Hi folks

Lately I've been more and more amazed by how different Japanese culture is to mine. Might seem like a dumb remark, but I really experience it as a problem. I mean, how do you learn about such things? I had some passive input on such things, so I have an extremely shallow overview. Movies, some stray wikipedia article. Western movies focusing on cultural differences (lost in translation, stupeur et tremblements, ...) are especially enlightening of my progress as I can already recognize most of the "weirdness".
I'm also working a bit to save some money for a long trip all over japan, hopefully next summer holiday, both to practice the language and to do some "field work" on japanese culture.
However I just feel I won't ever achieve a sufficient level of understanding by passive input alone.
I mean, it's not like I know nothing, as it was the great body of eastern thought and culture that persuaded me to learn an east asian language, it's just that the deeper I dig, the further the bottom seems to be...

So how did/do you deal with that, if you even experience(d) such a problem yourselves?
Are there any books that actually do any good? I mean, there are probably a thousand books with titles a permutation of "understanding japanese culture" or something, but how valuable are such things? Do they teach anything that can be learned by exposure?
If you learned a lot from certain books or movies, documentaries, articles, please do share!

I'll also probably get a big history book, to refresh my memory on what I know of japanese history (which is not non-existant, just not very deep).

Perhaps japanese/chinese studies would have been a better choice for me than maths? lol.

Anyway, sorry for this wall of text.
Enjoy your lives

Jorre

Hello Jorre,

I live in São Paulo, Brazil, where we have a huge local japanese community, fruit of many years of immigration. I grew up in such neighborhood, and most of my infancy I studied together with japanese-brazilian friends. As a consequence of such high immigration, japanese that settled in Brazil conserved their language to some extent, and in there are many families that still speak only japanese in their homes. In the 90's there was the dekasegi movement, in which many japanese descendants in Brazil went back to Japan to work and make money, often taking their families along, and their brazilian children were educated in japanese schools over there. When they came back because of the recession, they were all fluent and deeply immersed in the japanese culture. This is a cycle that repeats over and over, and keeps the community in Liberdade (the japanese neighborhood in São Paulo) in touch with their origins. There are some all-japanese supermarkets, hundreds of japanese shops and festivities, and excellent japanese schools.

It is through one of those schools that I learn japanese and japanese culture. They are very careful to teach you both together.

My suggestion, in case you do not have access to a good japanese school, is to resort to slice-of-life manga, which are both fun and full of information.

I have read two books by Amelie Nothomb that were particularly fun and enlightening:
Stupeur and Tremblements, that you saw as a movie, tells the story of Amelie as an employee in Japan; and Ni d'Eve ni d'Adam tells the other side to her story, her personal life in japan since she got there, fell in love and so on. That book made me hungry for okonomiyaki, that I finally found in an izakaya here. Delicious.

I second aureo's suggestion of slice-of-life manga and/or anime, even though the vast majority of them seem to be about high school - I have yet to discover a good manga about the Japanese corporate world. Some manga I would particularly recommend are Lucky Star/らき☆すた (the characters often have random Seinfeldesque conversations, a lot of which involve Japanese cultural peculiarities), Yotsuba&!/よつばと！ (the main character is a little girl learning about the world around her, giving the reader an outsider's perspective) and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei/さよなら絶望先生 (a manga that discusses some darker sides of Japanese society in a wacky and unorthodox way).
Additionally, "gaijin blog posts" sometimes have interesting insights, but you do have to be selective with them. Sometimes the problems those bloggers have with Japan are really exaggerated and childish, but sometimes you do find legitimate cultural differences that some find less reconcilable than others. Also, such negative blog posts tend to generate interesting discussions, like the one here.

Books can be helpful to a certain degree, but I would keep in mind that a lot of anthropology is bullshit.

One good book is "Patterns of Japanese Behavior" by Takie Sugiyama Lebra, but I warn that it's a little old and very wordy. It can give you a lot of insight into how older Japanese, maybe 35 and up, act.

I took a bunch of classes about Japanese culture, and read a lot, but until I lived here for a long time it didn't really hit me. In fact, even after studying abroad here for a semester I really didn't gain any insight into the culture. After living here for three years I get it a lot more. Also, I dated a Japanese girl for a year and that really taught me a lot. Dating and working really put you in the position to learn about culture, because cultural clashes will come to light a lot more than in almost any other situation.

I think you'll find if you read too much into these cultural and historical textbooks you'll be getting a stereotypical, overly thought out viewpoint on it all. Just go out and make friends and learn from reality! Japanese culture really isn't that different from any other civilised society, IMO.

Tzadeck Wrote:Books can be helpful to a certain degree, but I would keep in mind that a lot of anthropology is bullshit..

dizmox Wrote:I think you'll find if you read too much into these cultural and historical textbooks you'll be getting a stereotypical, overly thought out viewpoint on it all. Just go out and make friends and learn from reality! Japanese culture really isn't that different from any other civilised society, IMO.

I think that is also a stereotypical, not very thought out view on books and what they can teach ; ) Especially historical books. Those are priceless, as you can never ever get a good overview of important history of a country by exposure alone, and history is so bloody important in how it shapes a society... I'm very critical of this sort of anti-analytic viewpoint.
I'm also not saying you can ONLY learn from books - faaaar from it, you definately need REAL exposure to the matter at hand, but that doesn't take away from the fact that books can still contain very important information, which would take yourself years to gather. Feel free to substitute "article" or "documentary" or any other non-prosaic medium for "book" above.

aureo Wrote:My suggestion, in case you do not have access to a good japanese school, is to resort to slice-of-life manga, which are both fun and full of information.

I have read two books by Amelie Nothomb that were particularly fun and enlightening:
[...]

Well, I have also watched some slice of life anime, will get around to reading some manga too some day. The Nothomb books are a nice idea - would be good practice for my french too. Stupid that I didn't get the idea of reading them myself, I knew that that movie was based on a book by Nothomb. I would get to know my own country's literature a little better too , hehe.

Anyway, thanks for the hints and tips.

Greetings,

jorre

You can also use Keyhole TV and just watch a lot of their standard TV fare to get an idea of what's going on over there. TV isn't a completely accurate picture of a society-- it warps things a bit-- but it's a useful tool, and keyhole TV is free. (Although the picture is kind of bad.)

Speaking of books, there was another interesting thread about them.

100 Books for Understanding Contemporary Japan

OP:
how about asking a friend who has lived there anyway, and who you still owe a tie...

edit: PS: btw, give me my tie back xD

You sleazy backstabbing strange-looking japanese speaking dude that wears ties.
Someday you'll get it back.

Jorrebenst,
BTW wanna borrow my book on Chinese Modern history that I use at Uni? It's the shizzl ^^

I'll also send my anki deck on the topic! It's the most beautiful deck ever! xP With pictures, and colours, and neatly formed grids, ect, etc, etc...

(I always forget how to spell etc/ect)

your decks are so perfect they make me puke. With all due respect.
And uh, yeah, Chinese history was definitely what I was after... You do realize I'm doing Japanese, right?

I don't know about you, but what I could really use right now is a list of all the "set" phrases and when to use them in every day situations. As well as every day "Dos & Don'ts" that the average Japanese will know.

Some things still slip me up. Thank god I'm a tall, blond, white guy, or I could have been in some messy social situations - instead of just being explained to me what I messed up.