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britonell · 7 years

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Bit more about Japanese culture and anime...

There was some interest after this Inuyasha post. Thought it would be cool to go more in-depth and relate it to anime, so next time you watch something you can go, “Oh yeah. That happens over there.”

No, THAT doesn’t happen in Japan.

As a word of caution: I grew up near Tokyo in the 90′s, when the economic bubble had burst but your average family didn’t feel the effects until later. Culture may have shifted slightly after the economic downturn (I know there’s a more nationalistic undertone now, like most of Asia), and everything I say will not apply to all of Japan. Places like Sapporo and Ōsaka have their own distinct cultures, like how New York and Texas are uniquely different.

But since most anime are set in or are geared towards the Tokyo crowd, I have a good idea of the cultural influences. Especially when relating it to Inuyasha, which was published and set in the 90′s (at least in Kagome’s modern time).

Memories~

Also, what I’m about to say below is about Japan (Tokyo). Please don’t start applying it to other countries in Asia, or you will be laughably misled.

Additionally, I’m not some researcher who did extensive study on my own culture. I’m just relating to y’all my background, experiences, and the little bit of knowledge I’ve gleaned from my memories of living there as a little girl, as well as from stories shared by my parents.

Suffice it to say, you should not cite me for your research paper.

You’re on your own, suckers!

I didn’t want to bother making multiple posts, so this is gonna be looooong. It’s not all roses either. If you have this fantastic, perfect vision of Japan, turn back now! You hear me?

Now then.

Are you ready, kids?

HERE. WE. GOOOOO!!!

When I was in Japan, public elementary schools still ran 6 days a week (half-days on Saturdays, when we did nothing productive). Now only some private schools run for 6 days. But what I remember is the nutritious lunches. They were definitely healthier than pizza. And we had to drink all. That. Damn. Milk.

Whoa. The bottle I had to finish was a little smaller than that.

Note: I know most Asians are lactose intolerant, but no classmate of mine ever got a stomachache. We definitely weren’t drinking soy milk. It could’ve been processed/long-life milk. I’ve heard people with lactose intolerance in Japan drinking milk just fine, but traveling to the US and symptoms showing up. Dunno what’s different between our milk supplies.

You’ll find teachers pushing kids to drink their milk. You got mocked by your classmates if you failed to finish your bottle or carton. Reason is, we just don’t get a lot of calcium in out diet, not like other countries. Osteoporosis is sort of accepted as an inevitability -- that’s why you see so many old men in anime who’re tiny or have a terrible hunchback. It’s an exaggeration of the truth.

Look at that little fella.

Moving on... Boundaries are EVERYTHING: Thanks to movies and shows, Japanese people are aware how people abroad like being physically close to one another in a public setting.

THAT SAID, if you and your spouse greet each other with a chaste kiss in front of a young Japanese woman, you’re gonna hear a high-pitched squeal or a giggle -- not out of disapproval, mind you. It’s just not something you see everyday in Japan. Older folks and men who’re too cool to care will just avert their gaze. Or laugh awkwardly.

Awkward laughing is our thing.

A possible reaction to public kissing, along with awkward laughing. Not for the hip and cool kids, though. They might whistle at you.

Japan has some clear social rules about what can be done in specific situations. At least, it’s clear to us. People visiting might get a serious whiplash.

Example: I remember there being a channel that ran news programs during the day. What I didn’t know at the time was that after 10 pm -- BAM, topless host of an erotic game show. It was the parents’ responsibility to make sure kids stayed away from certain channels at night.

Same for certain streets. Host club workers will entice young women on these streets to drink at their clubs, and they can do that because kids and families don’t use those streets.

Don’t let the anime fool you. A lot of host clubs are shady, like drugs-sex-yakuza-type shady...

However... there was that one time my dad thought it would be funny to bring my mom and I to take a walk down a certain street because he’s a cheeky bastard (I was like 4 years old). According to my dad, there was utter silence as host club workers immediately clammed up and averted their gaze. One person went up to my dad and asked him if we were lost.

Hilarious talking about it now. Highly questionable back then.

My dad has a strange sense of humor.

Oh, after-work drinking culture for office workers is another accepted oddity. Spouses are NOT invited. Some companies are strict about married couples not working in the same building. Bizarre, I know, but they really want to keep marital issues away from company grounds. Some private schools even have strict rules about dating, but I went to public school so I’ve got no personal stories about that.

Drinking with coworkers really is about networking and strengthening ties with coworkers, like in other countries, but in Japan you can easily find a CEO getting drunk and wearing his tie around his forehead and dancing with his shirt unbuttoned. Not joking.

Exaggeration of the truth. I say exaggeration because most office workers aren’t gonna be that good looking. Heh.

Despite most Japanese people suffering from alcohol flush reaction, drinking after work is part of the work culture. In the 90′s, if they missed the last train (trains don’t run 24/7) you used to see office workers sleeping in parks.

Note: Pickpocketing is still virtually nonexistent in most of Japan. There’s even a whole fashion trend of young men showing off the latest wallet design by letting it hang from their back pocket with a fancy chain.

I’ll be honest. I couldn’t find an appropriate gif.

Nowadays, there’s capsule hotels (pod hotels). They seem like a novelty to tourists, but in reality are used by office workers that stayed out too long and don’t want to spend money on taxis, because that shit is expensive...

...for a reason: Japanese taxis are really nice. The doors slightly swing open for you when the driver pushes a button.

Anyway, morning comes and the office workers take meds for the hangover and they’ll be back to their serious selves come workday.

Nothing to see here, get back to work.

Next, Japanese language: We’ve got a shit-ton of loanwords. Like, off the top of my head, I don’t know the Japanese word for bread. I always say “pan,” which is from Portuguese. Being an island nation, you can clearly track which word came from which traders and missionaries.

I was on the phone with my dad while writing this. He assured me there’s a Japanese word for bread. He couldn’t remember. Then told me to stop playing around, before saying he’s going back to his sitcom...thanks, dad.

“Cosplay,” coined in Japan during the 80′s, is the combination of the words “costume” and “play.” Even the word “anime” is from “animation,” and in Japan it means just that. I remember watching a movie review when I was a kid and the reviewer calling the foreign movie “a great anime.” It wasn’t a 2-D movie. I think it might’ve been A Bug’s Life, but I wasn’t interested so meh.

And the big anime eyes have Western influences too! The great Osamu Tezuka, the father of manga, was influenced by Disney and Betty Boop.

A modern version of Tezuka-sensei’s iconic Astro Boy.

We’ve been using words and phrases from other countries for ages. We literally say “Merry Christmas,” because wishing someone to have a good foreign holiday in Japanese is just a waste of time -- unless you’re really nationalistic and don’t want to use English words. There are people like that, some of them politicians. Ugh.

Sushi on Christmas? Eh, why not? Holidays like Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and Halloween were all introduced to Japan by corporations, anyway.

I was talking to an old Japanese friend, and she exclaimed “Sweet” in the middle of conversation, which made me pause (she never moved out of Japan). More English words have come into casual Japanese conversations since I left the country, and they’ve been sort of molded and melded to form new terms. Terms I find weird...and make me feel old.

Oh, another thing that seems to surprise a lot of people I’ve met: Japanese people sing Happy Birthday in English. No one I personally knew sang it in Japanese...I guess we collectively decided it sounded better in English? All I know is that, as a little girl, every time I went to a birthday party we sang it in English.

Asked my dad why we sing it in English. His response was basically, “Who cares?” Also, is anyone else getting a little hungry?

It’s not that weird of an idea...because of reasons. The first being birthdays weren’t that big of a deal for commoners until a certain time period (I want to say Edo period). People just kept track of the years, so it was as if everyone’s birthday was the first day of the new year/springtime.

Secondly, English is a mandatory class beginning as early as kindergarten. Don’t think we’re all bilingual, though. It’s English meant to pass tests. I will be the first to admit, we’re not linguists. We learn enough to say certain phrases.

Heh. Sleeping in class is an international trope.

Onto couples and what’s acceptable: If you spot your girlfriend holding another boy’s hand in public, even if it was to get up some slippery stairs, it would be understandable to get a tiny bit defensive. So all those anime guys with jealousy issues? Perhaps context would say they’re being reasonably miffed. Or not, it depends.

Is it an upstanding citizen helping your girlfriend? Relax, man. Is it a romantic rival who wants a chance to be physically close? CODE RED! CODE RED! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! BOUNDARIES HAVE BEEN CROSSED! I REPEAT!

BOUNDARIES. HAVE. BEEN. CROSSED.

Inuyasha’s half dog. He’s just being territorial! :P (Respecting boundaries was a bigger deal in the past, anyway.)

Other than couples-only events or somewhere only young adults roam, hand-holding is really the only way to publicly show your affection. Kissing a friend on the cheek? Unless you did that with every friend and you grew up in a different country, you��ll get some raised eyebrows.

Back pocket butt squeeze? Y-Y-YOU DEVIANT!

That’s pretty much fool-around-in-the-alleyway territory.

One of the few times boundaries can be crossed? The arts. Once you get into the entertainment industry, or become a TV personality or a comedian, suddenly there’s this invitation to do crazy shit.

The arts is where you let go and do all sorts of strange and wild things.

Laws have tightened since the 90′s--the comedians were REALLY out there back then--but even to this day our manga, anime, and TV shows can push the limits of our sensitivities. Movies can be crazy violent. Video games can be crazy perverted. Prank shows can be crazy outrageous.

It’s sort of our outlet.

Our insane, dirty, naughty outlet.

Japanese people aren’t that religious (yes, we’re transitioning from booty to faith): A lot of us put down Shinto or Buddhism or whatever on paper if asked, but only out of respect for our elders who really were practicing. These days, people will go ahead and have a Christian wedding and then have a Buddhist funeral.

I’m not kidding here.

Cardcaptor Sakura!? ...I’ve actually seen weirder.

Despite the up to date youth, past beliefs and ideas are still deeply rooted in our culture (like saying “See you in the next life,” even if you don’t really care about the validity of reincarnation), so people can still be superstitious without belonging to a religious organization...and discrimination against females at the workplace and homophobia can be worse than in other developed countries.

The truth is our culture isn’t perfect.

I’m sorry, but it’s true.

So it’s understandable that people would be confused by the conservative behavior of Japanese people, because our media would suggest the complete opposite. In public, we keep to our boundaries, from combination of culture and lack of physical space.

You know those face masks people in Asia seem to wear all the time? In Japan, the ill wear those out of necessity in the city. Grueling work culture demands we work even while sick (unless you physically can’t get up). Cities are crowded, we’re stacked on top of one another in tiny apartments, but most jobs are in cities so we’ve got no choice but to cover our sneezes and coughs with masks as we squeeze into really, really crowded trains.

Good luck getting a seat during rush hour! You know what, good luck getting room to breathe.

Speaking of work culture: Customer service...best in the world, even the government employees are polite and prompt. I’ve lived in a couple of countries, and there’s no comparison. Pay for these Japanese workers isn’t that great and there’s no incentives like tips, it’s just that their standards are way higher. To a fault. “The customer is always right” is taken to a ridiculous level.

My dad remembers a news story about a waiter that politely quit after he was verbally skewered to tears by a customer, patiently waited outside until the customer exited, and then ambushed him with a bat. The typical reaction to the news story? "About time.”

Yay, violence!

I know working in customer service in the US can be brutal. The difference that makes it worse in Japan is there’s this widespread cultural expectation for workers to bow and apologize for everything no matter what, because service workers must be humble first and foremost, which is as humiliating and emotionally taxing as you can imagine.

The waiters of a typical restaurant in Japan aren’t even allowed to be sarcastic or cheeky to a rude customer, like snidely say, “I hope your day is as pleasant as you are,” because that could get them in trouble. They could even get in trouble for not smiling enough, or not being as eloquent as possible, or not wearing their uniform perfectly...

And these are considered “reasonable” demands from the manager!

“Grin and bear it” takes on a whole new meaning in Japan.

Our petty crimes are infrequent. Since our housewives are such busybodies, police get plenty of tattletales. But, like in a lot of countries, there’s under-reporting of certain crimes--sexual assaults--due to shame and whatnot. Stuff like train groping? Probably a combination of repressed desires, predators taking advantage of the under-reporting, and the submissive personalities commonly found in Japanese women.

We’re really good about returning lost property, however. It’s like our pride forces us to do so. Giving change someone left in a vending machine to the neighborhood police station as lost property is pretty much the first thing we learn in kindergarten, along with proper hand-washing.

My dad went back to visit Japan in 2015, and saw a man pick up and pocket currency someone ahead of him dropped at a bus stop. Dad’s reaction to this: “Society has fallen.” I tend to agree.

The few homicides that occur aren’t brought on by something like road rage, but more along the lines of crimes committed by repressed people with long-held, festering grudges that snapped, like the abused waiter. Or something really elaborate, like a yakuza cover-up. Either way, it can get really heinous.

Don’t let Detective Conan fool you. Ours murders aren’t that numerous. Or fun to solve.

Why do we snap? We have this culture of holding things in; gaman, which means to endure. It’s supposed to make you patient and persevere, thus negating entitlement, but I can say with certainty there’s too much of it (except in our politics), and it’s bad for our mental and physical health, e.g. our ridiculously grueling work culture and possibly snapping like that waiter.

Our subcultures (cosplay, anime) can be fun and neat. Our main culture, not so much. It’s only in specific events and areas of Japan, like cons and Harajuku, where you won’t be judged for being out there and letting loose.

I mean, we’ve got problems with shut-ins for a reason.

On a more lighter note...hot springs!

There used to be a lot more volcanic activity in Japan (smoke used to spew out of Mt. Fuji).

Natural hot springs birthed a particular bathing habit that we follow to this day, even at our own homes -- we prepare first by showering and cleansing ourselves, and then get into our boiling bathtub to relax our muscles.

In the past, travelers were essentially sharing the natural hot springs, so it was a no-brainer that they would try to get clean before getting in. Habits stuck, I guess. Of course, it’s less true for those living in tiny apartments without bathtubs. A modern travesty, really.

Even our monkeys love ‘em!

...if you’re curious about the monkeys: We have wild snow monkeys all over Japan that bathe in natural hot springs. There’s a national park famous for them. Japan also has islands full of cats, an island full of rabbits, and a public park full of deer too.

Something neat to end the post: It can be fun shopping at their flea markets and bazaars (we really call them that, yay loanwords). Japanese people are really, really great at taking care of their belongings, as evidenced by their temples and shrines. Hand-me-downs and used objects may be resold in their original packaging--that’s how well cared for they are.

Most of the city streets are clean too. Unless it’s festival time~

Went ahead and asked my dad why so many in Japan keep the original packaging. “Dunno. Habit?” he said. Then he went to eat some sunflower seeds. Helpful, dad. Helpful.

#anime #inuyasha #analysis #japan #culture #gifs #inunalysis

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