Cross-cultural communication （71）　

71) Greetings in France
The further south you go in Europe, the more passionate the people are, and the more exaggerated their greetings when they meet someone new. France is located in the middle of Europe, but when it comes to greetings, it seems to lean towards southern culture.

Men shake hands with each other, and they do it a lot, and the way they shake hands is also somewhat exaggerated. Even with friends who see each other almost every day, they repeat these exaggerated handshakes. I experienced this first-hand when I was a student and spent a month in Grenoble taking a summer French course.

The standard way for men and women to greet each other is to hug and then kiss each other on both cheeks. Even though it's called a kiss, it's just a sound. The cheeks are brought close together, but the lips don't usually touch. If you get used to it, it's not a big deal, but at first it can be quite confusing. At international sports events, when female athletes win medals, they perform this ritual with the person presenting the medal at the award ceremony, and these days, Japanese female athletes are also quite natural at doing this.

If you remember to shake hands as often as possible, that's all you need to do, but when it comes to the cheek-to-cheek kiss (called bise[beez] in French), you can only learn when to do it through experience. This is quite difficult, or rather, there are almost no rules. Even on the first meeting, you may be asked for a bise, or you may be offered just a handshake. Well, if you are Japanese or Asian, it is not very common for French people to insist on a bise. Especially, it seems that many Asian women do not want to be kissed. If you are a woman and do not want to be kissed by a man, you can just hold out your hand and ask for a handshake when you greet each other. I am a man, of course, but I have never been refused when I tried to baiser(verbal form of bise) a French woman, just in case.

I once asked a male American doctor working at the American Hospital of Paris about this. He had been living in Paris for several years at the time, but he said that he still had trouble deciding whether to shake hands or offer a bise when invited to a party. I remember feeling relieved that even Americans, who are Westerners, have trouble with this, so it's only natural that Japanese people would have trouble with it too.
It may be just a greeting, but it's also a greeting!

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