Cross-cultural communication （44）　

44）A French patient who is not punctual
The further south you go in Europe, the more relaxed people's sense of time becomes. France is more of a 'southern' country. When you are invited to a home party, it is considered polite to arrive 15 minutes late. So as long as you don't arrive more than an hour late, you won't be criticized. Even when I was working in Osaka, there were quite a few French people who were late for their appointments. Here is an example of one of them.

In the morning, I received a call from a French man who wanted to see me about an irregular heartbeat. I told him to come to my office at 1pm after I had finished my morning appointments. However, he still hadn't shown up by 1pm. I had no particular errands to run that day, so I was doing some paperwork at the clinic. He still hadn't shown up by 2pm. I thought that he probably wouldn't come at all if he was an hour late for his appointment. However, he arrived at 3pm, a full two hours late.

He apologized with a smile, saying, “I'm sorry I'm late,” and he was an intelligent, good-looking man with a dark complexion. When someone behaves so nonchalantly, it takes the edge off, and I said, “It's okay, don't worry about it. I said, “I didn't have any errands to run this afternoon because I was doing paperwork.”

The paperwork had already been done, and the evening consultation was scheduled to start at 5pm, so we chatted for quite a while. He was a second-generation French immigrant from North Africa, and he had studied theoretical physics at a French university, and was about to finish a graduate course at a certain university in Osaka City. That's right. He was a brilliant student. But at that time, I realized that being a brilliant student didn't necessarily mean that he was punctual.

He said that his main reason for coming to my office was to climb Mt. Fuji with his friends to celebrate the end of his time studying in Japan. However, he said that he had been feeling like his pulse was skipping sometimes recently, and he was worried about whether that was a problem. When I asked him about it, he said that he had been doing a lot of sports since university, and that he was currently training for the climb by jogging, so he didn't think there was anything wrong, and that he didn't smoke. I took his pulse for a few minutes, and there was no irregularity. The nurse wasn't there at that time, but there was nothing to stop me taking an electrocardiogram. However, even if we took an electrocardiogram for a few minutes in this state, it was thought that the possibility of irregular heartbeat being recorded was extremely low. After explaining all of this to him and concluding from the circumstantial evidence that climbing Mt. Fuji would be fine, he smiled and said, “That's what I came here for.” and the matter was settled.

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