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Japan has changed in important and visible ways

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Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#181

Post by throwaway290 »

wnscooke wrote: post #168

In my own experience, being a foreigner who (seemingly) doesn't speak a local language actually does open doors to unique insights - the people who do speak English are quite ready to tell all the ins and outs, pros and cons, ups and downs, subtleties, gripes, concerns, cultural tidbits exactly because they think I won't go around talking about what they said.

Yes. Being at location for a long time but as an outsider can allow a critical view. Adopting the language and the culture can make you blind to stuff or unwilling to frankly talk about it out of politeness.

Assuming in case of BBC correspondent Rupert it's not the same as with a typical foreign English teacher in Asia who doesn't care much about outside world and mostly hangs out in the same circle of foreigner friends (I'm slightly familiar with the culture).

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#182

Post by zelos »

vasco wrote: post #111
hogepiyo wrote: post #92

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language. Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it. Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't…

So if you live in 4 countries over four decades in your adult life you will learn 4 new languages? I don't think you must've lived more than one place abroad, or somewhere with good English. For example I speak 4 languages, understand another 2, but don't speak the language of the country I've lived in for the last 3.5 years, and I'm not even learning. At some point it's just absolutely not worth it and I'm just gonn…

He’s a journalist though - his job is to talk to people and ask questions. Surely that’s got to be much easier if you can do it in their native language?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#184

Post by nwienert »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship: > Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years. I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people…

> extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people

> [not] a good sign for long-term integration

The implication being we should be forcing integration on them?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#185

Post by suction »

wnscooke wrote: post #168

In my own experience, being a foreigner who (seemingly) doesn't speak a local language actually does open doors to unique insights - the people who do speak English are quite ready to tell all the ins and outs, pros and cons, ups and downs, subtleties, gripes, concerns, cultural tidbits exactly because they think I won't go around talking about what they said.

[dead]

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#186

Post by breput »

astrange wrote: post #125
breput wrote: post #41

An interesting view of Japan, outside of the big cities, is blog written by Richard Hendy (an English ex-pat) back in the early 2010s called Spike Japan[0]. He focuses on areas such as Hokkaido where there are glimpses of past prosperity but due to an aging population and the younger people moving to the cities, the communities that remain are crumbling, but in a very Japanese way. Hendy has a great sense of humor an…

I had Japanese resident friends at the time who were very mad about this blog because he kept claiming totally-not-abandoned places were abandoned. He just showed up on holidays when everyone was somewhere else!

I'm sure it happened to an extent, but he couldn't have faked all of physical decay photos or actual demographic and population data. He showed up on holidays when everyone was away, but they were always away in many rural areas.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#187

Post by [deleted] »

willbudd wrote: post #33
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship: > Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years. I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people…

As far as I know, naturalization only involves a basic language test at around the level of N3; which should be very easy if you picked up any Japanese at all during the years spent living in the country. The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent…

[deleted]

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#188

Post by tkgally »

Dalewyn wrote: post #144
recurser wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent residency status. This. I've been in Japan for 15 years, and have permanent residency. Citizenship would basically only grant me the right to vote for (or against, I guess) the party that has been in po…

>In exchange for that, I would have to give up 3 other citizenships. Not a great deal... Obligatory IANAL, but the "no dual citizenship" thing is a Japanese thing and it's not like the Japanese government will go around informing other countries of your new citizenship status. You would have to make the rounds yourself informing the governments concerned you renounced their respective citizenship. Which is to say: I'…

> You would have to make the rounds yourself informing the governments concerned you renounced their respective citizenship.

The Japanese government requires that you have renounced your other citizenship(s) as a condition for acquiring Japanese citizenship [1, item 5, in Japanese]. I know a number of people who have taken Japanese citizenship, and they all had to go through a formal citizenship-renouncing process at the embassies of their previous countries of citizenship.

Exceptions seem to be made only in cases in which the applicant, for some reason, cannot renounce a previous citizenship.

[1] https://www.moj.go.jp/MINJI/minji78.html#a09

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#189

Post by djtango »

graymatters wrote: post #171
hogepiyo wrote: post #92

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language. Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it. Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't…

Ability to learn new languages (as an adult) follows normal distribution. Moreover, the further the new language is from one’s mother tongue the more difficult it is. Furthermore, people who excel in mother tongue (with enhanced writing and expressive abilities) often fall on the lower end of the spectrum with the ability to learn new languages. Shaming people over that is quite … shameful.

Whenever I find a language hard to learn, I always remind myself that the vast majority of every population can speak their own language.

"Chinese is hard" -> 1.5B people figured it out.

More recently, on observing my niece and nephew, something we take for granted is how exhausting it is being a child. You are learning 247 non stop for best part of 2 decades. Can't understate how hardcore it is. No wonder why we adults have less stomach to learn a new language. The kind of immersive learning required for language acquisition is all encompassing, and really kind of needs to take over your life - especially one distant from your mother tongue.

I say all this while figuring out how I personally muster the motivation, routine and immersion to gain fluency in Mandarin by the end of this decade (a personal goal).

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#190

Post by saiya-jin »

hogepiyo wrote: post #92

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language. Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it. Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't…

You should definitely get off your high horse a bit, world is a bit bigger than your opinions. There are millions of very smart high earning expats all over the world that see no reason to learn local language well if its ie too hard for them, they practically never use it (ie at work its english, at home its XYZ and for basic chit chat you get by with few hundreds of basic words), or simply don't have time to learn due to ie parental responsibilities.

I applaud to every parent who rather spends time with their kids rather than studying language because 'you should'. Ideal is both of course, but that's not how reality usually looks like.

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