.
They chipped their tooth. They chipped a tooth eating tomato soup.
edit: Gemini makes great infographics https://imgur.com/a/V2D9VlM
when America was settled/founded by Britains, etiquette had not been standardized in GB either so the differences are due to parallel development, not island vs continent. That probably holds even more for differences between Japan and China.
Also, the at-distance interaction between two tools requires much more dexterity than making your hand meet your mouth. The latter you should be able to do with your eyes closed.
I wouldn't switch from a fork to a spoon to eat the peas.
Other vegetables are available. I'm not judging.
Well I don't personally mind, but this would be seen as poor form in the sense of the original article. You're 'supposed' to kind of spear them onto the end of the tines using the knife.
Also, with the scoop method, if the peas are hard enough, I would think they're at great risk of rolling around and off the fork. If I were going scoop style, I'd have to mash or at least flatten them a little first to prevent this.
No wonder robotics is hard.
How rude is it? When the food is not well prepared for chopsticks it’s really useful. But I do see why it’s rude, because it does imply that the food is not quite right. The Chinese restaurants in my country seem to have a problem making properly sticky rice.
!!! (Serious) To stand chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice. This is taboo, as it is the way rice is presented as a Buddhist funeral offering.
Does it mean without food?
> To keep putting the chopsticks into the same side dishes. It is proper etiquette to first eat rice, move on to eat from a side dish, eat rice again, and then eat from a different side dish.
So keto itself is a faux pas?
> 返し箸 Kaeshibashi (also known as 逆さ箸 sakasabashi)
> To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.
Ewww. I’d rather be rude than share germs.
> Ewww. I’d rather be rude than share germs.
I think this means you should use something other than your chopsticks to share food, and not just assume that "the back of my chopsticks are germ-free, I'll use that"
At a Chinese restaurant, you're not given more than a small bowl of rice anyway. There is no way to "be left with large amounts".
They piece through the ashes of a cremation and pass them between each other?
I know the modern style of conveyor belt cremation is a bit impersonal.
It’ll take me a while to process this.
1. > 返し箸 Kaeshibashi (also known as 逆さ箸 sakasabashi)
> To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.
Does this mean it is preferable to use the tips that may have touched mouth to then serve more food? Or is this considered fine because it's also taboo to touch the tips to your mouth? (which only a BARBARIAN would do!)
2. > こすり箸 Kosuribashi
> To rub waribashi (disposable chopsticks) together to remove splinters.
Just proceed to eat some splinters, then? What is the good etiquette way to handle low quality el-cheapo chopsticks?
---
I have been guilty of the above as well as:
Chigiribashi - Hold one chopstick in each hand and use them like a knife and fork to tear or cut food into smaller pieces.
Soroebashi - Hold chopsticks together and tap them on a dish or the top of the table to align the tips.
Namidabashi - Allow sauce or soup to drip from the tips of the chopsticks when eating. Namida means “tears.”
Nigiribashi - Grip both chopsticks in a fist.
Neburibashi - Lick the chopsticks.
Hashibashi - Place the chopsticks like a bridge across the top of a dish to show one is finished. Chopsticks should be placed on the hashioki (chopstick rest).
Furibashi - Shake off soup, sauce, or small bits of food from the tips of the chopsticks.
Mogibashi - Bite off and eat grains of rice that are stuck to the chopsticks.
Yokobashi - Line the chopsticks up together and use them like a spoon to scoop up food.
.. growing up my mom used to say, "What are you, raised by wolves!?" .. apparently, yes!
The preference is to use a separate pair of communal chopsticks that is not used directly for eating.
> Kosuribashi
I have heard that this one is because it's considered to be an insult implying that the chopsticks are low-quality. (That said, if your chopsticks are indeed low-quality, then avoiding splinters is probably preferable to then visibly plucking splinters out of your fingers.)
Well first of all the chopsticks are joined at the non-eating end, typically. So the splinters would be bothering your fingers more than anything.
It's rude because it insults the host, in a way. Anywhere that would care about you doing it should not be giving you the cheap chopsticks in the first place. If you're in a place that gives you them, they probably don't care about you doing it.
That’s why you don’t need to rub to get rid of splinters.
If that was always true, there wouldn't be a word for it.
I've been given some pretty gnarly chopsticks at roadside places outside the main metropolitan areas.
Most of these seem related to health/sanitary practices/being considerate more than anything. Just avoiding contaminating what others are going to eat with your own utensils is an easy way to describe several of them.
But, yeah, I tap them to align them all the time, have seen Japanese people do it day in and day out. I've even done it in some fine dining places in Japan. No one yelled at me, but I am a gaijin, so...
> To take the tips of the chopsticks in one’s mouth.
Sometimes I'm having a hard time avoiding that. Apparently I need more practice.
(Unless you want to come off as imitating a Rakugo storyteller. If you do, then go ahead and use them as a talking prop. But maybe make it clear that you’re not eating with those ones, so people don’t worry you’ll flick sauce at them!)
I spent months learning how to use them properly in secret and finally deployed my skills when I thought I was pretty good. She didn’t notice. I then realized she almost always used a fork. In high school and college their meals were always served hastily and the students always brought a fork or spoon. they would eat standing up and had maybe five minutes to get the job done. No time for chopsticks.
When her parents came out to visit us after we got married I frantically asked her advice about good chopstick etiquette. I very much did not wish to cause her to lose face. She didn’t give a flying fuck. I honestly think I married one of the freest spirits in Asia, which is not necessarily a compliment.
She said I was doing fine and literally refused to give me any feedback at all, incorrectly claiming she wasn’t even that good. In fact, I think she only started to resume using chopsticks because I ended up finding them useful and now far prefer them to silverware.
I ended up having to learn most of the customs by watching people in restaurants. Just learning how to set them down right took additional months because I noticed far too late that they set their chopsticks down in a sort of V shape which is much harder than one might expect. Also, I am left-handed, but taught myself to do it right handed on the theory of that would also help me not lose face in front of the in-laws. It turns out they are also highly unconventional and probably didn’t care about my chopstick use one way or the other.
When we had kids, I would learn that Asian children who don’t learn to use chopsticks represent another way to lose face. It results in titanic power struggles within the family and makes everyone miserable. It’s a little like forcing kids here in the USA to eat their vegetables. By this time I had learned of her disinterest, so neither of us bothered to teach them. All of our children naturally picked it up with no apparent effort, including one who is very severely developmentally disabled.
I often get the sense that foreigners getting stressed about (or feeling pride in) how well they use chopsticks is a weird kind of orientalism. Because, like, who cares if someone shows up in a western restaurant and uses a spoon instead of knife to saw through something, or grabs a big hunk with a fork and takes a bite, leaving the rest on the fork? Maybe you wouldn't do it if you were having dinner with the queen, but any other context nobody cares. I'm sure parents still try to teach their kids to eat polite way, and maybe even feel a bit embarrassed if their kids show themselves to be less well-behaved than the neighbors', but that's a universal thing so, eh.
The thing I find interesting with orientalism is that it has a mirror in chauvinism from the other direction, both sides reinforcing the idea that there is something special about the cultural norms of people from East Asia in particular. It's almost as if there is a deliberate effort to reify cultural differences in a way that feels counterproductive.
I think these forces are especially noticeable living as a migrant to this part of the world, in that you sometimes find people gushing over you for being able to use what is actually a pretty unremarkable set of utensils or occasionally shitting on you for not knowing an obscure bit of etiquette that locals rarely perform. Either way it's just another form of the "western people like this, Chinese people like that" discourse which at best is vapid and at worst straight-up racist. I don't think it really helps to build a common sense of humanity.
Anyway, I feel like this kind of article is representative of the problem, in that it serves to create anxiety that there is some secret etiquette that must be performed in order to not be seen as an uncultured barbarian. Again, I have no experience with Japan so maybe they really are just That Damn Serious about how they use their chopsticks, but I doubt it. At least for me it was quite reassuring to find that - outside of the folks who really did hold chauvinist and/or racist views - most people in China cared no more about how I ate than how anyone else ate, and that the range of what was socially acceptable eating for all people was wide enough to make it clear that these sorts of articles tend to be either deliberately divisive or out-of-touch.
OK I agree completely. You will see atrocious manners in an average bar there. But my in-laws are brilliant scientists and thoughtful, gracious people. My mother in law is my hero. If I can reduce any friction in her life I will. Likewise when they visited us they were always closely observant of my behavior.
I think some of what you are characterizing as chauvinism or Orientalism is what I view as courtesy? I could very well be wrong on that one or misinterpreting you.
I think the confusion may be in a situation (regardless of culture) where one knows that a loved one’s family has a high regard for courtesy and manners, and you’re willing and eager to please them, sometimes this desire could be mistaken by others for an obsession or “reification” of the specific culture of the family.
I have enjoyed the politeness of the comments from you both and appreciate your courtesy!
I've seen people eat noodles and broth (e.g., ramen) like that a million times? What am I missing? How do you properly eat noodles and broth?
But it's fast and efficient, which is why people do it anyway.
Other than that, I agree. It's kind of like trying to apply Emily Post's etiquette to TV dinners: many of these "rules" would be viewed as prissy by Japanese and some (eg. giving your miso soup a swirl with your chopsticks before drinking) are very, very commonly ignored.
i see what you did there
Most of these are only for formal settings. Honestly, I haven't even heard of some of them. Aside from Tatebashi (sticking chopsticks in rice), they’re mostly avoided for hygiene reasons. As for Nigiribashi (clutching them in a fist), it just looks a bit strange for an adult to do.
Given how many of these are clever tricks that I learned from seeing Japanese people eat, like aligning the chopsticks quickly in a plate or cleaning waribashi from splinters by rubbing them together, I’d not take all of these seriously, but it’s cool to know nonetheless.
I wonder how many of these words a typical Japanese person can list off the top of their head.
Also wondering how many of these apply in a Chinese setting or any other chopstick culture. Are there a different set of taboos?
> To rub waribashi (disposable chopsticks) together to remove splinters.
Stopped reading there. If you're handing me crappy chopsticks to eat with I am rubbing them together first.
hold the chopstick however you like. so long as you don’t drop things unintentionally it’s fine.
See, I can make up dumb shit too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_manners_in_North_America
I copy + pasted the whole article (minus the few included images) and added this prompt in Gemini 3 Pro:
> Take each of the following and add an image representing the act being described. The image should be very basic. Think of signs in buildings - exit signs, bathroom door signs, no smoking signs, etc. That style of simplicity. Just simple, flat, elegant vector graphic lines for the chopsticks, hands, bowls, etc.
Google Gemini output: https://gemini.google.com/share/11df1bc53e3d
I think this is pretty dang good for a one-shot run. I also ran this through Claude Opus 4.6 Extended (doesn't generate images directly, so it made an HTML page and some vector icons). Not as good as Gemini IMO. See here if curious: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8b6589b3-4da4-4fd5-b862-c...
Anyone able to do this better with a different prompt or model (or both)?
But next time, keep your findings for a thread related to the topic of LLM wonders, not when it's unrelated, such as chopsticks.