Archive for the 'culture' Category
Culturally Modified Female Voice
March 5th, 2009Most people with a passing familiarity with Japan, and anyone who has actually lived in Japan, is intimately familiar with the Culturally Modified Female Voice, by which I mean the extra-high voices that some (not all) Japanese women use. There are actually two types of annoying voices, with very different roots. The first is the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Carbon-Dating Expats
January 20th, 2008Talking with various foreign friends, I’ve realized that you can determine a sort of threshold value for when they moved to Japan: pre or post late 90′s. When I came to Japan (1996), beepers were all the rage in the US. Cell-phones were rare if not virtually unknown. Car phones, sure, but not cell-phones. In [...]
Tokyo Climate versus Houston Climate
November 8th, 2007Actually, this post is about Japanese climate, not just Tokyo, but I like parallelism in my post titles. Japan is a hot, humid country pretty much overall. And Houston is a hot, muggy climate. They probably post equal temperatures (in fact, Houston probably has higher temperatures), but, man, is Japan hotter. It all comes down [...]
The Age of Female Gender Loss
November 8th, 2007One of the things I’ve grown completely used to, but found odd when I first came to Japan, is that there is some nebulous age at which, apparently, Japanese women just turn into Japanese people. Somewhere around 50. It’s not at all unusual for female janitors to clean men’s restrooms while they are in use, [...]
The Times They Are A Changin’
August 4th, 2007Things are changing in Japan, vis foreigners. Two things in the last two days which brought this to mind: This morning, on one of the TV talkshow/variety shows (think The Today Show or the like if you don’t know Japanese TV), they had a segment where they asked a bunch of foreigners what Japanese food [...]
Japanese and the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
July 11th, 2007I’m not a reductionist. I’m not big on sentences that start with “the reason that…”, especially if the end of the sentence is something universal like “…Japanese people do blah”. However, I don’t think things pop up in a vacuum, either, so while I might disagree that a certain thing is the reason doesn’t mean [...]
