Another Cultural Difference
September 5th, 2008Yeah, yeah, that’s all us expats write about. Sorry.
I was listening to SModcast (a podcast by director Kevin Smith and producer Scott Mosier), and I had a big chunk of reverse culture-shock (that is, being shocked by your own culture because you’ve been away from it for so long that you forget parts of it). Kevin Smith was talking about how he got a big bag of weed and thoroughly enjoyed it. Not when he was a kid, but last week.
This would NEVER happen in Japan. Never. It’s inconceivable. It’s about as likely to happen as a US President is to jump up on the presidential podium at a press conference and defecate.
Sure, celebrities use drugs here. That’s obvious from the fact that occassionally someone gets busted (always, always with amphetamines). But there is only ONE way to admit drug use in Japan: when you’re apologizing, after being arrested. That is IT. If you were to say it any other time, you’d be blackballed for at least a year, if not indefinitely. If you’re a musician, your record company would cancel your tour and stop putting out new albums. No other record company would hire you either. If you’re a director, same thing, just substitute “tour” with “current project” and “new albums” with “new movies”. Etc. etc.
Not only would a celebrity (director, producer, actor, singer, writer, etc.) never say “Yeah, I smoke the occassional joint”, but the following things, which are even more accepted in the US, would either never or vanishingly seldom happen in Japan:
- Admitting to trying drugs as a youth, in any way other than discussing how you were a terrible problem youth with emotional problems and (the entertainment business/a hard-but-fair teacher/the death of a relative) saved you. In other words, you can mention them if they happened a long time ago and you think they were horrible, but you can’t just say “Oh, yeah, I smoked a few bowls when I was a teenager”, or “I used to like getting high, but I outgrew that”
- Admitting that you’re entering rehab (again, unless you’ve been arrested, in which case this step is now mandatory)
If it helps to reframe this, imagine a US without gangsta rap. In fact, forget the music industry, and just think “film, tv, politics, athlete”. Now replace “drugs” with “murder” (and I don’t mean as part of a war, I mean “I killed the neighbor, and it wasn’t self defense”). Would a person casually mention that they murdered someone when young? No. Would they as part of a retrospective on how they were a horrible person but have since atoned? Maybe. Depends how many years have passed, how contrite they are, etc.
Would someone go on a podcast and say (not joking, and not clearly delusional), “Yeah, last week I killed a few people. It was awesome”, and still have a career? Not damn likely.
Powers of 10 and WH40K
August 30th, 2008I’ve got a cold, so my mind isn’t working all that well. So this post may not be very organized.
Are you, dear reader, familiar with the short film “Powers of 10″? It’s an old education short, about 9 minutes long (you’d think they would have added a minute of padding in there), which zooms out from a picnic scene, further and further into space, giving the viewer a sense of cosmic scale. It then zooms in, going into the skin of the picnicker’s hand, the cells, the DNA, the molecules, the atoms, giving the viewer a sense of the utter smallness of the things that make us up.
I enjoy the cruft (backstory, setting, history, etc.) of Warhammer 40K for the same reason. Lots of sci-fi has tried to go with the “massively big” angle. Setting things not hundreds, but thousands of years in the future. Having some planet entirely covered by city. Having battles which last years and kill millions.
Warhammer 40K just turns all that up to 11. Instead of a setting thousands of years in the future, how about 38,000 years in the future? One planet covered by a city? How about that being an entire class of planets. Battles lasting years? How about sieges lasting over a century. Death tolls for which numbers are just silly.
Basically, as big as you can imagine something, Games Workshop (the publishers of WH40K) are focussed on making it bigger. And somehow they make it work. You don’t get “big number fatigue”, where everything is so large it seems normal. Instead, everything seems to factor off something else, so when you think something is big, there’s something out there which is only 1/10th as big, and still seems huge, and something which is 10 times as big, and still seems huge.
So, in a sense, it ends up working like the Powers of 10. You can start looking at the universe, and realize “Wow, the sun is REALLY REALLY big! It’s HUGE!”, and keep moving out, to “Wow, the solar system is REALLY REALLY huge!”, “The galaxy is REALLY REALLY huge!” “The universe is REALLY REALLY huge!”. And yet you never think “Well, the sun is actually really small after all”. Likewise, you never think that some battle which lasted 100 years and killed every living thing on a planet is small, even though there is some other battle that lasted 5 centuries and wiped out a whole system.
Japanese Privacy
August 13th, 2008Japanese have an odd sense of privacy.
Basically, from what I can tell, it’s that any unauthorized reproduction of any information that concerns a person is, in itself, an invasion of privacy. That seems reasonable, at first glance. But I’m talking ANY reproduction of information concerning someone. Google recently released Street View (which shows actual photographs of streets) for a few Japanese cities, and complaints are already going up. The contention seems to be that people’s houses are shown, and also people in the streets are shown.
My understanding of “privacy” is that, by its very nature, it is something that does not happen in “public”. If you’re doing something out in the middle of the street, it isn’t private. If you can see your house by walking down a public street, your house isn’t private. But that doesn’t seem to be the prevailing approach in Japan.
The arguments I’ve heard against Google Streetview are that “Japan is small, and people live close together, and therefore it’s a long-standing aspect of Japanese culture that things which normally wouldn’t be private in other countries are considered private”. But, honestly, that sounds like an ad hoc hypothesis. Everything I’ve learned about the Japan of 30, 40, 50 years ago indicates that this type of thing wouldn’t have been a problem back then, despite the fact that Japan was small back then, too, and people lived close together, then, too.
It’s weird. There are things (in any country) which stay the same yet which everyone is convinced are changing (you hear ALL THE TIME about how Japan has become so unsafe, and getting worse every year, when in reality crime has been dropping for several years now), and there are things which are changing which everyone maintains have always been that way (”We have always thought that even looking at a person’s house is an invasion of privacy. And we’ve always been at war with Eurasia”).
The Way Chinese People Dress
August 2nd, 2008There comes, for any issue, a point in people’s lives at which their view of something stops changing, despite reality continuing to change. For each issue, that’s a different time, but it always seems to happen: folks who keep saying “Czechoslovakia”, or “the U.S.S.R” in non-historical contexts.
One of my stuck points, I’ve realised, is about how Chinese people dress. I’ve lived in Japan for over a decade, and have met lots of folks who claim to be able to tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese folks just by looking. I could too, until a few years ago. I think most people who claim to be able to tell the difference between Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese believe that they’re doing so via jaw structure, epicanthic folds, etc., but except for some really edge cases, I think it really comes down to little things like hairstyles, makeup, and clothing.
Which is why China’s continuing economic success is making things so difficult. It used to be easy: if you see someone who looks like they stepped out of the 80’s, they were Chinese. If it wasn’t in real life, but on TV, it was either old 80’s Japanese TV footage, or modern China. Unless they were acting really really creepy, in which case it was North Korea. But now that China has caught up economically with much of the world, so has their fashion, and now Chinese look pretty much exactly like Japanese. Except, mentally, I still picture them as looking like Japanese teleported from the past.
Not that this really causes any problems. “Distinguishing similar Asian nationalities” is neither part of my private nor work life. It’s just one of the points in my mental history tracking that seems to have gotten stuck.
That and “Czechoslovakia”.
McBeatles
May 1st, 2008Tonight is bargain clearance night for random observations (they’ve kinda stockpiled, so they’re all coming out here in tiny snippets).
There’s a McDonald’s near my workplace, whose owner must be the biggest fan of Reich, Glass, and Adams that has ever existed. Not that he plays any of their works. No, he’s more of the avant garde recontextualizing performance art type. To wit: the McDonald’s has a Beatles CD that they use as the store background music. Note that I do not say that they use it as part of the background music. No, that’s the entirety of their library. One CD, probably about an hour long, played 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, uninterrupted. For the last two years. That’s 8,736 hours of playback. If any of the music licensing groups found out, Paul McCartney could probably build another space yacht secret fortress robot with the back royalties.
Personally, though, I preferred the CD that the McDonald’s used to play, before they switched to the Beatles CD: a classical music CD, non-descript (I have no memory of what composers or pieces were on it) with what I can only assume were some deep deep scratches, because it had a tendency to skip and repeatskip and repeatskip and repeatskip and repeat for long, long stretches of time. (The kitchen crew couldn’t hear the music (or they share the owner’s taste for minimalism), so nobody would reset or fast-forward the CD if it started skipping.) The soundtrack for a lunch back then could easily consist of:
La da di dah dum, da dah didididididididididididididididididididididididididididididididididididididididdididi… (continuing on uninterrupted for the next 15 minutes)
Graffiti Battle
May 1st, 2008There’s an interesting graffiti battle (graffiti in the bathroom stall sense, not the wall art sense) going on at my workplace. Above the urinal is a sign that means to say”Please do not throw gum into the urinal”. However, they got the kanji wrong. It should say:
便器にガムを捨てないでください。
But it actually says:
便器にガムを拾てないでください。
（The difference is bolded for clarity)
Which means something like “Please do not take gum into the urinal”. (It’s grammatically incorrect in Japanese, so the English translation is equally grammatically incorrect).
There have now developed two factions at work: one faction has hand edited the sign to revert the sign to what it meant to say (”Please do not throw gum into the urinal”), while another faction has edited the sign to clean up the grammar (”Please do not take gum from the urinal”). Neither group is so bold as to cross out the other’s corrections, but personally I favor the latter camp.
Engrish
May 1st, 2008When you’ve lived in Asia for quite a while, you lose your taste for Engrish…or, perhaps, you could say that your taste becomes more refined. Random misspellings and minor grammatical mistakes are no longer interesting. But, still, from time to time, there is something that tickles your fancy. Like today, when I saw a guy wearing a black suede jacket with a crimson rose and the following text:
Elegant like a butterfly
Shucking and jiving
Not Abandoned
April 13th, 2008I haven’t abandoned this site, they just shut off all internet access at work, and I usually updated on night shifts.
Japan is Crazy for Barack Obama
February 21st, 2008…Not because of his politics, demeanor, looks, or anything else, mind you, but his name.
Obama is a Japanese name. Not a common one, by any means, but recognizably name-like. Like “Windthorpe” or “Hasseldorf” or something: perhaps you’ve never met someone named either of those, but if you heard them, you’d immediately know they were names.
What this means is that all over the TV there are little segments, on the news or talk shows or the like, of something Obama-ish. Pre-commercial teasers saying “After the break, an exclusive interview with Obama”, only to come out of the break interviewing some auto mechanic whose name is Obama. That sort of thing, over and over. Then there’s the little town of Obama (population: 32,000), which is milking this for everything its worth: they have declared themselves “official” supporters. They have come up with sweet buns with pictures of Obama on them. They have sent Barack Obama a set of nice chopsticks, because his birthday is the same day as “Official Chopstick Day” in Obama (much like America has “National RandomBadThing Awareness Month”, Japan is jam-packed with “Official RandomPurchasableThing Days”. The 29th of every month is “Meat Day”, based on a pun of “meat” (肉 - niku) and “29″ (二九 - niku).)
Making things even more frustrating, the suffix for “City” is “市 - shi“. So Fukuoka City is Fukuoka-shi. And the neutral-but-polite suffix for someone, for example, on the news is “氏 - shi“. So Obama City is 小浜市 - Obama-shi, and Barack Obama is オバマ氏 - Obama-shi.
As I’ve mentioned before, googling in Japanese is hard for several reasons, one of which is that everyone always wants to play clever with their puns. Writing 鯖 - saba (horse mackerel) for サーバ - saba (server, as in a computer server) . Obama is no exception. Googling for info on Obama City, it seems like 75% of the hits on Google were about Barack Obama himself, except people were all being clever writing 小浜市 instead of オバマ氏.
So, there you go. Random trivia for the day. If Obama loses the primaries or the election, this will all be a historical nugget. If he becomes president (fingers crossed), I expect a slight increase in the flurry until everyone tires of it and gets over his name. Until we get some presidential candidate named Bob Unko or something (unko = poop). I doubt that will ever get old.
Studying Japanese and Playing Skateboarding Video Games
February 6th, 2008(This post doesn’t really have to do with Japanese, that’s just coincidental)
With the rise of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the internet is aflame with musicians who complain that the newly ascendant musician-simulator genre is keeping people from actually picking up and learning to play real instruments.
The same argument has been used against other simulators-of-stuff-you-can-just-plain-do-in-real-life. Nobody has ever complained, for example, that Microsoft Flight Simulator has kept people from going out and flying real planes, because it’s clear that the financial barrier in buying a plane is the actual preventative, and playing the game is in fact more like to make people go out and take flying classes than to prevent it. But for games which involve things that require minimal investment, like baseball, it’s an old argument.
When I was young, I studied Japanese. People would sometimes ask me if I enjoyed learning Japanese. The honest answer, which I sometimes gave, was: no. Not at all. Studying Japanese wasn’t fun, it was work. However, I enjoyed knowing Japanese, and studying was what got me to that goal.
I think there are three levels of study/knowledge enjoyment. The first is where you enjoy the study, and you enjoy the ability gained by studying. Nothing will stop someone who has interest in both of these. Give them guitar hero, and they may love it, but that won’t stop them from practicing the guitar, because they actually enjoy the guitar.
The next level is where you don’t enjoy the study, but you don’t hate it either, and you enjoy the ability gained by studying. I’d still say, in this case, that sims won’t stop someone. Sure, playing the sim may be more fun, but since practice isn’t actually un-fun, the sim experience will never match up to the actual experience, so a person might study a little more slowly, but the studying will still happen.
The last level is where you find the study to be just plain onerous, even though you’d enjoy the ability gained by studying. For me, this is where skateboarding lies. I tried my hand at it, practicing ollying for I-don’t-know-how-many-hours. And then I quit. Sure, I know the mantra is that people today give up when they find something hard, but they’re missing the point: when I’m studying something purely for fun, not for my health or sanity or financial stability, if it’s not fun, it’s missing the entire point. Sure, I might have a lot of fun once I’ve struggled through the hard part, but that would have to be a whole mountain of fun to make up for the unpleasantness endured.
So, what traditionally happened is that people in the first category advanced quickly, people in the second category advanced slowly, and people in the third category quit. Sure, you might know if your son was a category three guy, because you bought him that guitar for his birthday, and he only played it a week before giving it up. But odds are, you’d only know a cat 3 quitter if you were his good friend or direct relative.
Nowadays, what happens is that people in the first category advance quickly, people in the second category advance slowly, and people in the third category just play games that simulate the part of the activity which they enjoy. They pretend to shred with the best musicians instead of hiding their guitar in the back of the closet. They pretend to grind with Tony Hawk rather than hide their skateboard in the shoe cabinet. But since they’re playing those games, instead of just silently hiding their stuff, they’re much more visible.
And that’s why people complain about the games. If your friend plays Guitar Hero every night, and never touches the guitar in the back of his closet, you can get on his case for letting video games prevent him from learning to play a REAL instrument. If he didn’t play Guitar Hero, and never touched the guitar in the back of his closet, you’d never get on his case, because you’d never know he had an interest in guitars in the first place.
