The Police Chief with Pink Slippers

In America, families can be divided into two basic categories: the ones who ask you to take your shoes off when you come in, and the ones who don't.  The families of the former category would be enamored with a certain trait of Japanese culture, the genkan.  The genkan is the entryway.  In our house it is about 3 feet by 3 feet of tile right after you step through our front door.  There you take off your outside shoes, step up onto the wooden floor (without touching your socks to the tile), and then walk around barefoot or in slippers.

The Japanese home has a few levels of cleanliness or purity.  The genkan is the transition from the dirtiest (outside) to the cleaner interior.  Most  homes have wooden floors with small area carpets or a tatami room.  Tatami are traditional small handwoven straw mats.  To this day they are hand made.  You are never supposed to walk on carpet or tatami with shoes, so you have to take your slippers off if you want to step onto a carpet.  When nature calls and you have to step into the toilet room, some homes provide bathroom slippers.  You slip of your slippers outside the bathroom and step into the bathroom slippers as you enter the toilet room.

Oh, and it isn't just homes that have a genkan.  Public schools, some businesses, and even medical clinics have genkan.  Wherever you go, they provide little slippers for you to use.  Should you ever visit, try to bring your own slippers.  The public slippers are slicker than snot. Seriously.  It's like trying to walk on banana peels that keep falling off your gargantuan, gangly American feet.  I have yet to make it up a staircase without having to walk like an Egyptian: two steps forward, one step back.  Maybe that's why they're called slippers.

For a few weeks all that taking off and putting on shoes makes you a little crazy.  I've never accurately counted, but I think some days I switch shoes at least 6,200 times.  It took about two days to begin hating shoes with laces.  I bought sneakers for indoor shoes.  Guess how they are held shut.  Laces, don't make me laugh.  Velcro, still too much work.  My friends, I purchased...wait for it... zip up shoes.  Oh yeah.  Easy on, easy off.  I'd be the envied at any nursing home.

Most people don't take shoes with them wherever they go.  Some people leave a pair of indoor shoes at their work.  Well what happens when someone goes to a public event where they have to dress nice and don't bring their own indoor shoes?   Men in dapper business suits might be wearing bright red slippers or white velcro tennis shoes.  When the police chief goes to a kindergarten, that's when you see the chief of police in uniform, sitting on a tiny folding chair, wearing Hello, Kitty slippers.  If that doesn't cut down on genkan resentment, I don't know what will.