Why I Like the Kiwis

Abstract

"Kiwis" here is a term of endearment referring to the New Zealanders, used with their concurrence and generally in their presence. A small country, no doubt. A two-frigate flotilla of the NZ Navy made a friendly port call in Tokyo nearly ten years ago. I took some of my former students who had visited NZ with me. I asked the captain of a frigate about the size of his navy, and his answer was this was it. "Is this enough to defend your country?" was my question, to which he replied, tongue in cheek, " Nobody would bother us." I like the Nzers' readiness to laugh at themselves. More than a couple of decades ago when Mr. Oyamada Takashi was appointed Japan's ambassador to NZ, he delighted the people assembled to farewell him by the following joke : Japan and NZ are quite similar in terms of the countries' shapes, land area, four seasons, coastlines, volcanoes, hotsprings, etc. Differences are the population : 126 million Japanese (thebn) and only a little over 3 million in NZ. But while NZ has more than 150 milion sheep, in Japan you can finish counting all the sheep before you become sleepy. Which joke I later improved by adding my own second punchline : As a matter of fact, in the highly congested and competitive society like Japan, you may even see some red-eyed sheep at the railroad station early in the morning try to count the comnmuters. The indigeneous residents of the Land of Long White Cloud, the Maoris, are well integrated into the society, having produced some outstanding civic and political leaders. One of the charming Maori customs maintained has been known by the misnomer "rubbing the nose." I learned the right way of Maori greeting from none other than the Queen of the Maoris who visited Japan some years ago. You hold each other's palms, put your foreheads and then your noses together lightly, close your eyes, and think about each othyer. You might say that I learned this from the royal horse's mouth. Another well-known flightless bird native to NZ Moa, had been hunted by the Maoris and became extinct two centuries ago. Having bought a cute little booklet at an NZ museum entitled NO MOA, written for young people, I kept repeating No moa, No moa, and soon came up with a rather primitive limerick A Maori from old Rotorua Came to Auckland to hunt up some moa. The museum retains Only the skeletal remains. Cried the Maori, 'Alas, there's no moa!' Unlike their siblings across the Tasman Sea, the Kiwis' ancestors were not convicts. They pride themselves of the fact their forebears came there on their own. To this their sibling rivals would immediately retort that theirs had been chosen by His Majesty's Court. What may sound like mutual insulting to the third parties is in fact friendly bantering, enjoyed by these two peoples to confirm their friendship. The Penguin books of Australian jokes, more Australian jokes, and NZ jokes are full of such bantering jokes. The butts of the jokes can be either of them. I also like the way the Kiwis are capable of laughing at themselves, in self-deprecating jokes, the best type of jokes to me. To quote just one example : Did you hear about the New Zealand businessman who was glad he was not born in Japan because he couldn't speak Japanese. By the time this unscholarly, irrelevant essay is printed, I will have finished a two-week lecture tour of NZ as a guest of the English-Speaking Union of NZ in collaboration with the English-Speaking Union of Japan. My Aussie friends, having found out about this, quickly tell to be sure to teach the Kiwis how to speak English properly. Everyone in the world has his/her own national, regional accent. I enjoy listening to the different Englishes, and to those bantering jokes exchanged between various peoples.