I like to sit on the floor to work and write. If I was allowed to sprawl out on the floor in my office then I would but I don’t, instead I sit on a swivel chair with my legs tucked under. I like my centre of gravity being low to the ground and being able to stretch – maybe to even touch my toes.
This might be a Japanese tendency which I’ve inherited. In the not-so-distant past, every household sat on the tatami mat floor to eat their meals and watch TV. My Obaachan grew up getting up and down off the floor, she would work at her sewing machine with her legs tucked under her.
My aunt bought her a new navy-blue armchair for the sitting room lately. It was a nice gesture because Obaachan who is ninety snoozes on her hard dining room chair every night watching television. This new armchair gave her something to feel embraced in, however, like grandmother like granddaughter; Obaachan one night toppled over the armchair and banged her head on the side of the kerosene stove, which upon impact turned itself off immediately. The boiling kettle atop the stove did not fall but teetered.
Obaachan didn’t tell her daughter (my aunt) who had bought her the armchair about what happened until a week later, feeling ashamed and silly for causing a near emergency. Her head had swollen but nothing had cracked nor bled. She now tells me she can’t go to the hairdressers anymore in case they ask questions regarding the bruise on her head.
When I found out about her accident a month later, I was mortified. She could have badly burned her face and died. Then what?
I asked her, ‘Oh my goodness how did you fall off the chair?’
She said, ‘It was my fault for having sat in it.’
I was confused as this conversation (like all conversations with my grandmother) was happening in Japanese.
‘I don’t understand, of course you sat in it. It’s a chair.’
‘Yes, but you’re not supposed to sit on chairs, are you? You’re meant to perch on them with your bottom.’
‘What?’
‘I tucked my legs under: I sat on it. That was the problem.’
‘Oh.’
And I realised to sit in Japanese probably does mean something different than to sit in England. All this time I’ve been sitting in London, I’ve just been perching on chairs! No wonder it felt uncomfortable. It makes me wonder if this verb “to sit” contains within it a generational difference as well as a cultural one.
If I asked Japanese passers-by on the street what their idea of sitting means – does it have to involve a chair? Or the ground? Or can you arguably sit on both – like I had imagined it all these years; even though in my body I knew I preferred sitting on the floor; had I expanded the idea of sitting to encompass all furnishings and elements of the world one could sit on, like a tree stump or a toadstool in the case where you’re a tiny fairy?
