End ‘Open Door’ Policy - Lock Up

Dear Miss Manners: We have a real problem with people we know just walking into our home instead of using our doorbell and waiting. Sometimes they come through our back door.

I was brought up to consider it rude to walk into someone’s home unannounced. And it is startling to find people in our home unexpectedly.

We have politely asked them to ring and wait, but to no avail. What else can we do besides keeping the doors locked all the time? We do not want to alienate them, but they are invading our privacy and peace of mind.

Gentle Reader: Unless one of your great pleasures in life is to go around bragging to your urban friends that you live in a community “where we never lock our doors,” Miss Manners fails to see the problem with doing exactly that.

This simple action forces intrusive people, of whom you seem to know more than your share, to knock and to wait to have the door opened before they can enter. You don’t have to make any explanation unless one of these offenders has the further audacity to ask why you changed your habit. In that case, you might find it useful to confide, as if it had nothing to do with the person you are addressing, that it is for protection against “intruders.”

Is it the symbolism that bothers you? Miss Manners must inform you that you really cannot insist on the symbolism of having an “open door” if it bothers you to have people walk through it.

Dear Miss Manners: A female Japanese exchange student we are hosting in our home is very quiet and respectful; however, a situation arose for which I have no answer.

We have a hot tub in the back yard, which she is entitled to use whenever she wants. The first time she used it, she came down from her bedroom wearing a bathrobe; as she removed it to enter the hot tub, she was totally naked in the presence of my two sons. I was too shocked to do anything, but talked to her later.

She informed me that co-ed communal nude bathing is a Japanese tradition among family and close friends. She couldn’t understand why we would want to wear a bathing suit when relaxing in a hot tub or spa and could not comprehend why I should be bothered that my boys saw her naked.

Considering that the Japanese are a much more conservative society and have fewer social problems than we do, I frankly don’t have a good reason why she or any of us for that matter should wear bathing suits, except that it has been ingrained in us that it is wrong to be nude in mixed company. Can you provide any enlightenment?

Gentle Reader: One of the ways in which travel is educational is that it teaches people that many practices they considered to be natural are, in fact, conventional.

This does not make them any the less valid.

Even what is considered shocking is sometimes conventional. You would probably not consider it improper for a patient to disrobe for a doctor of the opposite sex, for example.

However, the principle of trying to adapt oneself to please one’s host is universal. If your guest is as polite as you say, she will cease bathing naked now that she understands that it violates her hosts’ practice.

And Miss Manners hopes that you will cease to feel that your customs have been threatened by the knowledge that other people do things differently. There is nothing insufficient about answering that you follow a practice because it was ingrained in you.

However, you may wish to debate comparative etiquette with your guest in a friendly spirit, if she is agreeable to doing so. Miss Manners only hopes you will first read a book of Japanese etiquette so that you will have plenty of material for asking questions - neither more or less unanswerable than the question she asked you - about why her society has the customs it does.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate