The Paris Syndrome

Who knew this syndrome actually existed or that the Japanese seem to be the ones most susceptible to fall prone to this malaise?

Paris - Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday. "A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

Already this year, Japan's embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors - including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them. Previous cases include a man convinced he was the French "Sun King", Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being attacked with microwaves, the paper cited Japanese embassy official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.

"Fragile travellers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis," psychologist Herve Benhamou told the paper. The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed "Paris Syndrome", was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.

For the Japanese tourist, it’s is a combination of a cultural clash mixed with a delusional crash. The rude brush with the reality of modern day French shopkeepers (who do not believe the customer is king) and the fact that ordinary Parisians fail to live up to the Japanese tourist’s expectations of a people submerged in elegance and beauty. Apparently, subway travel and purse snatchers are also a little more than mildly off-putting for the Japanese.

I have never been to Paris but I did have a great-grandmother who was French. Clever, witty and sly old soul that she was. She gave me more than a few lessons in malice and haughty arrogance which forever disabused me of any notions that the French were on a nobler higher plane than the rest of us. Even thirty-four years dead and bring up her name to my Sainted Mother - then sit back and watch Momma seethe to a full boil in mere seconds.