If you’re Rireinukave…
• You believe that freedom of speech was laid down by the Allmother in the beginning of time.
• You’re familiar with Kane Takesima, Pera Simamatu, Rituno Yuvu (Fruits of the Season), Ereñara Iyo (A Night with Stars), Kemi-takupiñi (Postwoman Kemi), Anorase Anonose (Sunset Sunrise), Eti Hirekitu, Tara Ataruvo, Erehetu (Star Patrol), Emotimano Raku (Flags of Our Mothers), Mike Tovukane, Sari to Tinu (Sari and Tinu), Mo-sivepusa (Annex Mo), Hopu Keñeuke, Aino Esokeña, and, of course, Posu Natuñoto.
• You know how potesame (stickball), vekusame (kickball), and tañoyora (pole dancing) are played, and you can argue intricate points about their rules. Although tañoyora literally means ‘pole dancing’, it is a martial art, basically quarterstaff with steel poles. Potesame is much like (field)hockey and vekusame is rather like football (soccer).
• You expect to have three weeks of vacation a year.
• You are biologically female. You don’t think of yourself as female though, since only the lower animals are female or male. It’s just that everyone is expected to have at least one baby. Otherwise, your career prospects are rather limited. Only a mother can be expected to have the mature judgement required in a leadership position.
Mmm, deep fried whatever…
• You don’t think of yourself as religious; venerating the ancestors at the family altar is simply tradition. Even if you follow the way of the Pure Land, since it merely recommends showing respect to all goddesses.
• Galactic fast food chains are unknown, but there are some native ones, even though they face stiff competition from street hawkers. You think of the likes of McDonald’s and KFC etc. as fairly cheap food.
• You own a telephone and a TV. Your place is not heated in the winter. In fact there is no winter, at least in the regions people actually live. Your place has its own kuriso, or toilet room. If it doesn’t also have a bathroom, there is always a bathhouse down the block. What laundry you have, you take it to a professional to clean. You don’t kill your own food. You don’t have a dirt floor. You either eat at a table sitting on chairs, or sitting cross-legged on the floor.
• You eat boiled rice with most meals, use poña (fish sauce) as a condiment for much of your food, and eat most things with a spoon. A three-tined fork (ñave) can also be used to load up your spoon.
• You don’t consider dogs, cats, or monkeys to be food. Practically anything else is. Especially if deep fried.
• A bathroom (sopasoto) always has a shower in it, but not necessarily a bathtub, and definitely not a toilet. The toilet is in a kuriso.
The business of Rireinu is business
• It seems natural to you that the railways, auto manufacturers, and airlines are privately run. The utilities are private but strictly regulated regional monopolies, which again seems natural.
• You expect, as a matter of course, that the phones will work. Getting a new phone is routine.
• The train system is excellent. High-speed trains are the way for intercity travel. Commuter trains and subways run with clockwork precision and are the best way to get around in the cities. The roads are perennially underfunded thanks to the powerful railway lobby, so cars aren’t all that useful. You usually don’t take a plane except when you’re crossing an ocean. You probably have never been to space.
• You find a two-party system natural. You expect the politicians of both parties to be responsive to business, strong on defense, and concerned with the middle class. You find a multi-party parliamentary system inefficient and comic.
• Socialism is another one of those galactic ideas that sounds much better in theory than in practice.
• You usually don’t think in terms of race. That’s because everyone in the three worlds of Rireinu is a Rireinukave. Except a few galactic diplomats and such.
• You do not expect you will ever meet a galactic face-to-face in meatspace. Or even in avatarspace really.
• You take a strong court system for granted, although you won’t use it. You know that if you went into business and had problems with a customer, partner, or supplier, you could take them to court– but you wouldn’t, because the system is way too slow, and being involved in a suit isn’t exactly good for your reputation.
• You think a tax level of 30% isn’t all that bad, and chances are you don’t think so much about it anyway because corporate workers don’t have to file their tax returns– their income taxes are deducted from salary. The only people who gripe about taxes are business owners and the self-employed.
• You count on excellent medical treatment. You know you’re not going to die of cholera or other Crapsack World diseases. You expect very strong measures to be taken to save very ill babies or people in their eighties. You think dying at 75ye. (about 65 Galactic Standard Years) would be a tragedy.
• You think a lot of problems could be solved if only people would put aside their prejudices and work together.
• You’d respect someone who speaks Human, Minbari, or Hainish– but you very likely don’t yourself speak them well enough to communicate with a monolingual foreigner. Who are we kidding? You most likely don’t know more than one or two words of any galactic language.
• It’s not all that necessary to learn galactic languages anyway. You can travel the system using nothing but Rireinutire– and who really wants to visit the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the rest of the galaxy? I mean, honestly?
• School is free through high school, unless you go to a private school. Colleges charge only a nominal tuition.
• College is four years long, unless you study medicine (six years). Competition for admission to the better universities is pretty fierce.
Everybody knows that
• Mustard comes as a paste in plastic tubes or in powdered form in cans. Shaving cream comes in cans. Milk comes in plastic bottles.
• The year comes first, then the month and date: 2712-4-12. (And you know what happened on that date.)
• The decimal point is a mid·dot. It is identical in shape to porehuhu, the character used almost exactly like a comma.
• Numbers larger than seña (1,000,000,000) have names based on the powers of one thousand, so a million times million is called nehosenu (four-AUG-thousand.NOM), a thousand nehosenu is vihosenu (five-AUG-thousand.NOM), etc.
• You expect marriages to be made for love, not arranged by third parties. Getting married by the District Registrar is the only legal marriage. Each bride has her own miko or lieutenant at the wedding– a friend or a sibling. And, naturally, a woman gets only one wife at a time.
• If a woman has sex with another woman, she’s had sex. As long as neither is married to somebody else, nor is their age difference too great, nobody cares. But if your lover is young enough to be your daughter, you will be ostracized for being a cradle-robber and disgusting pervert. Unless she is a grandmother herself; at that age the number of years starts to matter less.
• Once you’re introduced to someone, you will call her by name only if she is a peer, subordinate or junior. Anyone who is senior or higher in the socio-economic ladder must be addressed with great respect.
• You usually wear nothing more than a belt with pouches. Possibly a hat, maybe shoes or sandals. If you go to the beach, you take it off.
• A hotel room has a private bath. On the other hand, traditional-style inns have cavernous common baths.
• You do not watch any galactic media.
• You expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes. Of course, some entertaining and gift-giving may be necessary, but you certainly wouldn’t consider this a bribe.
• If a politican has been cheating on her wife, you might question her ability to govern.
• Just about any store, or street vendor, will take your credit card.
• A company can fire just about anybody it wants, for cause.
• Bacon is usually soft and juicy, not crunchy.
Contributions to galactic civilization
• You went over Rireinu history at school, with the barest mention of galactic history thrown in.
• World War II was a thing that you know nothing about. The Great War in the early 23rd Century was a total disaster for the planet: ten years of senseless bloodshed, half the flower of the womanhood of the planet slaughtered in the trenches for the overweening pride of half a dozen queens and empresses.
• Your country has never been conquered by a foreign nation. The Great War led directly to the Unification of Rireinu, and in the five centuries since, the world has grown into one big happy family together.
• You expect the military to fight wars, not get involved in politics. When you did your conscript year in the Army or the Navy, you learned a healthy disrespect for The Other Service. You probably remember the name of the Commander-in-Charge of your Service at the time, but you may not be able to name her incumbent successor.
• You think of galactics as basically Rireinukave in funny bodypaint and stage prosthetics. Their being divided in what seems to be moieties called “female” and “male” seems utterly inexplicable, since males are of course non-sapient.
And let’s welcome our guests for tonight
• The people who appear on the most popular talk shows are mostly entertainers, politicians, or rather strange individuals. Authors and artists have special talk shows.
• Much of media content is gossip about celebrities. Intellectuals often deplore this, but the general public don’t seem to care– the more gossip articles there are in a magazine or tabloid, the better they sell.
• Comics (ayepiha) are everywhere. There are dozens of weekly ayepiha magazines and almost everyone reads them.
• You’re used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.
• You measure things using the traditional rea-poku-toririni system, which works exactly like the metric system, only with different basic units.
• You are not a farmer.
• You drive on the left side of the road. You stop at amber lights even if nobody’s around. If you’re a pedestrian and cars are stopped at an amber light, you will fearlessly cross the street in front of them. (Traffic lights in Rireinu are: amber– stop, red– caution, blue– go.)
• You consider the Volkswagen Beetle to be a car the size of a medium-sized car.
• The police in general aren’t armed, but all police forces have armed response units.
• If a person is plumper than the average, it doesn’t improve her looks. Being solidly muscular does.
• The biggest meal of the day is in the evening.
• The ethnicity people most often make jokes about are the Sumiapakave, people of Sumiapa Province.
• Sumiapakave are widely considered to be dumb and rather backward; Islanders, tight-fisted and humourless; Westlanders, impractical and talkative; Harukave, rude and loutish. (Unless of course you belong to one of these groups.)
• There’s parts of the city you won’t go to unless you’re in the company of a knowledgeable local.
Outside Nasakeri (the Haru Ring Road)
• You feel that your kind of people aren’t being listened to enough in Haru.
• You wouldn’t expect both inflation and unemployment to be very high (say, over 5%) at the same time.
• You say you don’t care very much what family someone comes from, but you will when your daughter brings her girlfriend over.
• The normal thing, when a couple dies, is for their estate to be divided equally between their daughters.
• Opera and ballet are unknown. Traditional eiha plays are of course the quintessence of Rireinu culture, but the dialogue (in ancient Harutire) is difficult to follow and, aside from one or two performances you were forced to sit through in school, you’ve never gone to see any.
• Christmas is unknown to you, unless you speak Human. Also, because the Galactic Standard Year is a fair bit longer than the Rireinu year, there’s no telling when Christmas would be.
• The most important holiday is New Year, which falls on the winter solstice of the northern hemisphere of Rireinu. It is a time for cleaning the house, meeting relatives, and eating well. And lots of fireworks.
• You are used to not having a state church and the possibility of such a thing has never even occurred to you.
• You’d be hard pressed to name the capitals or the leaders of even the closest neighbouring galactic nations.
• You’ve left a message at the beep.
• Taxi drivers are generally local residents and they usually do know their way around the city.
• You think welfare and unemployment payments are necessary, even though you sometimes hear of people cheating. On the other hand, you would be deeply ashamed to take handouts yourself. National Health Insurance and National Pension are a prerequisite for any civilized nation.
• If you want to be a doctor, you need to get a bachelor’s first.
• You know lawyers exist, but you’ve never seen one in person.
Space and time
• If you have an appointment, you’ll mutter an excuse if you’re five eririni (about 6min 40s) late, and apologize profusely if it’s ten eririni. Half a watch (about an hour) late is almost inexcusable.
• If you’re talking to someone, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than about one rea (50cm).
• You think it’s rude to touch people you’re not intimate with. (With family members, you have no qualms about kissing and hugging them in public.) When you’re a nameless face in a crowd or jam-packed on a commuter train, however, you have no qualms about pushing and bumping into people.
• About the only things you expect to bargain for are houses, cars, and antiques. Haggling is largely a matter of finding the hidden point that’s the seller’s minimum.
• Once you’re past college, you very rarely simply show up at someone’s place. People have to invite each other over– especially if a meal is involved.
• You bow to greet people. Once you’re past school age, you’re expected to know the various methods and degrees of bowing– from cursory nods to full ninety degrees to groveling on the floor– and use them properly according to the situation.
• When you negotiate, you are polite, of course, and you make negotiation a social event. To ‘play hardball’ is a little rude.
• If you have a business appointment or interview with someone, you expect to have that person to yourself, and the business shouldn’t take more than a watch (about 2h 15min) or so.
Based, of course, on the seminal work ( https://www.zompist.com/amercult.html ) of Mark Rosenfelder.
Flowering Fields 