91–100 of 179 posts
9 years in Japan. 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."
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…
No love for "Shikabane Hime" ? What is wrong with this guy?!
Insisting on a way of life completely at odds with where you live can be stressful. I'm kind of curious how he ended up deciding to live in Japan. I know wouldn't if I were a strict vegetarian, tee-totaling, non-conformist who didn't like anime, didn't like rigid company culture and couldn't even tolerate the existence of smoking sections at restaurants. It's almost as if he's drawn to frustration.
In my experience, the way it works is - at first everything in the foreign culture is great. Its all novel, the language and culture, and every idiosyncrasy is fascinating and every difference is a new challenge. In time you adapt, and then things seem normal again and you enjoy participating according to the rules of the new society. Once you're 'over it' though, you come to realize just how much work you're putting…
I'm in my own mini-crisis myself, and I don't know what to do (emigrating is a bit drastic, but I'm considering it).
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…
The ironic part was that he would begridgingly list all the good points about living here too. In the end, he became a tangled mess. He disliked and liked being here, and also disliked and liked the idea of returning home. Sounds kindof the the same with the dude in this article. You feel like telling him to just pack his bags and return home, but you know that he won't because he'd miss the good parts of living in Tokyo and end up complaining about the US instead.
A major part of this is to do with always drawing comparisons to your original culture as a source of familiarity. The natives don't draw such comparisons. To them there is no "better" or "crappier" place. It's not Japanese work-life, it's just work-life. It's not Japanese food, it's food. Home is home, and that's just how things are.
After listening to my French friend, reading this article, and reading your comment, it seems to me that romantacising aspects of your home culture whenever you're pissed off about something in your host culture (and vice-versa), though inevitable, alomost never leads to happiness.
Someone should turn on the Patio11 signal and summon him to comment on this. 00000 0000000 000P11000 0000000 00000
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…
Huh, I had the opposite experience when I worked for a small Dutch company. The amount of enforced merry-making (not to mention all the emphasis on consensus-formation) really got on my nerves. Never saw anything like it when I was working for American companies. It did remind me of my brief career in Tokyo --- I'm not the only one to have noticed the superficial similarities between Dutch and Japanese corporate culture [1], though apparently if you dig deeper it's not as similar as it looks.
Of course, this may simply be a quirk of the industry I was in at the time (options trading). It may also be a consequence of me rubbing Dutch people the wrong way (when excusing myself from company bowling/drinking/whatever trips or expressing dissenting opinions), while knowing how not to rub American people the wrong way because I'm a lot more familiar with their culture.
[1] e.g. Joop Stam has done a lot of research on this: http://www.mb.utwente.nl/oohr/staff/professorate/stam/
I only read about half that article before losing interest, but one argument jumped out at me: the mandatory office parties and drinking outings. This, IMO, is not a Japan-only phenomenon, although I'm sure the Japanese put their own cultural twists on this lovely concept. After college, I went to work in a bank in New York. The in-crowd in my group went out for drinks, together, at least three times a week. I never…
That's only really the case in certain environments. In finance or consulting it's very common, particular for younger employees, but those are pretty much the only industries and demographic I've ever heard of it being widely expected. The only ubiquitous US workplace social function is the holiday party.
I only read about half that article before losing interest, but one argument jumped out at me: the mandatory office parties and drinking outings. This, IMO, is not a Japan-only phenomenon, although I'm sure the Japanese put their own cultural twists on this lovely concept. After college, I went to work in a bank in New York. The in-crowd in my group went out for drinks, together, at least three times a week. I never…
This was the best and most interesting part. The rest were minor cultural gripes; but Japanese corporate culture, from everything I've heard, is severely broken even by our low standards.
American and Japanese corporate conformity seem to be different in one aspect. The Japanese-style conformity, as described by the OP, seems to be about seeming like a "team player" rather than standing out. American-style Wall Street conformity is about the "hungry" image.
The best predictor of who will succeed on Wall Street is commute time (as a negative correlate). This is not because of the long hours or stress, but because of the image one projects by one's choice of neighborhood. (This is also why Manhattan real estate is so expensive; there's a professional stake in one's location.) 40-year-old MDs with families are "allowed" to live in Jersey, but a 24-year-old who lives in Brooklyn is just weird; either he doesn't expect to be successful, or he's saving (gasp!) and might do something funny like launch a startup. No one will get fired for failing to show "hunger", but you definitely won't get promoted.
My experience, however, has shown that "hungry" people (i.e. those with empty or overtly material ambitions) are generally one-dimensional, sociopathic backstabbers with mediocre ideas and whose overall worth is less than nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, the way it works is - at first everything in the foreign culture is great. Its all novel, the language and culture, and every idiosyncrasy is fascinating and every difference is a new challenge. In time you adapt, and then things seem normal again and you enjoy participating according to the rules of the new society. Once you're 'over it' though, you come to realize just how much work you're putting…
And what if you're tired and irritated... of your home country? I'm in my own mini-crisis myself, and I don't know what to do (emigrating is a bit drastic, but I'm considering it).