That’s my mojo working.
Fear not. I will carry on your tradition, if only to irritate my own spouse.
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I would just be like, “they’re not chopsticks, they’re hair sticks”.
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And if the fish and sticks are so cheap, then rules don’t apply. At those places, sit with your back to the wall, with your wakizashi on the table within reach… while you rub your cheapsticks together.
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Gluttony kills more than the tanto.
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At the cheap Chinese place across the street from where I work, the office workers use chopsticks, the blue collar guys use forks and the Asian grad students use spoons. Most of those grad students are in engineering or science, so yeah, efficiency.
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Stainless steel chopsticks that are round are the norm in Korea. I like them so much I bought my own set.
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I’m so proud.
Proceed with which, though? Leaving your sword in the umbrella stand, or with the proprietor?
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i swear i saw an australian frilled neck lizard on the list of illegal foods. i’m heading off to japan next week for the first time. should bring a few frilled neck lizards to curry favour with the locals.
a nine-hour flight with a few lizards down my undies will be a bit scratchy, i imagine. budgies, the traditional animal to stick down your pants, being feathered, are fine, but a lizard?
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I’ve done most of these. It’s kind of odd that there are so many things it’s perfectly natural to do with chopsticks that are associated with funerals.
The important thing to remember is that just by existing in Japan, one is being rude. So, you must apologize for everything you do as often as you can.
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Oddly enough far Asian cultures moved away from cutlery centuries ago because they were seen as crude tools/ kitchen impliments, and properly prepared dish shouldn’t need more work at the table.
Also, in Malaysia it seems like everyone used a fork/spoon combo to eat, and they remarked that me eating with just a fork was odd.
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I’ll take the cheap bamboo sticks that I have to rub together thank you. I don’t like the idea of adding to the 10,800 square miles of forest which are disappearing each year in China alone just so I can have fancy hard wood chopsticks to throw away at the end of the meal.
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I thought that in America, it was traditional to pick up each piece and pass it from hand to hand, blowing on it and saying “ow ow ow, hot!”
In Japan, they have a ‘bone picking ceremony’ in which the family uses chopsticks to pick through the ash to place the bone bits into an urn, starting at the feet, ending with the head.
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It makes sense to eat rice-based dishes with a fork and spoon combo, particularly in a culture where you’re supposed to clean your plate of every single grain of rice.
I guess the Japanese norm of not cleaning your plate made it acceptable to eat rice with chopsticks while not being allowed to use the Chinese way of eating rice with chopsticks (lift the bowl up to your mouth and use the chopsticks to sweep it in).
And it’s worth reiterating.
There are people present (me) who have gotten into the habit of reading travel advice for people from A traveling to B as a way of finding out more about A’s culture.
I’ve read that “In Japan, you are expected to take of your shoes when you enter a private home” and I thought “why would they mention something obvious like that”.
And I read that “In Japan, when people receive a compliment, they will deny it. To them, this is a way of being polite and showing humility.”
And I thought, “but that’s what you’re supposed to do when you receive a compliment, saying ‘thank you’ might sound arrogant”.
Central Europe is indeed somewhere between America and Asia, culturally as well as geographically.
And it’s interesting to find about these things the roundabout way, because the differences are so subtle that Americans are unlikely to tell me if I do it wrong while visiting the US 
.
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But I totally get you. I have a couple of titanium pairs. One in the company drawer, one in my handbag, one in my rucksack and one in the car. At home I usually wood one, because they predate my titanium ones and are still there, so why change that.
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Germany’s in central Europe though and losing the shoes is usually done between relatives, if at all.
And Germans, when getting complimented, will also simply say Thank you. OTHO, Germans will also matter-of-factly answer „yes” when that dress really makes you look fat.
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