How low can you go ... what a brother don't know

John Steele Gordon, "The President Who Grovels" (Commentary, November 14, 2009), writes:

Could someone in the Chief of Protocol’s Office at the State Department please tell Barack Obama that heads of state do not bow to other heads of state? And for the head of state of the country founded on the idea that “all men are created equal,” that goes double.

When Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the White House denied it: “It wasn’t a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he’s taller than King Abdullah,” said one aide. As a commentator on CNN said, “Ray Charles could see that he bowed.” (h/t PowerLine)

Now he has bowed, extravagantly, to Emperor Akihito of Japan. The Los Angeles Times called it a “wow bow” in its headline and asked “How low will he go?”

President Obama goes abroad apologizing for the supposed sins of a country that defended and extended freedom around the world at a staggering cost in lives and treasure and then grovels before the man whose country has yet to apologize for the Rape of Nanking.

As my mother used to say, “Pardon me while I throw up.”

Some Western journalists are speculating that those who have trouble with Mr. Obama's gesture are limited to foam-at-the-mouth American right wingers, and that it may be warmly received in Japan where such gestures of humility, it is thought, have been long respected. I spent my first twenty years in Japan. I should know.

There is indeed a popular saying among the older generation in Japan, which suggests that a person is respected being humble -- because his "atama ga hikui" (literally: because he "has a low head"). Yet you can't simply extract this gesture from its Confucian cultural context and tradition and expect to properly apply it in the abstract.

If you watch people bow to one another in Japan, it is a delicate ritual. If people have exchanged name cards the process is assisted by the fact that each knows the relative rank of the other and how deeply it would be appropriate or inappropriate to bow. Rank is a deeply complicated affair involving gender, relative age, profession, and a host of other relationships cataloged by Confucius. If one doesn't know the rank of the other, the undertaking is a bit dicier, and each party carefully eyes the other while making his best intuitive judgment of how deep a bow is appropriate, each party typically repeating the bows until they come to some sort of unstated mutual consensus.

Thus the idea that an American president should baldly waltz up to the Emperor of Japan and greet him with a profoundly deep bow, bending almost double, exhibits nothing so much as silliness. However well-intentioned it may be, it shows utter lack of judgment. Why? Because there is no proper inter-cultural, international context for such a bow. Mr. Obama is neither Emperor Akihito's subject nor a Confucian, and I do not think he believes him divine -- a title that was abrogated after the Second World War. This is simply not the way a contemporary head of state greets another, even if he is royalty. A shake of the hand with a slight bow of the head would have been ample and appropriate. But within a Japanese context, Mr. Obama's gesture comes closer to the manner in which a vastly inferior Japanese subject would bow to his Emperor, or perhaps someone out of the Emperor's good graces seeking his mercy or pardon. Hence, it was an altogether inept and inordinate gesture for a head of state.

Mr. Obama was probably merely trying to show courtesy and respect for a venerated national Japanese figurehead. I am sure the Emperor was graciously indulgent -- just as the Queen of England was with Michelle Obama's pats on her back; yet I am no less certain that the gesture felt awkward to them. Here comes running another stupid gaijin (foreigner) who simply does not know his manners. Well, at least he's bowing and not high-fiving the Emperor, so I am quite certain they were happy to smile at the poor spoiled and abysmally untutored and inexperienced boy president. Let's hope he didn't try to give the Emperor some sort of electronic gadget. That would have been a fatal coffin nail.

I must say it strikes me odd how "into" these sorts of international gestures Mr. Obama is, when I consider how little he is "into" such gestures as laying a wreath at the tomb of the unknowns the other day at the Arlington National Cemetery, a fact amply clear from his awkwardly stiff and impatient body language.

[Hat tip to C.B.]