That's really interesting. What other flipped-coin situations do you notice?
- Excessive Politeness <-> Passive Aggression (once you over-step or under-step)
- Dedication to Professionalism <-> Overworking & <x>-theatre (the appearance of working hard becomes paramount)
- Pressure to behave "properly" <-> [Ex|Im]plosion of "improper" behavior
- Prioritizing the group <-> Normalization of oppression (ex. someone putting up with something that isn't right to avoid perturbing the group dynamic)
- Propensity to save money <-> Less economic liquidity (whether this is good or bad for an economy is very much up for debate)
- Emphasis on success/reputation <-> Very risk averse behavior
Weirdly enough, in my opinion all of these things are what make japan what it is, and partially what makes it interesting. I haven't checked but surely Japan is the most homogeneous large successful nation out there, with a very distinct culture. I feel like I understand it because once you see the other side of some of these behaviors, it just clicks -- some of it is just historical and requires much more research (could japan have been a matriarchal society? maybe?), but a lot of it just kind of obvious based on the values held by a populace that is so largely homogeneous in culture.
Again, I'm not an expert in Japanese culture, that takes decades of work and research -- but I've found a lot of these fairly obvious to see over the years.
One thing I learned (the bad way) is that people at work will be nice to you and avoid confrontation and argument to an extraordinary extent. But if you push them too far and get into an argument.... that's it. You've ruined that relationship pretty much for ever.
Unfortunately it took me a couple of tries to understand the nuance of that :-(
I'm really trying to keep it light, but there is a lot to the underbelly of japanese culture that isn't so great, but all that said, it's a fantastic place to live, the cost of living is low (RIP japanese work force wages), public transportation is amazing, people are wonderful, there's a wide variety of influences and culture to sample.
Here's a light-hearted positive anecdote -- last year I left my wallet on a bus I was riding, and when realizing ~30 minutes later, I stopped a bus going the same direction to ask if the same buses came back (as in, would the same bus I left my wallet on come back the other way), and the driver not only confirmed, but also took out some stationery and wrote the number for the bus depot, and the called and coordinated extremely professionally. It was so professional that I was even a bit ashamed for sounding flustered on the phone.
To balance out that light-hearted positive anecdote -- don't ever go to a Japanese governmental agency without the right paperwork/seals/etc, it very likely will not end well for you.
But, yeah. It's best to keep it light in your own head. "Going up against Japan" is like going up against a brick wall. If you start getting upset about something you're just going to wreck yourself. Japan will not change. Until it does, of course. And then it will change literally overnight for no discernible reason and you'll be left wondering, "How the heck did everybody know to change???"
> But, yeah. It's best to keep it light in your own head. "Going up against Japan" is like going up against a brick wall. If you start getting upset about something you're just going to wreck yourself. Japan will not change. Until it does, of course. And then it will change literally overnight for no discernible reason and you'll be left wondering, "How the heck did everybody know to change???"
This is so true. Japan will pull a 180 with near zero warning -- one of the biggest things here is the constant contradiction/juxtaposition of opposing forces -- I have to admit I just can't reason about some things. The example is a bit out there, but I could see gay marriage laws being reversed in that kind of manner -- there doesn't seem to be the judeo-christian stigma here, and most people seem to be neutral (younger people's attitudes aren't actually shifting that far from older generations) so it's the kind of thing that I expect might just happen at some point and everyone will be like "oh, yeah, of course".
Another fun anecdote (which may or may not be true) for others reading this (I assume mikekchar already knows) -- The reason you basically can never find trash cans around Tokyo is likely due to the subway sarin gas attack of 1995, Japan was basically like "can't bomb us if we don't have trashcans to put the bombs in", and that was that. I am thoroughly convinced the reason Tokyo isn't filled with litter is due to cleanliness being ingrained in the Japanese national identity -- you basically learn to just hold on to your trash (internalize your inconvenience) until you get home or to somewhere with a trash can.
That's a myth. Except if you consider the Japanese national identity was set in the 60s. What made the Japanese clean is the Japanese government, during the preparation for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Before that, Japan had trash everywhere.
My last gf was Japanese, and this reminds me of her a lot. She supposedly had tons of "friends", but I almost never met any of them, and most of them just seemed to be people she texted once in a while. She tried telling me once that she could maintain a really "close" relationship without ever meeting in person or talking on the phone...
And our relationship wasn't very close either; she only texted me, never called, and really didn't seem to make much effort for us to get to know each other on a really deep level. It's what finally destroyed our relationship.
Is this normal with Japanese people or was she just weird? She did seem to possibly have other issues.
In the last few years my Japanophile flatmate has brought multiple Japanese people into our home for short term (couple of months) cohabitation. I've also noticed what to me felt like a lack of interest in interpersonal depth or closeness, with myself and others. Conversations stayed rote, surface level, and formal - though flatly cheerful. I often felt like I was "stressing an introvert," was suddenly oddly conscious of the other's sense of privacy, and only got polite awkwardness in response to attempts to be open and build rapport. I just chalked it up to cultural differences.
As a kind of extreme example, young women in Japan have absolutely no problem with the idea of going off on vacation without their boyfriend. They will go with a group of female friends, or even go off on their own. In the west it would be unheard of, I think. If you saw a woman vacationing alone, you would almost certainly assume she was single. This is not the case at all in Japan.
People, in general, are also really guarded. It is said that you must have 3 faces: one that you show to everyone, one that you show to your closest friends and family and one that you show to only yourself. So that limits the kind of "closeness" that you can have. If "really getting to know someone" means knowing all their inner secrets and motivations... well, I think that is just incredibly unlikely to happen with Japanese people.
I hesitate to say this, but I only found out that my wife was religious 3 years after we were married! It's not that we have a bad relationship at all, but it's just something that was hers alone and private. Such a thing would be unthinkable in the west.
This is a difficult topic to discuss because it's again super cultural and there is a lot of "common knowledge" (i.e. things that you assume based on how you were brought up, but never really questioned).
All of us have bits that are private. In the west, it's usually our deepest fears or things that we are ashamed about. We project an image of ourselves that shows us how we would like to be, rather than strictly the true image. All of us are, to one extent or another, messed up inside and if we projected that, then everybody would be upset.
I tend to think of the guarded aspect of Japanese society to be less of a matter of withholding "the real you", but rather projecting the "you that matters to you most". My wife has kind of the opposite problem that you do. For example, if I'm afraid of something but struggle through my fears and succeed, I tend to share that with my wife. She thinks that's super strange. Why would I go to such a great effort to be courageous and then tell her that I'm afraid? In a kind of way, you are spoiling the work of art that is you by doing that.
I think in the west we think, "Oh but you need to have someone to confide in or else you will be lonely". I think this is really the difference. Like I said, people here are more independent. I think it's just a cultural difference and the way they they were brought up. "Getting to know someone" is less about sharing your secrets and more about learning about them by observing them. YMMV.
What do you mean by 'connect', exactly, and how would you be able to judge about what is substantial to others, when the culture is so different to the Western one ? I have friends from Europe and the States, that after decades here, still don't get the vast differences in thinking and behaviour.
There's an emphasis here in people understanding how others feel ( or making an educated guess ) without actual spoken communication, that is difficult to understand for Westerners even after years in the country. A gesture indicating a feeling is often much more appreciated than a full-blown conversation. 空気を読め。
Most people that have come to visit us and met part of our Japanese family often comment on how cold or distant some family members seem to be despite being siblings, or a couple, and they couldn't be more wrong.
Some of those family members have the closest relationship I've ever known people to have. They just don't walk around making a point about it, or need to express it outwardly.
My wife would talk about the weather with her mother on the phone, once every few days. Just the weather. It was not what she talked about that mattered. It was the fact that she called, no matter what. If we had been living in Namie when Fukushima went nuts, and she had been on the phone, we wouldn't have left the house on the face of a nuclear meltdown before finishing the call. And she would have talked only about the ckufing weather, I assure you.
IMO the order is reversed -- they don't need to talk because they have a very good/healthy relationship, it takes a large amount of consistent interaction to get to that level.
tangent Lately I'm really starting to think that relationships are really about both people building accurate models of the other person in their own heads -- after all you never really know another person, you just know about them and bring them into your your life and interact. When people are surprised by others it's because what the person did conflicts with the model of the person they had in their head.
Back to the topic though, in my comment I was more referring to friends/people you didn't grow up with -- people you met in high school/college/working in your 20s.
All this said, I think Japan has the propensity for great relationships as well -- I see old people who look like they've been good friends for 50+ years (same neighborhood, same groups, kids go to the same highschool, etc) and that is a wonderful thing worthy of envy.
Also just as much as people quietly show confidence in each other and converse without words, one of the biggest causes of societal pressure is unspoken expectations. The stiff-upper-lip gets idealized as the "right" way to interact and that's what the norm is. While most cases I'm sure are benign, expressing feeling is generally considered a good thing in a healthy relationship, whether or not you both know whatever you were going to say or not.
> ... expressing feeling is generally considered a good thing in a healthy relationship ...
Not sure that can be assumed to be a universal truth. In most cases, in Japan, expressing feeling is sign of a problem. And often one reason ( of many ) for the isolation foreigners can face in Japanese society. While trying to 'express' themselves, they're actually making others feel uncomfortable by doing so, or trying to convey things that have been already understood, no need 'to explain the joke', you're ruining it.
Not trying to paint a rosy picture here, anyway, about Japanese ways. There are many problems in Japanese society ( directly related to the topic and mentioned in other comments, the massive and ubiquitous alcoholism and all its terrible consequences, for instance ), and societal pressure reaches levels hard to understand in the West, for sure.
That's certainly true -- differences in self-expression is often cited when talking to other foreigners about these kinds of issues.
Oh and I did not assume you were trying to pain an overly rosy picture of japanese culture -- I agree that they certainly emote less, and need to emote less because of the different cultural norms.
I assume a key problem with that is that when there is a disagreement that can only be well resolved through talking things out, they just don't know how to do it. So instead it is suppressed and everyone just pretends there is no disagreement.
The place I worked had that smooth and human focused vibe for the HR and marketing dept, and a mildly confrontational and straight to the point bias in the engineering dept.