Explore everyday life in Japan
As it turns out, there is a correct way to hold chopsticks, and if you are like I was before coming to Japan, you are holding them all wrong. When I first starting trying to use chopsticks, I felt that holding them in the middle, or even closer to the tips of the chopsticks gave me more strength and a greater ability to pick up and hold big items like sushi rolls and pieces of tempura. I was wrong, though. As you can see in the poster pictured below, a poster which has been displayed in all of the elementary schools I have been to in Japan, the correct way to hold chopsticks is further away from the food, toward the end of the chopsticks. Doing so will give you a greater range of motion with your chopsticks and, once you have developed some hand strength, allow you to pick up bigger items with ease. Holding your chopsticks toward the end of them will also give you greater leverage, which means that you will be able to hold bigger items while exerting less force.
Before coming to Japan, I remember having a conversation with my cousin in which he jokingly asked me if I thought children in Japan had something akin to training wheels for chopsticks. As it turns out, they do. Of course, many children, by observing and copying their parents learn how to use chopsticks on their own from a very young age, but you would be surprised by the way that many two and three-year-olds hold their chopsticks. Many children place the two chopsticks in the palm of their hands like they would a hammer and somehow manage to spread them apart by opening and closing their pinkies, ring, and middle fingers. Other children, rather than using chopsticks like a set of pincers, just use them like a spoon to shovel food into their mouths.
Nursery schools in Japan recommend teaching children how to correctly use chopsticks after they have learned how to firmly hold a spoon and fork and have developed the ability to carry food to their mouths with ease. At this stage, many children are given training chopsticks like the ones pictured above. These chopsticks have rings on them to teach children the proper place to put their fingers, the proper places being positions on the chopsticks that will help children to spread the chopsticks apart by keeping the lower chopstick stable and moving only the upper chopstick. If you are using chopsticks properly, your chopsticks should not be moving apart like a pair of scissors. Only the upper chopstick should be moving. In addition, the rings on these starter chopsticks also teach children how to hold their chopsticks with nice form. If you look at the poster above one more time, you will see that all of the fingers on the hand that is shown are arched the same way and line up with each other in a nice wave-like shape.
If you spend any time in Japan, you may find that, like many areas that involve a certain degree of skill and can be complemented in a way to suggest ability or a lack thereof, your chopstick skills and the way in which you hold chopsticks may become a topic of small talk. This could mean two things, either you will be praised, or you will be taught the proper way to hold your chopsticks. Good luck!
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting daily updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.