Cross-cultural communication （81）　

81) Plastic
In the years since the start of the 21st century, there was a time when the online message board for the alumni association of my high school was very lively. One of the regular posters was a guy called T, who had graduated from a Japanese national university and then from an American university, and was working for a major IT company in the area. He was a film buff, and was particularly knowledgeable about American films, which he had lived in for around 30 years at the time, and he would occasionally post about them. One of the film titles (or was it a line from a film?) that he posted that is still used a lot today, and that made a big impression on me, was Dustin Hoffman's breakthrough role in the film “The Graduate”. dialogues that are still used today, the one that made the biggest impression on me was the scene in Dustin Hoffman's breakthrough film, “The Graduate”, where the husband of the mother of Ben’s girl friend, Elen whom Ben is having an affair with, proudly tells Ben at a house party, “Do you know what the best investment is right now?”. The guy says confidently, “Plastic”. This was a rather stale perception even at the time of the film's release in the late 1960s. Even now, in English-speaking countries, if someone persistently asks you for information about a money-making scheme during a business conversation, you can get a laugh by pausing for a moment and then saying the word “plastic”.

I was about to forget about such memories, but in the opinion section of the November 28, 2018 Nikkei morning edition (which I read on the train to work every morning), there was a translated article from The Economist, which is affiliated with Nikkei. The article was titled “One-man management, endless risks”. It discussed the risks of one-man management, using the example of Carlos Ghosn's downfall. In the article, it was stated that “in the 1960s and 70s, the top executives who ran companies were supposed to become extinct. Instead, what emerged were uninteresting small-time managers.” As an example, the article cited the line from the film “Graduation” mentioned above, spoken by the old man who was Plastic.

I was a little surprised to see the line that T-kun had mentioned as a joke to lighten the mood also appear in a serious article in the British quality newspaper The Economist. I have to take my hat off to T-kun's vast knowledge. If I get the chance, I'd like to try and get a laugh from the English people with the word “plastic”.

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