After almost a quarter of a century in this land, I generally find the cliche "inscrutable Japanese" to be undeserved. For I can "scrute" them OK.
Sure, the frontiers of my ignorance are ever expanding, and I routinely know much less than I claim to. (Which means . . . if I claim to know this, I may in fact be wrong.)
However, being married to a Japanese and living in Japan all these years has served to scrub the inscrutability out of most situations. Except one: