> if a guy doesn't want to go to a party and get terribly drunk with everyone else in the company, then he obviously has some element of his outside life — a girlfriend, a hobby, et cetera — that is more important to him than the company
You are completely justified in complaining about the article's negativity. It's not like he announced in the title or the first paragraph what it was going to be about.
"When you buy Super Famicom games in used game shops, the gray plastic is very often stained deep, ugly yellow from existing in houses packed to bursting with cigarette smoke. Sometimes, the consoles themselves are so yellow."
That's actually due to the plastic used, it's not from smoke.
Reminds me of the time I bought a used Dreamcast at GameStop and it had a disc all scratched to hell in it and reeked of pot. Actually looked and smelled like someone cleaned their pipe and dumped it in the system.
I can't imagine living in Japan as a vegetarian teetotaler. There's nothing wrong with that lifestyle but, man, pick your battles. Those things—the working, drinking, and meat eating—are part of the culture and it's not exactly a well kept secret.
I know that I love booze and meat so I'm not going to relocate to Bangalore any time soon.
Mate, I've been to Bangalore and while there are more bars than elsewhere in India it's a far cry from, say, New York where I'm living in alcohol sodden bliss ;)
The author comes across as a whiney and effeminate control freak. Japan has it right; meat is awesome. 80's music is awesome. The liberty to choose what drugs you inject into your body is again, awesome. Seems like he would fit well with hipsters in NYC or SF. Apologize for the condescension but he just rubbed my the wrong way.
I suggest he chills out and learns to go with the flow sometimes. But happiness is probably the last thing this guy wants, he's the type of guy who thrives on finding things at fault.
Booze and meat can be found in Bangalore, much the same way that vegetarian food can be found in Japan. And I've been to a few of the pubs there. Well. Yeah.
Not to say I didn't enjoy my stay, on the contrary I loved it; but I wouldn't move there and act indignant because I couldn't get good quality wine and steak.
The point was to illustrate that Southern India is a culture inclined to vegetarian food and not drinking. And while you _can_ find meat (and some semblance of wine) in Bangalore it's hardly the same as New York or Sydney (my two "homes") in that regard.
"Booze and meat can be found in Bangalore, much the same way that vegetarian food can be found in Japan."
From what I understand from the article under discussion , purely vegetarian food hardly exists in japan. I have no idea if that is true, but the situation wrt meat is hardly the same in South India, so your comparison above is demonstrably false.
"The point was to illustrate that Southern India is a culture inclined to vegetarian food and not drinking."
Rubbish.
Your stay in Bangalore doesn't lead you to correct generalizations about South India. In Kerala for instance, (one of the four states in South India), practically everyone is a non vegetarian. Hyderabad(in Andhra Pradesh) is famous for its nonvegetarian food, specially Biriyani. You have no idea about the amount of liquor consumed either. Extremely large quantities of liquor are consumed in South India. There is a thriving illegal liquor mafia which would be very interested in your discuvery that South India is "not inclined" to liquor. The people you interacted with during your stay here may have been largely vegetarian, but South India is hardly "inclined" to either vegetarianism or abstinence from alcohol, the way the OP describes Japan as being "inclined to " non vegetarianism.Show me any locality in Bangalore and I'll find you a couple of dozen non vegetarian restaurants in a 5 km radius. And lots of liquor shops.
I've lived here 35+ years. I should know.
I'll grant you that you may not get a steak done the way you want it, but hey I can't get a Masala Dosa in the average restaurant in Arizona. That hardly means Westerners don't "incline" to potatoes (the major filling in a Masala Dosa.
Most South Indian non vegetarians eat Chicken or Lamb (and not primarily Pork or Beef as in the United States). Beef is slightly rarer (but again not in Kerala). You need to distinguish "meat" from the "exact dish I eat in New York".
I was saying there was plenty of meat In Bangalore, not sausages made Chicago Style (or whatever). Meat does not dominate the menu as much as in the West, but it is easily available almost everywhere.
Some communities of people, e.g Brahmins or Jains or Buddhists are vegetarians. These are minorities. Large chunks of Hindus, Muslims and Christians are meat eaters (and alcohol drinkers). Apart from these minority communities, People who don't regularly eat meat do so because of economic reasons not any "inclination" to vegetarianism.
He was exaggerating about the scarcity, I've travelled Japan with vegetarian friends and they could fine suitable food (and quite nice food when we were in the mountains around Buddhist temples). In any case you're getting into a nitpick about the general idea which is that a meat loving boozehound is going to feel really out of place in India when compared to, say, Japan, Australia, North America, Europe, etc. . . .
As one of those I wouldn't move to India and expect to have my cravings for steak and a nice Bordeaux satisfied with any regularity. Just as I wouldn't move to Japan as a veggo and expect to have my cravings for super awesome tempeh dishes satisfied. And I certainly wouldn't complain about it like that.
"As one of those I wouldn't move to India and expect to have my cravings for steak and a nice Bordeaux satisfied with any regularity. Just as I wouldn't move to Japan as a veggo and expect to have my cravings for super awesome tempeh dishes satisfied. And I certainly wouldn't complain about it like that."
Fair Enough! Fwiw, some Indians bitch and moan about American food habits when they move to the USA so I am sure the habit is fairly universal !
I agree completely. People will find things to complain about nearly everywhere. Frankly, if I had an opportunity to spend more time in India I wouldn't complain one bit because I really enjoy the country and I could be quite happy going without my usual fair.
The whole thing seemed amateurishly written. Left me thinking: does Kotaku not have editors? Why did he suddenly directly address the reader as "man" three times in one paragraph? Why did paragraphs seem rambly and disconnected? If one's going to take the "asshole" tone, one needs to be likable or at least amusing... maybe the author should read some Bukowski.
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.
I remember watching DBZ after school, and while it is certainly "graphically iconic", there is no legitimate way to claim it has a coherent plot. It seems like the author is remembering his Saturday morning cartoons through some rose-tinted cokebottles.
I won't even touch "Anime is terrible. It used to be okay."
Reading the article I felt that just like how he is comparing current Anime to DBZ (what he remembers) is the same way he is comparing his current feeling towards Japanese culture to what he thought it would be.
It feels like reality has settled in and his daily life has some deeper rooted problems than the stickers being placed on the barcode a certain a way.
Regardless he gives a view of the culture that you don't often hear about.
What are you talking about? They have, e.g., 30 eps in a row of goku fighting frieza. it's an extremely slow plot, but every episode follows after the next. (except after a saga ends, then they just do a time skip to the next big fight)
Man does this bring back memories from back when I was still a young hackling... Watching in eager anticipation what will happen next. For four straight episodes it was Goku with his hands in the air constipating, and somehow I loved every minute of it.
Correct or not, your post reminded me of a recent Jon Stewart (Daily Show) deconstruction of Glenn Beck's and Sean Hannity's rant about how great "America used to be". The idea was that your own country is ALWAYS great TO YOU when you're 12.... BECAUSE YOU'RE 12!
I was in college when it hit over here. Couldn't make head nor tails of it. It seemed like crap to me.
Then again, I used to watch TMNT after school and to this day will maintain that it was actually quite funny, even though someone older than me will, with some justification, villify that as well.
Some of this article was worth reading. The complaints about how things used to be better, however, were not.
While I wouldn't call DBZ's plot unique, it wasn't bad.
You might have experienced a bad, emasculated version which was aired in America, stripped down to nothing but fight scenes and completely devoid of anything involving adult life. That version really sucked.
I would like to check out some manga to see what it's like. I almost posted a request for manga recommendations on a LibraryThing manga forum, but I decided against it. I tried writing up a description of what I was looking for, but it devolved into rejection of a bunch of anime stereotypes:
- No ordinary schmoes who turn out to have amazing supernatural powers.
- Nothing that revolves around a series of contests with enemies of escalating power.
- No robots or exoskeletons.
- It would be nice if the central character was an adult. An adult whose love interest is not an adolescent.
- While I'm on that topic, nothing that will make people think I'm a pervert if they catch me reading it.
So, while I was wroting this up, I started checking out the lists of mangas that had been previously recommended in the forum, and I started to feel like I was shitting all over everything they loved, so I decided not to post my request. People talk quite a lot about manga being a serious art form for adults. Am I missing something?
The problem with forums about anime or manga is that they self-select for people who have been rejected from every other community. A solid science-fiction or horror story can find discussion in the appropriate forums, but nobody normal is interested in some high-school student's harem of magical girls.
Here are some manga / anime recommendations. Some have not been licensed for distribution in the US, or have been only partially released here, so you will need to hunt a bit for fansubs. I watch only the animated adaptations, as they're easier to hide, but feel free to order the original manga versions if you don't feel ashamed about reading comic books. Not all are adaptations -- the movies, and a few television series, are original animations.
Very interesting suggestions, thanks! I'll certainly check out Monster and maybe some of the others. It's interesting that sci-fi and fantasy still predominate (and a couple of your suggestions do actually involve robots.) Personally, I have no problem with genre fiction, but I'm partial to mysteries (of the protagonist-solves-the-crime variety) and historical adventures (such as the Horatio Hornblower novels.) Do you have any suggestions along those lines?
P.S. I just added "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" to my Netflix queue, and Netflix suggested something called "Xxxholic" for me. Well... I won't prejudge, but that kind of thing certainly doesn't help dispel stereotypes.
"Robot" is an awfully broad category; none of my suggestions involve the giant, piloted, super-powered robots. Monster is very good, but at 72 episodes, is unusually long for a mature series. You may want to look at Tokyo Godfathers or Planetes first, to see if your interests match mine.
"xxxHolic" is a weird Japan-glish word; you can read it as "____-aholic". I've not seen the series and can't recommend either way, but from the Wikipedia article it looks like something you'd not enjoy.
Online recommendation engines seem to break when dealing with Japan-related topics; I don't know why, but it could be that some people will watch anything if it's 1) animated 2) from Japan, so the engines build false associations between wildly different works. This happens in music also -- I once listened to an orchestral re-imagining of some soundtrack by the Tokyo Philharmonic, and now Last.FM won't stop recommending awful j-pop.
If you read one manga, read Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki. Yes, that's the same Miyazaki who is the famous animation director. It's after midnight and I'm not feeling particularly eloquent, but it will be worth your while.
I'd make the same point I would to someone griping about all the psychics, aliens, vampires, and wizards in the paperback books they've tried out:
Well, that's the geek media.
Worse, it's the young-geek media - most of that stuff is marketed to teenage guys. Admittedly, it's really hard to find anything else in the US because young geeks have been the primary source of demand for Japanese animation and comics. We mostly get the Bleaches and the Hellsings and whatnot.
It's as if the rest of the world only got SF and Fantasy movies out of Hollywood. There's stuff to love there, to be sure, but it's a necessarily limited sampling.
I would heartily recommend you Distant Neighborhood (Haruka na Machi e) by Jiro Taniguchi
Actually most of the books by Jiro Taniguchi are really good, they are mostly simple touching story that give a good glimpse of japanese culture and the relationship between people.
Started out reading, then scanning, finally skimming for section heads and interesting topics.
The problem is that the author didn't make a cogent point and back it up. Instead he started off with a lot of excuse-making, then went into a list, but kept deviating from the list to talk about video games (which, I guess, should have been the topic?)
It had the feeling of a long list of grievances strewn together, ranted about, and then tacked on to a couple of other conversations.
The strength of the article was in the negative first-person impressions of Japanese culture. He should have stuck with that, cut out the apologizing and made that just a sentence or two at the end. Then he should have tightened the hell out of the prose and tried to make some kind of thesis that his stories supported.
Other that that, the first-person stuff was good. But damn -- this guy is an editor? The structure is a mess.
At one point he even admits how bad it is -- and then continues on in the death march towards the end.
Aha it makes a little more sense now. Editors are usually poor writers/reporters - their skill set is different (which doesn't excuse the fact he clearly never copy-edited what he wrote)
I read the whole thing and I actually liked the style. It's not like he's randomly reviewing video games in the middle of the article, he's using his examples of things he finds stupid to show how the arbitrary and nonsensical social conventions contribute to a lack of creativity in Japanese business.
Only barely. English has plenty of similarly complicated words that are used frequently without people understanding their meaning. Learning about those meanings puts a bit of a shade on what people are actually saying, until you realize people don't actually mean it that way.
It's the same way with irrashaimase; it's a self-deprecating phrase (and Japanese does indeed have a lot of them), but it's a stock phrase, and that's how people use it. Similarly, a lot of our exclamations have origins in words, even if we've forgotten them. For instance, why do we say "ow" instead of "ai", or simply "aa"? "Ow" is significantly more complicated physically than simply "aa!"ing. Other cultures say different things for exclamations, even "spontaneous" things like pain, and that's normal. Getting uppity about it isn't.
Wait, your example from English is completely unrelated to Tim's point, which is that they use words with some meaning that may not apply to the current circumstances. Tim's argument is that that imposes a subliminal message, which, repeated often and widely enough, has a negative effect on the society. Maybe you have some argument against that, but you didn't make it in this comment.
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 saw any appeal in $10 martinis or $6 beers — especially with a bunch of people with whom I just spent 10 working hours. Needless to say, it did not take long before I was considered "not a team player." (My bosses liked me, so I did well enough before I realized I loathe corporate life and left, but my peers were not fans and caused considerable trouble.)
"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."
You are right about this. Pretty much any place I have worked (I'm from the US) has had office parties or other kind of outings. I almost always went because it does help you get to know your boss and co-workers (it was only about once-a-month). I don't really see a problem with it.
Your example of going out three times a week is a bit much (I wouldn't go out that many times a week), but you could have at least gone out with them once-in-awhile to show them that you don't completely hate your co-workers. If you do, you probably shouldn't be working there anyway.
You can't take the human nature/social aspect out of working. If you don't do these things, people will think you are weird/the outsider/don't like them.
" I almost always went because it does help you get to know your boss and co-workers (it was only about once-a-month). I don't really see a problem with it."
I made it a point never to go for one after my first experience. In Bangalore these take weird forms, usually wasting a holiday or a weekend, landing up in some god forsaken "resort", where you can do exciting things like play badminton or carroms, Quoits or Dumb Charades (I kid you not!), or quietly get drunk in a corner, with some of the really bad companies throwing in a few "mission and vision" style speeches from the powers that be.
Once I got a letter from a VP telling me to report to his office and explain why I didn't attend the "office party weekend + mission and vision session" over the previous weekend and I explained (quite diplomatically) that I didn't give a fuck about these things and had no intention of ever attending anything like this in the future either. He seemed completely shocked and speechless and was almost in tears when I left.
My immediate superior later gave me a veiled warning that my " career progress could be affected" by such "unorthodox attitudes" but, strangely enough, it wasn't. I got regular promotions and raises and was "on the leadership track" when I left because work was too boring. They didn't believe my reason for leaving either ("I am bored out of my skull"), because I was a "senior person" (I was 28!!) and was "poised on the leadership ladder" (yes they actually spoke like that!).
These were large companies though. Small (less than 20 people) company parties were often a lot of fun. I am so glad I don't have to work for large companies anymore.
"These were large companies though. Small (less than 20 people) company parties were often a lot of fun. I am so glad I don't have to work for large companies anymore."
I agree with you there. I now only work for small companies for that very same reason.
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.
Hahaha. I used to work at a tech company that constantly had happy hours and even dinners out at restaurants together. Eventually I stopped going to all of them because I couldn't handle all these nerds getting drunk and trying to talk faster and louder than the next one. They still tolerated me.
But one day the boss bought some shitty Chinese food for the company lunch and I just went out and got myself a gyro and came back. It was never the same after that.
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.
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.
I think this is the kind of article that you scroll through until you find a paragraph with some interesting words, read until you get bored, and do that again until the end.
I hadn't considered the meat part before, but he's right, nearly everything has meat in it. USA is getting pretty vegetarian-friendly, Japan not so much.
As to the other complaints: rose-tinted glasses looking back to "the good old days", plus a bit of culture shock. It's a frickin' different culture, of course you're not going to understand / go along with it perfectly.
I'll fully grant that some of the cultural habits are downright dangerous (not merely creepy), but every culture has that. Sounds like he's merely found out recently that Japan isn't some holy grail location like he seems to have thought it was, and is merely a location on Earth.
I'm actually very surprised this ended up here. For those who might not know Tim Rogers, him and a few other college-age gamers started a recently defunct site called 'insert credit' around 8 or 9 years ago to try to apply Hunter S. Thompson style "New Journalism" to video game journalism.
Their articles had a high incident of insight to them that was largely the result of repeated deconstruction and re-examination of the game design of various 80s-era classics. Quite often the articles (some of which read a lot like the linked article) were pretty entertaining.
Bringing personal experience into the essay or game review was always the point, and Tim in particular tended to go off on completely wild tangents and write in an almost incoherent and stream of consciousness style (perhaps, "style"); from memory, in one review he pauses to go cook a burrito, then describes the burrito cooking process, before resuming what he was writing about the actual game in question.
This article is pretty classic Tim Rogers: an extremely long exploration of an idea that touches on some interesting (if perhaps apocryphal) stories or facets of that idea, but may or may not have a coherent underlying vision or message.
After Insert Credit imploded, the forums moved to selectbutton.net but without any "main content" (the front-page stories are just selected forum threads). Soon afterward, Tim started up actionbutton.net to host game reviews by himself and other like-minded folks; they're generally just as good as the old Insert Credit material, and of course more up-to-date.
I've found actionbutton to be a step below the old reviews, perhaps for similar reasons that Tim now finds his honeymoon in Japan souring. The reviews there tend to be a lot more about being entertaining than enlightening, and their stated goal of having the average score being 1/4 stars has been thrown to the wayside. I also don't really play games anymore.
There are a few potentially "important" things that I hope escapes IC and its graduates and becomes more mainstream. Reviews that explain the context of their creation, and reviews that examine the philosophy of the game design. Unfortunately these are hard, require work, and don't look any better on the glossy page. Some examples:
Rogers wrote a fantastic review[1] of Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song that starts off by chronicling the entire career of its designer (Kawazu) and reviewing some of his earlier games with depth and insight. There are clear patterns evident in his early games, which are then used to give context to and explain the current game under review.
The second is probably my favorite video game review, which is of Windwaker by Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh[2]. EJRW is a better and more insightful (but less colorful) writer than Rogers, but perhaps not as colorful. He made an old forum post I distinctly remember lamenting the laziness of linear game design, which is something of a cliche. When challenged for an alternative, he backed it up with a very interesting review of the use of "danger" rather than contrivances like keys or inventory items as a limit on exploration in Dragon Quest/The Legend of Zelda.
As for this particular posting of Tim's, I don't really have much more to comment. Like I said in my original comment, it's classic Tim Rogers, and it's hard to explain what "classic Tim Rogers" is without just pointing people to another 15-20 articles similar in construction and content. It feels odd to write about it in a familiar tone since I was largely a lurker at IC (as I am here).
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.
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 in just to function. It becomes extremely tiresome just getting by, and many little things irritate you.
It sounds like he's in this final stage. It sounds like its time to come home.
I agree that a trip home might be a good idea in his case. There is another possible step for someone living abroad, though-- adaptation. It doesn't have to be any harder than it was at home. People can change. It's possible to adjust to one's surroundings on a deeper level, in a way such that daily life is no longer a struggle.
I say this having the majority of my adult life living in a country far from where I grew up.
I'm rather surprised by this article, mostly because I basically have the opposite opinion about Japan. My theory is that I was born in Japan and lived there for most of my life and so for me this is all just how life works. More importantly, from a Japanese perspective, this is how we enjoy life.
It externally seems that I should have a similar opinion of Japan as him because I am not Japanese and I seem to have had similar experiences. Yet my exposure to the culture from birth leaves me taking for granted a lot of what he fights.
When I first came to Canada to study in university I had grudges toward the culture and way of life and I hadn't noticed until now why that was. It was because my perception of "how things work" was challenged.
I lived in Japan in the early 2000s. I don't know anything about anime or videogames, but everything else in the article seemed accurate. Personally I loved it, but I left before things started to wear me down.
Much of this is a critique of salaryman culture. Salaryman culture is bananas, a bi-polar combination of Kafka-esque hallucinatory boredom during the day, and 'girls gone wild' at night. Except, it isn't girls going wild, it's 48 year old men. It's interesting for about 2 weeks, and then becomes completely tedious, and slightly scary if you care about your health at all. I'm astonished that the Japanese still top the life expectancy charts.
When I wasn't working, I hung out with artists, skaters and surfers. I visited small towns on weekends and spent a lot of time at the beach. Life outside of Tokyo and the salaryman grind is much more relaxed, fun, and "good" weird instead of "WTF" weird.
Whenever I have a friend interested in relocating to Japan I plead with them to NOT work at a Japanese office. Only go there to work if you're the best fixed-gear bike welder, or are a popular underground DJ, or some other sort of "big in japan" folk hero. Anything that keeps you out of salaryman-land.
When it comes to entire countries, or even large cities, they usually have every possible lifestyle within them -- somewhere. It's never what you know about a place; it's who you know.
You may have to make different choices though. It's probably possible to be a teetotalling vegetarian in Japan, but you might have to go to a monastery or something. Whereas you could easily be a games developer with those traits in the USA.
I couldn't make myself read the whole thing, but I think it's far from accurate.
For instance, he seems to be able to communicate in Japanese but he still doesn't grasp that "otsukaresama" and "irasshaimase" are really only greetings. I wonder what would be his reaction if he heard that in some places it's usual to say "ohayou gozaimasu" (usually meaning "good morning") when you get to the office in the evening.
Mandatory parties aren't really mandatory, you see. Many Japanese do "escape" the parties. You just have to do it tactfully. And so on.
That said, I agree with you about avoiding working in a Japanese office. The usual English teaching path seems to work for a lot of people, though.
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 in a perpetually bad mood, very similar to the stressed out shitty mood someone quiting smoking is always in.
Some of the points he makes are valid. There is lard in bread, I think that's MUCH better then the hydrogenated fats of margarine. Lard may not be good for you, but it is better then the alternatives.
And smoking is definitely bad for you. And as an European I feel that American corporate culture bleeds far too far into everyone's personal life, much like how the author feels about corporate partying in Japan.
The no-real friends thing also strikes me as something I can say about Americans, who from my perspective seem to have trouble forming deep adult friendships.
But the author and I have two options, get over it or go home.
The curious thing about culture shock is that it never strikes in the very first moments of awe when you just arrive. It takes a little while. But then you tend to get over it and then many months or some times years later it hits you again, and this time it is WORSE. And many immigrants/ex-pats never got over the second wave. They (we!) just end up pissed off at the host culture.
* EVERY JAPANESE POP SONG IS ABOUT THE SAME THING *
Yeah, that's kind of every pop song period. And this attitude is a classing sign of culture shock.
Culture shock to me, as someone who has visited 20-ish countries and lived in 2, is more that "things are almost normal and like what you're used to, but just not enough to be comfortable", and as a result you end up perpetually on edge and perpetually adjusting just outside your comfort zone. It's jarring and difficult, a little like the room in Orwell's 1984 where the corners aren't quite straight, and things are just out of focus.
I didn't get culture shock in Tokyo, because it's just so different to everywhere else I'd been that I completely stopped the usual comparisons and just gave up.
I got that from Germany, after a month in Tokyo. I was fine in Tokyo, but in Germany I could read the signs, after all. In a month I was horribly homesick.
London, though - London just about killed me in one day.
Uh, not to be a complete jerk or anything, but do you realize that your comment is far easier to understand if you actually mention where you're from? Now it's like reading half of a joke.
Indiana. I probably would have said that before I moved back, but there's something about the isolation of the American heartland that makes the rest of the world feel a little like a dream you once had. Sorry.
I wouldn't dismiss this article as simply culture shock. A university surveyed foreign students and tracked their progress as they adjusted to the new culture, they found that most people get over the culture shock after 2 semesters. [1]
This guy is writing this after living 5 years in Japan. I would therefore not dismiss this as simple culture shock, it's a genuine critique of a culture after he's become accustomed to it.
They get over the shallow culture shock. The real culture shock is knowing you're never going to fit in where you live -but because you've been there so long, you're never going to fit in anywhere else, either. You've become an ethnic group of one.
Puerto Rico did this to me over the course of about five years. I can't stay on-island for more than about a year or I flip out. Up here in the States proper has done this to my (Hungarian) wife over the course of about fifteen years. Her limit is about two years.
They get over the shallow culture shock. The real culture shock is knowing you're never going to fit in where you live -but because you've been there so long, you're never going to fit in anywhere else, either. You've become an ethnic group of one.
This has been my story ever since I was born. One nice thing about not fitting in is that you become friends with others who don't fit in, who tend to be the most interesting people.
Point. I've read about this, too - especially people who've grown up multicultural tend to glom together as a "international ethnicity". One of the real attractions of living somewhere other than "your country" is being one of the expat crowd and love/hate dissing the local culture.
You're in for a double helping of culture shock as long as you still consider yourself a 'national' of some country.
I try - with partial success - to live as though being born in some place was pure chance and to try to lose the myopic view of life that you get when you keep seeing things through the lens of home. It's a mixed success, and I haven't even lived in places that were very different from the one that I was born in.
For me the 'security blanket' seems to be cheese. As long as I can find a good chunk of cheese somewhere I can deal with the rest. Selling cheese at exorbitant prices to immigrants must be a great way to make money.
I grew up as an expat in Central America for the first 14 years of my life. My parents worked for a religious NGO and part of their job was to help other incoming expats acclimate and adjust to the new culture. There's an entire branch of psychology devoted to culture shock, enculturation and acculturation. It's a pretty complex process. Becoming bicultural is a long, long process. A lot of monocultural people, by definition have little frame of reference, and it's hard to understand unless they've gone through it themselves.
Having been through it, and having watched hundreds of other people go through it during. I have no doubt that part of this rant is due to culture shock/enculturation difficulties.
As a rough generalization, there are several stages of enculturation (adapting to living in a different culture). The first stage is the actual culture shock. It generally takes 1-12 months to get over the initial, "OMG they eat Foo!" or figure out what end of the chopsticks to pick food out of the serving bowl with or how to buy groceries, or what side of the cheek to kiss as a greeting, or how low to bow to what people.
After the initial culture shock, there's generally a honey moon phase where everything is seen as wonderful an exciting and so much better than in the old country. That phase can last anywhere from 6 months to 3 years.
Frequently from year 2-6, post move, the honeymoon fades. The "flaws" in the new culture become increasingly apparent, and people get critical and frustrated at their adopted country. Cultural differences are seen as stupid, or backwards.
Slowly, after 4-6 years, people tend to get more accustomed to the new country. They start to adapt, and adopt the new culture as their own, and they feel a lot more at home. Some families I grew up with never made that transition.
I spent the first 14 years of my life living in Cost Rica and Honduras. I've been in the US for over 20 years. And, now, after being, "home" for 20 years, I'm finally starting to feel like I might belong in the US. Moving to the Bay Area, where there's a much bigger multi-cultural vibe helps. Had I stayed in the rural Midwest where my parents live, I would have gone apeshit. Still, after 20 years, some things about the US drive me crazy. I could have written a similar rant at many points the last 20 years.
I'm a lot of geek immigrants/expats could write a similar rant about their host country. Just ask your coworker engineer friends about the US immigration process. :) I know my parents ranted from time to time about life in Costa Rica or Honduras from time to time. They lived down there for 20 years. And, even though they got really pissed off from time to time, it didn't change their love of either country.
It can work both ways. I hated bluegrass with a passion (music, that is; the plant I'm agnostic about) until I came back to Indiana the first time (from Europe). Now I like it - I went through a period of really liking it, though.
But the US still drives me batty. It's just that houses are so damn cheap here.
Imagine having a best friend like you had when you were 5. You could play in the tree house, play video games all day, build stuff, ride bikes all across town, stay over their house, do everything together, talk about anything, once in a while have fights and arguments but then make up. Well it's kind of like that even when you are grown up.
The way the society is structured might help develop these friendships or might prevent them. For example, were I was growing up (in ex Soviet Union), the school was structured such that you could end up being in the same class with mostly the same people for 12 years. Not just the same school -- but the same class. So if you never move (more on that later), you would end up knowing the same 30 people very well. One or two of them might become your good friends.
Now school is just one factor, the other is how transient people are. It used to be that people would be born, grow up and live most of their lives in one city. That means you probably will still have your fiends from since you were 5 living in the same city. In some countries, people move more, mostly because of jobs I guess. It is very hard to form deep friendships when you are moving every 4 years. Yes, you have many acquaintances but not too many friends.
I thought about this quite a bit. By now I lived half of my life in the "old world" and half in US. I can still skype, chat and email back and forth with my childhood buddies, but it is just not the same. I think good friendships need real face to face contact. I am making friends at work, but there is always an apprehension and competitiveness involved. They'll never be the same kind of friends I had growing up. Or maybe I became a different kind of person (too apprehensive, too withdrawn) that nobody would want to be best friends with ...?
I've heard Americans (I'm American) complain about it, especially with their neighbors. We tend to stay holed up in our McMansions with the AC/Heat on and watch TV. Or we are the lone passenger in our car, listening to XM with the windows up.
People often just don't get to know one another on a deep level. We also tend to move around a bit, which makes maintaining friendships hard.
Now, that's not true for everyone, but it's been a lot of my experience.
Seems very accurate. After 22, my experience is that social life gets very compartmentalized. Your work friends are great to discuss work-related topics with, but most are not people you'd talk about deep philosophical questions (whether there is an afterlife, why we exist) with. And who listens to your problems? A paid therapist. And while this isn't true of prostitution in general, when high-achieving men hire prostitutes they tend to ask for the "girlfriend experience"-- kissing, cuddling, and conversation with an educated woman, because they aren't looking for sex, but for the untarnished intimacy they were able to have in high school. Americans are now paying for emotional closeness that was free in a younger, more innocent age when the stakes of even the littlest things didn't seem so high.
The problem is that American society treats success and failure as proving signs of personal merit, so everyone has to create a veneer of uninterrupted and effortless success because to seem like anything other than a rockstar signals weakness and despondency. This makes real emotional intimacy impossible.
i've lived in a different culture for about 10 years, and i understand what you're saying. i'm not sure the right term is culture shock, though - see other replies, that associate that with something much more immediate.
for some people, living long-term in another culture is hard. i certainly find it so at times. and this is despite being completely aware of the issue, the validity of other belief / social systems, etc etc.
it's a malaise at a very deep level - not something that can be addressed by conscious platitudes. i don't have a solution, apart from just continuing.
[ps the way i see it, our subconscious is "programmed" at a very early stage in our development, and is much less adaptable than our conscious. what we're talking about here is the result of long-term attrition between those subconscious assumptions and an inconsistent (but, or course, completely valid) reality. in some ways, respecting the other culture makes it harder - you can't simply dismiss it (except for periods of anger - i would guess this article was written in such a time). i also sometimes wonder if those that don't suffer this are simply repressing / unconnected with their subconscious to such a degree that they are unaware... the alternative is that their subconscious somehow adapts.]
A lot of the things you do in a host culture are things you have to memorize and "just do" rather than coming naturally from your growing up years. It's mentally exhausting to keep referring to your catalog of do's and don'ts all day, every day. It doesn't get put onto the back shelf for a great many years.
I have a Friench friend who, for years, has been critical about Australians. When i first met him he could continually rave on about how people in Paris are so much open with their emotions and how us Aussies are too closed by comparison. Or how the nightlife here sucked by comparison. Or how French music was better, the food tastier, the culture richer. The list went on...
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.
And as an European I feel that American corporate culture bleeds far too far into everyone's personal life.
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.
You've never worked for an American company that tried to tell you what you could/couldn't do outside of work? Either you've had good luck or I've had bad because every place I worked for tried to impose their rules beyond the office parking lot. Maybe it was due to working in a "right to work" state?
Yeah, really. Ever had a stern talking to because the political bumper sticker on your car didn't align with the company image? That's uniquely American.
My experience working both for several companies and for myself outsourcing myself to companies is that there's a pretty wide range of corporate cultures here in the Netherlands. Going from the enforced merry-making (which is an awesome description, since it makes me retch!) to much, much more easy going environments.
There seems to be a non-romance/love existential philosophy/angst genre of pop songs. The Japanese version seems to use a different set of pastoral imagery than the American one, and much more of it. Not sure what that means.
People tend to attribute problems around them to the culture, particularly when the culture isn't theirs. And everyone wants to think his/her situation is unique, as the indication of one's uniqueness.
But as some comments indicate, some (or most) of the author's problems are actually not idiosyncratic to Japan. Although he has valid points, his problems will just stay there in different shapes even if he leaves Japan.
Man, this guy's list of reasons for hating Japan is pretty much identical to my list of reasons for loving Japan. Non-smoking, tee-totalling vegetarian? Sounds like a real fun guy.
Got to hand it to him on the comedy shows, though, they're awful.
Oy, if I had a yen for every time a westerner made some off-base criticism that belied their understanding of Japanese language, Japanese culture, and Japanese psychology...
I can only relate to my own experience (6 years in Japan now), but I have never been in a position where I had to drink. I have never been in a very big Japanese corporate company, but in both University, gvt labs and start up, there have always been people who do not drink, and that has never been an issue.
Maybe I can sum up every little point I'm trying to make in this whole word-slab by saying I don't like that so many people agree to do things that they obviously hate doing.
This seems like a great description of the meat-free, booze-free, non-comformist working for a big Japanese corporation. Why didn't he leave the country 19,000 words ago?
You know, he's not the only HN reader in Japan... ;)
I'm not sure what needs commenting. The article is quite in-depth and mostly fits with my experience. I can add an anecdote, perhaps, on this part: The Japanese are so serious about work that even work-related parties are mandatory. If you don't go to a company party, you're not part of the team. If you're not part of the team, it's possible you're not actually working at the company.
This is very real. I live in a university dorm and I'm friend with one of the Japanese assistants working here. He was nearly fired because he wasn't going to nomikai (drinking parties) with the other assistants and the manager often enough. He wasn't going because he had to study for exams and prepare a trip. He got a long email from one of his older colleagues saying that "maybe he wasn't cut out for the residence assistant lifestyle" and that as the youngest one it was his duty to do better to fit in the group. All that even though he was, as far as I could see, the only one to actually socialize with the foreign residents (that's supposed to be his job)...
Incidentally, my university keeps a fairly strict separation between foreign and local students. Exchange students live in the same building as the sports club members for my university (the teams are required to live together), but we're not allowed to go into their area or for them to come. People who learn Japanese here are rather encouraged to stay together and not mix with the Japanese students (except those who want to practice English). It's what they call tatemae/honne: the uni wants to give an air of internationalism, but it doesn't really matter to them if it's true or not - just that it looks like it.
I'm in a way lucky to be in engineering, so that I take all my classes with local students, but I've had to deal with many exceptions and needed special permission from all teachers I take a lesson under. I'm literally the only undergrad exchange student on my campus. To their credit however, I've always felt welcomed by teachers - I feel like a few have travelled and actually wish their students were more exposed to other countries.
I've also seen a professor say to his new undergrad students (unpaid interns) that "from now on, the laboratory lifestyle is going to be the main thing for you" (main in English). Life in Japan is defined by your group, and it mostly goes from school, to laboratory (or intern work), then to the company. At each point people are expected to dedicate a lot of time to being with their group.
For some reason, I'm getting an (obviously wrong) impression from this conversation that the only type of work you can get in Japan comes in the form of big-business cubicle farms. patio11's input would be interesting here because he's getting by without working at one of these.
Big-business cubicle farms and salarymanhood are only about a third of the Japanese economy/labor force. Wave me down someday when I have more free time and I'll gladly talk about this, or you can just look out your door in the US at someone working and ask "Do they have that sort of job in Japan?" and I'll tell you, right now, the answer is yes. We have people selling food out of carts, bored DMV clerks who punch out at 5:00, part-time English teachers, retirees who run cafes, quirky musicians who made stuff for the App Store (my town has multiple App Store millionaires), and folks working at the 7-11.
That said, I think you may have gotten the wrong impression about what I do for a day job. For about three of the last five years, and continuing through the end of this month, I've had a job that virtually defines Japanese salarymanhood, making Big Freaking Enterprise Web Apps for a multi-national with thousands of employees that is listed on the stock exchange.
I worked in a small-medium business in Tokyo for a couple of years. The developers were primarily other foreigners, but the rest of the company was Japanese.
The company never really had any drinking parties, and from my perspective I wish there had been. On the other hand, I never really worked overtime, never felt pressure to do so, and didn't suffer from any of the other major stereotypical problems.
For the last year I've been running my own consulting firm here. Around me it seems like there are many other people do their own innovative things here, but maybe those are just the circles I run in.
All appearances to the contrary, I do actually work for a living, and early morning on release Monday is a bad time to drop a thesis on my desk and ask me for comments.
Yes, it really was a thesis. I don't know how interesting it is if you are actually experiencing these things on a daily basis. As a complete outsider, however, this small window into Japanese work culture was very interesting. Don't know how well I could handle working in such an environment.
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That's actually due to the plastic used, it's not from smoke.
http://vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/189
I know that I love booze and meat so I'm not going to relocate to Bangalore any time soon.
I suggest he chills out and learns to go with the flow sometimes. But happiness is probably the last thing this guy wants, he's the type of guy who thrives on finding things at fault.
Plenty of Booze and meat in Bangalore. Good Pubs, not so much.
Not to say I didn't enjoy my stay, on the contrary I loved it; but I wouldn't move there and act indignant because I couldn't get good quality wine and steak.
The point was to illustrate that Southern India is a culture inclined to vegetarian food and not drinking. And while you _can_ find meat (and some semblance of wine) in Bangalore it's hardly the same as New York or Sydney (my two "homes") in that regard.
From what I understand from the article under discussion , purely vegetarian food hardly exists in japan. I have no idea if that is true, but the situation wrt meat is hardly the same in South India, so your comparison above is demonstrably false.
"The point was to illustrate that Southern India is a culture inclined to vegetarian food and not drinking."
Rubbish.
Your stay in Bangalore doesn't lead you to correct generalizations about South India. In Kerala for instance, (one of the four states in South India), practically everyone is a non vegetarian. Hyderabad(in Andhra Pradesh) is famous for its nonvegetarian food, specially Biriyani. You have no idea about the amount of liquor consumed either. Extremely large quantities of liquor are consumed in South India. There is a thriving illegal liquor mafia which would be very interested in your discuvery that South India is "not inclined" to liquor. The people you interacted with during your stay here may have been largely vegetarian, but South India is hardly "inclined" to either vegetarianism or abstinence from alcohol, the way the OP describes Japan as being "inclined to " non vegetarianism.Show me any locality in Bangalore and I'll find you a couple of dozen non vegetarian restaurants in a 5 km radius. And lots of liquor shops.
I've lived here 35+ years. I should know.
I'll grant you that you may not get a steak done the way you want it, but hey I can't get a Masala Dosa in the average restaurant in Arizona. That hardly means Westerners don't "incline" to potatoes (the major filling in a Masala Dosa.
Most South Indian non vegetarians eat Chicken or Lamb (and not primarily Pork or Beef as in the United States). Beef is slightly rarer (but again not in Kerala). You need to distinguish "meat" from the "exact dish I eat in New York". I was saying there was plenty of meat In Bangalore, not sausages made Chicago Style (or whatever). Meat does not dominate the menu as much as in the West, but it is easily available almost everywhere.
Some communities of people, e.g Brahmins or Jains or Buddhists are vegetarians. These are minorities. Large chunks of Hindus, Muslims and Christians are meat eaters (and alcohol drinkers). Apart from these minority communities, People who don't regularly eat meat do so because of economic reasons not any "inclination" to vegetarianism.
As one of those I wouldn't move to India and expect to have my cravings for steak and a nice Bordeaux satisfied with any regularity. Just as I wouldn't move to Japan as a veggo and expect to have my cravings for super awesome tempeh dishes satisfied. And I certainly wouldn't complain about it like that.
Fair Enough! Fwiw, some Indians bitch and moan about American food habits when they move to the USA so I am sure the habit is fairly universal !
Meat is expensive in Japan. I buy a 400 gram steak and a Coke&brandy for $4.63 total.
(incidentally did anyone else struggle to read the start of this article - it didnt flow very well)
I remember watching DBZ after school, and while it is certainly "graphically iconic", there is no legitimate way to claim it has a coherent plot. It seems like the author is remembering his Saturday morning cartoons through some rose-tinted cokebottles.
I won't even touch "Anime is terrible. It used to be okay."
It feels like reality has settled in and his daily life has some deeper rooted problems than the stickers being placed on the barcode a certain a way.
Regardless he gives a view of the culture that you don't often hear about.
That is not a word that should ever exist... yet I cannot imagine a better description.
"Constipating" xD So awesomely descriptive. I'll be chuckling about this for quite a while (earning crazy-looks from random passers-by)!
Then again, I used to watch TMNT after school and to this day will maintain that it was actually quite funny, even though someone older than me will, with some justification, villify that as well.
Some of this article was worth reading. The complaints about how things used to be better, however, were not.
You might have experienced a bad, emasculated version which was aired in America, stripped down to nothing but fight scenes and completely devoid of anything involving adult life. That version really sucked.
- No ordinary schmoes who turn out to have amazing supernatural powers.
- Nothing that revolves around a series of contests with enemies of escalating power.
- No robots or exoskeletons.
- It would be nice if the central character was an adult. An adult whose love interest is not an adolescent.
- While I'm on that topic, nothing that will make people think I'm a pervert if they catch me reading it.
So, while I was wroting this up, I started checking out the lists of mangas that had been previously recommended in the forum, and I started to feel like I was shitting all over everything they loved, so I decided not to post my request. People talk quite a lot about manga being a serious art form for adults. Am I missing something?
Here are some manga / anime recommendations. Some have not been licensed for distribution in the US, or have been only partially released here, so you will need to hunt a bit for fansubs. I watch only the animated adaptations, as they're easier to hide, but feel free to order the original manga versions if you don't feel ashamed about reading comic books. Not all are adaptations -- the movies, and a few television series, are original animations.
- Monster < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_%28manga%29 >
- Planetes < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes >
- Mushishi < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushishi >
- Mononoke < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononoke_%28TV_series%29 >
- Tokyo Godfathers < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Godfathers >
If you're willing to relax your standards a bit, there are many outstanding series aimed at younger viewers.
- Denno Coil < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil >
- Yokohama Shopping Trip < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kik%C5%8D >
- Kino's Journey < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino%27s_Journey >
- Cromartie High School < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromartie_High_School >
- My Neighbor Totoro < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Neighbor_Totoro > , or almost anything else by Studio Ghibli < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli >
- The Girl Who Leapt Through Time < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Leapt_Through_Time >
- Yotsuba&! < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotsuba&! >
P.S. I just added "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" to my Netflix queue, and Netflix suggested something called "Xxxholic" for me. Well... I won't prejudge, but that kind of thing certainly doesn't help dispel stereotypes.
"xxxHolic" is a weird Japan-glish word; you can read it as "____-aholic". I've not seen the series and can't recommend either way, but from the Wikipedia article it looks like something you'd not enjoy.
Online recommendation engines seem to break when dealing with Japan-related topics; I don't know why, but it could be that some people will watch anything if it's 1) animated 2) from Japan, so the engines build false associations between wildly different works. This happens in music also -- I once listened to an orchestral re-imagining of some soundtrack by the Tokyo Philharmonic, and now Last.FM won't stop recommending awful j-pop.
My personal all-time favorite, though, goes to The Twelve Kingdoms. http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=26
I've recently seen "Beyond the Clouds", which was also very good: http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=469
The anime version of Kino's Journey is probably my favourite anime.
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_W...
Well, that's the geek media.
Worse, it's the young-geek media - most of that stuff is marketed to teenage guys. Admittedly, it's really hard to find anything else in the US because young geeks have been the primary source of demand for Japanese animation and comics. We mostly get the Bleaches and the Hellsings and whatnot.
It's as if the rest of the world only got SF and Fantasy movies out of Hollywood. There's stuff to love there, to be sure, but it's a necessarily limited sampling.
Actually most of the books by Jiro Taniguchi are really good, they are mostly simple touching story that give a good glimpse of japanese culture and the relationship between people.
http://www.amazon.com/DISTANT-NEIGHBORHOOD-Jiro-Taniguchi/dp...
http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Neighborhood-2-Jiro-Taniguchi/...
The problem is that the author didn't make a cogent point and back it up. Instead he started off with a lot of excuse-making, then went into a list, but kept deviating from the list to talk about video games (which, I guess, should have been the topic?)
It had the feeling of a long list of grievances strewn together, ranted about, and then tacked on to a couple of other conversations.
The strength of the article was in the negative first-person impressions of Japanese culture. He should have stuck with that, cut out the apologizing and made that just a sentence or two at the end. Then he should have tightened the hell out of the prose and tried to make some kind of thesis that his stories supported.
Other that that, the first-person stuff was good. But damn -- this guy is an editor? The structure is a mess.
At one point he even admits how bad it is -- and then continues on in the death march towards the end.
Aha it makes a little more sense now. Editors are usually poor writers/reporters - their skill set is different (which doesn't excuse the fact he clearly never copy-edited what he wrote)
It's the same way with irrashaimase; it's a self-deprecating phrase (and Japanese does indeed have a lot of them), but it's a stock phrase, and that's how people use it. Similarly, a lot of our exclamations have origins in words, even if we've forgotten them. For instance, why do we say "ow" instead of "ai", or simply "aa"? "Ow" is significantly more complicated physically than simply "aa!"ing. Other cultures say different things for exclamations, even "spontaneous" things like pain, and that's normal. Getting uppity about it isn't.
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 saw any appeal in $10 martinis or $6 beers — especially with a bunch of people with whom I just spent 10 working hours. Needless to say, it did not take long before I was considered "not a team player." (My bosses liked me, so I did well enough before I realized I loathe corporate life and left, but my peers were not fans and caused considerable trouble.)
You are right about this. Pretty much any place I have worked (I'm from the US) has had office parties or other kind of outings. I almost always went because it does help you get to know your boss and co-workers (it was only about once-a-month). I don't really see a problem with it.
Your example of going out three times a week is a bit much (I wouldn't go out that many times a week), but you could have at least gone out with them once-in-awhile to show them that you don't completely hate your co-workers. If you do, you probably shouldn't be working there anyway.
You can't take the human nature/social aspect out of working. If you don't do these things, people will think you are weird/the outsider/don't like them.
Maybe you should run your own business?
I made it a point never to go for one after my first experience. In Bangalore these take weird forms, usually wasting a holiday or a weekend, landing up in some god forsaken "resort", where you can do exciting things like play badminton or carroms, Quoits or Dumb Charades (I kid you not!), or quietly get drunk in a corner, with some of the really bad companies throwing in a few "mission and vision" style speeches from the powers that be.
Once I got a letter from a VP telling me to report to his office and explain why I didn't attend the "office party weekend + mission and vision session" over the previous weekend and I explained (quite diplomatically) that I didn't give a fuck about these things and had no intention of ever attending anything like this in the future either. He seemed completely shocked and speechless and was almost in tears when I left.
My immediate superior later gave me a veiled warning that my " career progress could be affected" by such "unorthodox attitudes" but, strangely enough, it wasn't. I got regular promotions and raises and was "on the leadership track" when I left because work was too boring. They didn't believe my reason for leaving either ("I am bored out of my skull"), because I was a "senior person" (I was 28!!) and was "poised on the leadership ladder" (yes they actually spoke like that!).
These were large companies though. Small (less than 20 people) company parties were often a lot of fun. I am so glad I don't have to work for large companies anymore.
I agree with you there. I now only work for small companies for that very same reason.
The only ubiquitous US workplace social function is the holiday party.
But one day the boss bought some shitty Chinese food for the company lunch and I just went out and got myself a gyro and came back. It was never the same after that.
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.
edit - that's not entirely true, I got about 1/10th of the way through and realised I could do more constructive things with my time.
As to the other complaints: rose-tinted glasses looking back to "the good old days", plus a bit of culture shock. It's a frickin' different culture, of course you're not going to understand / go along with it perfectly.
I'll fully grant that some of the cultural habits are downright dangerous (not merely creepy), but every culture has that. Sounds like he's merely found out recently that Japan isn't some holy grail location like he seems to have thought it was, and is merely a location on Earth.
Their articles had a high incident of insight to them that was largely the result of repeated deconstruction and re-examination of the game design of various 80s-era classics. Quite often the articles (some of which read a lot like the linked article) were pretty entertaining.
Bringing personal experience into the essay or game review was always the point, and Tim in particular tended to go off on completely wild tangents and write in an almost incoherent and stream of consciousness style (perhaps, "style"); from memory, in one review he pauses to go cook a burrito, then describes the burrito cooking process, before resuming what he was writing about the actual game in question.
This article is pretty classic Tim Rogers: an extremely long exploration of an idea that touches on some interesting (if perhaps apocryphal) stories or facets of that idea, but may or may not have a coherent underlying vision or message.
There are a few potentially "important" things that I hope escapes IC and its graduates and becomes more mainstream. Reviews that explain the context of their creation, and reviews that examine the philosophy of the game design. Unfortunately these are hard, require work, and don't look any better on the glossy page. Some examples:
Rogers wrote a fantastic review[1] of Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song that starts off by chronicling the entire career of its designer (Kawazu) and reviewing some of his earlier games with depth and insight. There are clear patterns evident in his early games, which are then used to give context to and explain the current game under review.
The second is probably my favorite video game review, which is of Windwaker by Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh[2]. EJRW is a better and more insightful (but less colorful) writer than Rogers, but perhaps not as colorful. He made an old forum post I distinctly remember lamenting the laziness of linear game design, which is something of a cliche. When challenged for an alternative, he backed it up with a very interesting review of the use of "danger" rather than contrivances like keys or inventory items as a limit on exploration in Dragon Quest/The Legend of Zelda.
As for this particular posting of Tim's, I don't really have much more to comment. Like I said in my original comment, it's classic Tim Rogers, and it's hard to explain what "classic Tim Rogers" is without just pointing people to another 15-20 articles similar in construction and content. It feels odd to write about it in a familiar tone since I was largely a lurker at IC (as I am here).
[1] http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=saga
[2] http://www.insertcredit.com/reviews/windwaker/windwaker1.htm...
It's almost as if he's drawn to frustration.
It sounds like he's in this final stage. It sounds like its time to come home.
I say this having the majority of my adult life living in a country far from where I grew up.
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).
It externally seems that I should have a similar opinion of Japan as him because I am not Japanese and I seem to have had similar experiences. Yet my exposure to the culture from birth leaves me taking for granted a lot of what he fights.
When I first came to Canada to study in university I had grudges toward the culture and way of life and I hadn't noticed until now why that was. It was because my perception of "how things work" was challenged.
Much of this is a critique of salaryman culture. Salaryman culture is bananas, a bi-polar combination of Kafka-esque hallucinatory boredom during the day, and 'girls gone wild' at night. Except, it isn't girls going wild, it's 48 year old men. It's interesting for about 2 weeks, and then becomes completely tedious, and slightly scary if you care about your health at all. I'm astonished that the Japanese still top the life expectancy charts.
When I wasn't working, I hung out with artists, skaters and surfers. I visited small towns on weekends and spent a lot of time at the beach. Life outside of Tokyo and the salaryman grind is much more relaxed, fun, and "good" weird instead of "WTF" weird.
Whenever I have a friend interested in relocating to Japan I plead with them to NOT work at a Japanese office. Only go there to work if you're the best fixed-gear bike welder, or are a popular underground DJ, or some other sort of "big in japan" folk hero. Anything that keeps you out of salaryman-land.
You may have to make different choices though. It's probably possible to be a teetotalling vegetarian in Japan, but you might have to go to a monastery or something. Whereas you could easily be a games developer with those traits in the USA.
For instance, he seems to be able to communicate in Japanese but he still doesn't grasp that "otsukaresama" and "irasshaimase" are really only greetings. I wonder what would be his reaction if he heard that in some places it's usual to say "ohayou gozaimasu" (usually meaning "good morning") when you get to the office in the evening.
Mandatory parties aren't really mandatory, you see. Many Japanese do "escape" the parties. You just have to do it tactfully. And so on.
That said, I agree with you about avoiding working in a Japanese office. The usual English teaching path seems to work for a lot of people, though.
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 in a perpetually bad mood, very similar to the stressed out shitty mood someone quiting smoking is always in.
Some of the points he makes are valid. There is lard in bread, I think that's MUCH better then the hydrogenated fats of margarine. Lard may not be good for you, but it is better then the alternatives.
And smoking is definitely bad for you. And as an European I feel that American corporate culture bleeds far too far into everyone's personal life, much like how the author feels about corporate partying in Japan.
The no-real friends thing also strikes me as something I can say about Americans, who from my perspective seem to have trouble forming deep adult friendships.
But the author and I have two options, get over it or go home.
The curious thing about culture shock is that it never strikes in the very first moments of awe when you just arrive. It takes a little while. But then you tend to get over it and then many months or some times years later it hits you again, and this time it is WORSE. And many immigrants/ex-pats never got over the second wave. They (we!) just end up pissed off at the host culture.
* EVERY JAPANESE POP SONG IS ABOUT THE SAME THING * Yeah, that's kind of every pop song period. And this attitude is a classing sign of culture shock.
I didn't get culture shock in Tokyo, because it's just so different to everywhere else I'd been that I completely stopped the usual comparisons and just gave up.
London, though - London just about killed me in one day.
I was a mess when I was younger.
This guy is writing this after living 5 years in Japan. I would therefore not dismiss this as simple culture shock, it's a genuine critique of a culture after he's become accustomed to it.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPfB6GIjM9Q
Puerto Rico did this to me over the course of about five years. I can't stay on-island for more than about a year or I flip out. Up here in the States proper has done this to my (Hungarian) wife over the course of about fifteen years. Her limit is about two years.
It doesn't go away.
This has been my story ever since I was born. One nice thing about not fitting in is that you become friends with others who don't fit in, who tend to be the most interesting people.
I try - with partial success - to live as though being born in some place was pure chance and to try to lose the myopic view of life that you get when you keep seeing things through the lens of home. It's a mixed success, and I haven't even lived in places that were very different from the one that I was born in.
For me the 'security blanket' seems to be cheese. As long as I can find a good chunk of cheese somewhere I can deal with the rest. Selling cheese at exorbitant prices to immigrants must be a great way to make money.
Having been through it, and having watched hundreds of other people go through it during. I have no doubt that part of this rant is due to culture shock/enculturation difficulties.
As a rough generalization, there are several stages of enculturation (adapting to living in a different culture). The first stage is the actual culture shock. It generally takes 1-12 months to get over the initial, "OMG they eat Foo!" or figure out what end of the chopsticks to pick food out of the serving bowl with or how to buy groceries, or what side of the cheek to kiss as a greeting, or how low to bow to what people.
After the initial culture shock, there's generally a honey moon phase where everything is seen as wonderful an exciting and so much better than in the old country. That phase can last anywhere from 6 months to 3 years.
Frequently from year 2-6, post move, the honeymoon fades. The "flaws" in the new culture become increasingly apparent, and people get critical and frustrated at their adopted country. Cultural differences are seen as stupid, or backwards.
Slowly, after 4-6 years, people tend to get more accustomed to the new country. They start to adapt, and adopt the new culture as their own, and they feel a lot more at home. Some families I grew up with never made that transition.
I spent the first 14 years of my life living in Cost Rica and Honduras. I've been in the US for over 20 years. And, now, after being, "home" for 20 years, I'm finally starting to feel like I might belong in the US. Moving to the Bay Area, where there's a much bigger multi-cultural vibe helps. Had I stayed in the rural Midwest where my parents live, I would have gone apeshit. Still, after 20 years, some things about the US drive me crazy. I could have written a similar rant at many points the last 20 years.
I'm a lot of geek immigrants/expats could write a similar rant about their host country. Just ask your coworker engineer friends about the US immigration process. :) I know my parents ranted from time to time about life in Costa Rica or Honduras from time to time. They lived down there for 20 years. And, even though they got really pissed off from time to time, it didn't change their love of either country.
But the US still drives me batty. It's just that houses are so damn cheap here.
Uh...
The way the society is structured might help develop these friendships or might prevent them. For example, were I was growing up (in ex Soviet Union), the school was structured such that you could end up being in the same class with mostly the same people for 12 years. Not just the same school -- but the same class. So if you never move (more on that later), you would end up knowing the same 30 people very well. One or two of them might become your good friends.
Now school is just one factor, the other is how transient people are. It used to be that people would be born, grow up and live most of their lives in one city. That means you probably will still have your fiends from since you were 5 living in the same city. In some countries, people move more, mostly because of jobs I guess. It is very hard to form deep friendships when you are moving every 4 years. Yes, you have many acquaintances but not too many friends.
I thought about this quite a bit. By now I lived half of my life in the "old world" and half in US. I can still skype, chat and email back and forth with my childhood buddies, but it is just not the same. I think good friendships need real face to face contact. I am making friends at work, but there is always an apprehension and competitiveness involved. They'll never be the same kind of friends I had growing up. Or maybe I became a different kind of person (too apprehensive, too withdrawn) that nobody would want to be best friends with ...?
People often just don't get to know one another on a deep level. We also tend to move around a bit, which makes maintaining friendships hard.
Now, that's not true for everyone, but it's been a lot of my experience.
The problem is that American society treats success and failure as proving signs of personal merit, so everyone has to create a veneer of uninterrupted and effortless success because to seem like anything other than a rockstar signals weakness and despondency. This makes real emotional intimacy impossible.
for some people, living long-term in another culture is hard. i certainly find it so at times. and this is despite being completely aware of the issue, the validity of other belief / social systems, etc etc.
it's a malaise at a very deep level - not something that can be addressed by conscious platitudes. i don't have a solution, apart from just continuing.
[ps the way i see it, our subconscious is "programmed" at a very early stage in our development, and is much less adaptable than our conscious. what we're talking about here is the result of long-term attrition between those subconscious assumptions and an inconsistent (but, or course, completely valid) reality. in some ways, respecting the other culture makes it harder - you can't simply dismiss it (except for periods of anger - i would guess this article was written in such a time). i also sometimes wonder if those that don't suffer this are simply repressing / unconnected with their subconscious to such a degree that they are unaware... the alternative is that their subconscious somehow adapts.]
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.
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/
My experience working both for several companies and for myself outsourcing myself to companies is that there's a pretty wide range of corporate cultures here in the Netherlands. Going from the enforced merry-making (which is an awesome description, since it makes me retch!) to much, much more easy going environments.
There seems to be a non-romance/love existential philosophy/angst genre of pop songs. The Japanese version seems to use a different set of pastoral imagery than the American one, and much more of it. Not sure what that means.
http://gaijinhostsabin.justin-klein.com/the-rules-of-the-gam...
But as some comments indicate, some (or most) of the author's problems are actually not idiosyncratic to Japan. Although he has valid points, his problems will just stay there in different shapes even if he leaves Japan.
Got to hand it to him on the comedy shows, though, they're awful.
Until you can fight a live octopus down your throat between puffs on a cig, and wash it all down with a gallon of beer, you can't be fun.
This seems like a great description of the meat-free, booze-free, non-comformist working for a big Japanese corporation. Why didn't he leave the country 19,000 words ago?
I'm not sure what needs commenting. The article is quite in-depth and mostly fits with my experience. I can add an anecdote, perhaps, on this part: The Japanese are so serious about work that even work-related parties are mandatory. If you don't go to a company party, you're not part of the team. If you're not part of the team, it's possible you're not actually working at the company.
This is very real. I live in a university dorm and I'm friend with one of the Japanese assistants working here. He was nearly fired because he wasn't going to nomikai (drinking parties) with the other assistants and the manager often enough. He wasn't going because he had to study for exams and prepare a trip. He got a long email from one of his older colleagues saying that "maybe he wasn't cut out for the residence assistant lifestyle" and that as the youngest one it was his duty to do better to fit in the group. All that even though he was, as far as I could see, the only one to actually socialize with the foreign residents (that's supposed to be his job)...
Incidentally, my university keeps a fairly strict separation between foreign and local students. Exchange students live in the same building as the sports club members for my university (the teams are required to live together), but we're not allowed to go into their area or for them to come. People who learn Japanese here are rather encouraged to stay together and not mix with the Japanese students (except those who want to practice English). It's what they call tatemae/honne: the uni wants to give an air of internationalism, but it doesn't really matter to them if it's true or not - just that it looks like it.
I'm in a way lucky to be in engineering, so that I take all my classes with local students, but I've had to deal with many exceptions and needed special permission from all teachers I take a lesson under. I'm literally the only undergrad exchange student on my campus. To their credit however, I've always felt welcomed by teachers - I feel like a few have travelled and actually wish their students were more exposed to other countries.
I've also seen a professor say to his new undergrad students (unpaid interns) that "from now on, the laboratory lifestyle is going to be the main thing for you" (main in English). Life in Japan is defined by your group, and it mostly goes from school, to laboratory (or intern work), then to the company. At each point people are expected to dedicate a lot of time to being with their group.
That said, I think you may have gotten the wrong impression about what I do for a day job. For about three of the last five years, and continuing through the end of this month, I've had a job that virtually defines Japanese salarymanhood, making Big Freaking Enterprise Web Apps for a multi-national with thousands of employees that is listed on the stock exchange.
Examples?
The company never really had any drinking parties, and from my perspective I wish there had been. On the other hand, I never really worked overtime, never felt pressure to do so, and didn't suffer from any of the other major stereotypical problems.
For the last year I've been running my own consulting firm here. Around me it seems like there are many other people do their own innovative things here, but maybe those are just the circles I run in.