Ahhh Japan

Nordic Viking.

I like it when you post, you always make two good points.
 
This shaved head, goatee sporting gaijin made sure and drank at least a gallon of Asahi super dry each night for therapeutic purposes, as well as Sapporo. Sometimes I drank this beer that had a fishing Buddha dude on the label, but I can't remember the brand now; it was pretty good. I lived on Mos Burgers for lunch (about 3 at a time) ~ good stuff.

As I was riding the train back to Osaka to fly home, I spoke to a 50+ year old man from England. He had taught English to rich kids for 30 years, was married to a local gal and had two children. I told him I had felt very isolated; he said that he still felt that way. He stated that, as a foreigner, you can never be 100% privy or understand all of their idiosynchrosies.

BTW, I was asked not to use the hotels communal bath because of my hairy body ~ it would be offensive to other guests:rolleyes: I actually had an employee at the electronics store wipe off the mp3 player I had touched, as if I had contaminated it with hanta virus. Didn't seem to bug him when the local handled it, though.
 
We North Americans, Canadians as well as Americans, need to mine this obviously caricatured stuff for a few hard bits of truth. Which in no way is an attempt to justify the attitudes in these pieces, or to somehow argue that the Japanese haven't got serious cultural issues of their own. They have.

But yeah, the biggest single non-residential land-use even in my small city, is shopping malls and their parking lots. Not schools. Not parks, or athletics fields, or even grocery stores. Shopping malls and parking lots.

Everything is a commodity - from the "right" clothes that the cool kids wear in my kids' schools, to the music we listen to, to the bloody newsreaders (Katie Couric is a news anchor?!) who hawk infotainment products so that advertisers get access to us. Most of us shrug, and put up with it ... or go buy more stuff.

Think even of shows like "the Antiques Roadshow." Here we have people bringing in items thick with family history, in some cases national history. There's huge intrinsic value, both as objects and often as artworks. But the kicker is always the dollar sign at the end ... what's the value at auction. While the folks will often say "oh, but I'd never sell it ...", you see the lights go off in their heads. Economics is our great leveller, our common denominator.

Now, Japan seems to me to be every bit as caught in sick garbage - consumerist, chauvinistic, xenophobic crap. But some of the criticisms in these texts, however offensively written, have merit.
 
Something must be said about the high quality of the Japanese educational system though. I mean DannyInJapan has gone from reading 4th grade English (post #1) to reading 8th grade English (post #23) in only 72 hours.

In Sweden we do one grade of English, per year.
 
yeah I've been looking for that one hi res enough for a background...

Give me something nice to click on...
 
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