81–90 of 179 posts
Someone should turn on the Patio11 signal and summon him to comment on this. 00000 0000000 000P11000 0000000 00000
Timezones. It's still pretty early in the morning there for a hacker. I imagine he'll be along within the next hour or two.
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What are you talking about? They have, e.g., 30 eps in a row of goku fighting frieza. it's an extremely slow plot, but every episode follows after the next. (except after a saga ends, then they just do a time skip to the next big fight)
Man does this bring back memories from back when I was still a young hackling... Watching in eager anticipation what will happen next. For four straight episodes it was Goku with his hands in the air constipating, and somehow I loved every minute of it.
That is not a word that should ever exist... yet I cannot imagine a better description.
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Well since the audience here probably hasn't changed just for this story may I suggest that the lack of coherent commentary reflects the unfocussed and meandering style of the source article. It does have some interesting snapshots of Japanese culture in there but they are bookended by too many personal rants based on the author's peculiarities so the result is part travelogue, part social criticism, part gaming comm…
That could explain it. Another possibility is that this site has a higher than usual percentage of nippophile users, and that they react negatively to articles critical of that country, its culture, or its institutions. Either possibility doesn't put an end to my disappointment.
Come now, you're not even trying. If you're going to be smugly derogatory toward people who enjoy some bit of Japanese popular culture, the technical term is "weeaboo".
I'm a vegetarian non-smoker living in a country where nearly everybody smokes and all the native cusine has meat. I also don't like all the word-dancing involved in office-level Japanese, not to mention the office politics, and I especially can't stand the sheer pile of pointless (to me) social protocol.
Because I don't participate in most of what the natives do, I've had a hard time making friends with said natives, and I'm lonely.
There's nothing wrong with me, of course. This is Japan's fault, and they should fix themselves to be more like California.
END ARTICLE SUMMARY
Begin my take:
I'm a native Californian, currently living in Tokyo. Admittedly, I'm not a vegetarian, but I don't smoke, and I agree that a lot of the stuff here can be maddeningly irritating... if you try and apply your own value systems.
But you can't. It's a different country, they do things differently. If you try and fight that, for the most part, you're just going to end up bitter and frustrated. If you're going to live somewhere where the value systems are different, you need to figure out what you need to compromise on in order to keep both yourself and the natives happy.
The one nice thing about being a foreigner, is that because you're a foreigner, you can get away with flaunting a lot of social protocol already. If you even make a solid attempt at observing social niceties, you can totally cock them up, and the Japanese will still be pretty happy that you bothered in the first place.
Patio11-aka-Patrick, please feel to correct me where I'm wrong here. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That could explain it. Another possibility is that this site has a higher than usual percentage of nippophile users, and that they react negatively to articles critical of that country, its culture, or its institutions. Either possibility doesn't put an end to my disappointment.
Another possibility is that this site has a higher than usual percentage of nippophile users, Come now, you're not even trying. If you're going to be smugly derogatory toward people who enjoy some bit of Japanese popular culture, the technical term is "weeaboo".
Long ago, manga aspired to be like Dragon Ball Z: graphically iconic, with a story more coherent than it probably needed to be. Now there's the ADHD-addled Dragon-Ball-Z-inspired One Piece, a manga for the Twitter age if there ever was one. Pop culture was best when you, the reader of this sentence, were 12: http://i46.tinypic.com/1625ims.gif I remember watching DBZ after school, and while it is certainly "graphicall…
This poor person is suffering from culture shock. I'm an immigrant let me explain. Culture shock is not OMG they eat X here. Culture shock develops slowly from the stress of being away from home and living in a strange land. You are long over people eating X or what ever, and then one day you're just sick of it all. Not exactly ALL of it, but you tend to fixate on the defects of the strange place you're in and you're…
for some people, living long-term in another culture is hard. i certainly find it so at times. and this is despite being completely aware of the issue, the validity of other belief / social systems, etc etc.
it's a malaise at a very deep level - not something that can be addressed by conscious platitudes. i don't have a solution, apart from just continuing.
[ps the way i see it, our subconscious is "programmed" at a very early stage in our development, and is much less adaptable than our conscious. what we're talking about here is the result of long-term attrition between those subconscious assumptions and an inconsistent (but, or course, completely valid) reality. in some ways, respecting the other culture makes it harder - you can't simply dismiss it (except for periods of anger - i would guess this article was written in such a time). i also sometimes wonder if those that don't suffer this are simply repressing / unconnected with their subconscious to such a degree that they are unaware... the alternative is that their subconscious somehow adapts.]
Someone should turn on the Patio11 signal and summon him to comment on this. 00000 0000000 000P11000 0000000 00000
I'm not sure what needs commenting. The article is quite in-depth and mostly fits with my experience. I can add an anecdote, perhaps, on this part: The Japanese are so serious about work that even work-related parties are mandatory. If you don't go to a company party, you're not part of the team. If you're not part of the team, it's possible you're not actually working at the company.
This is very real. I live in a university dorm and I'm friend with one of the Japanese assistants working here. He was nearly fired because he wasn't going to nomikai (drinking parties) with the other assistants and the manager often enough. He wasn't going because he had to study for exams and prepare a trip. He got a long email from one of his older colleagues saying that "maybe he wasn't cut out for the residence assistant lifestyle" and that as the youngest one it was his duty to do better to fit in the group. All that even though he was, as far as I could see, the only one to actually socialize with the foreign residents (that's supposed to be his job)...
Incidentally, my university keeps a fairly strict separation between foreign and local students. Exchange students live in the same building as the sports club members for my university (the teams are required to live together), but we're not allowed to go into their area or for them to come. People who learn Japanese here are rather encouraged to stay together and not mix with the Japanese students (except those who want to practice English). It's what they call tatemae/honne: the uni wants to give an air of internationalism, but it doesn't really matter to them if it's true or not - just that it looks like it.
I'm in a way lucky to be in engineering, so that I take all my classes with local students, but I've had to deal with many exceptions and needed special permission from all teachers I take a lesson under. I'm literally the only undergrad exchange student on my campus. To their credit however, I've always felt welcomed by teachers - I feel like a few have travelled and actually wish their students were more exposed to other countries.
I've also seen a professor say to his new undergrad students (unpaid interns) that "from now on, the laboratory lifestyle is going to be the main thing for you" (main in English). Life in Japan is defined by your group, and it mostly goes from school, to laboratory (or intern work), then to the company. At each point people are expected to dedicate a lot of time to being with their group.
Whenever someone criticises Japan, I'm always reminded of a comment I heard years ago that stuck with me.
"If Japan changed to be exactly what you want, you wouldn't have come here in the first place."