Just read that piece on Gaijinpot about questions we get asked all the time, and I decided to compile my own list. There are a few questions that are bound to come up when I meet someone for the first time, such as…
While I was looking for a job back last year, I had one big problem: I had no idea how much people actually earn. Even if I asked people I knew from the university or encountered during my “internships”, or at jobhunting events, they’d just give evasive answers and refuse to tell.
If you keep forcing people to make decisions they can’t possibly make reasonably, don’t expect any reasonable results either. This occurred to me while reading an article on The Atlantic about fixing intersex babies with surgeries. Parents are asked (or even urged) to decide whether or not to do the surgery, even though even the doctors don’t have an exact knowledge of what consequences it may have. Then how can anyone expect laymen parents to make that decision responsibly?
One of my bosses at the studio gives me pretty good advice quite often, sometimes telling me stuff I haven’t even noticed before. One such thing is that Japanese can’t hold my gaze and I can assure a superior position in arguments this way, because of the power they feel in my stare due to my different facial structure. I was really fascinated by this idea and decided to try it in practice.
Just earlier I was reading a wiki about the old province of Musashi, and I was a bit surprised to see a proposal that its name is of Ainu origin and roughly means marsh. I’ve been interested in the name itself for a while, considering how it keeps popping up all over the area of the former province (which includes where I live). On the other hand, I find it quite fascinating that while the English wiki only lists Vovin’s Ainu origin theory for the name, the Japanese wiki doesn’t even mention such a possibility. Remember the axioms of Japanese society:
1) Japan is a homogenous, monocultural society.
2) If reality is otherwise, then 1).
So apparently my flat faces west, something I only noticed recently as days’ve been getting hotter. I’ve kept my windows open for weeks now, and in the morning it’s always nice and cool to wake up, and even when I get back home for lunch… But then when I get out of work and arrive home in the evening, it’s a whole different story.
The thing in the post title is something I didn’t have any experience with before coming to Japan. It only became a part of my daily routine since I moved to Tokyo almost two months ago. Sadly I’m not talking about the FPS game.
I’m pretty sure I’ve experienced more earthquakes in Tokyo just the past two weeks than in the 4 years I spent in Hikone. “Best” of all is that some of these weren’t even small. Small is when everyone just tweets “omg it’s an earthquake” then forgets all about it ten minutes later.
“Why did you come to Japan?” I don’t know if I’d written about this before and I just forgot or it’s just the almost-daily repetitions of this question that make me feel so bored of it. I just realized that I didn’t really elaborate on this part when I wrote about how I learned Japanese earlier.
So, on the third try, i (miraculously) got it. I really have no idea how could i pass now and got failed the last time, considering i honestly did horrible this time (messed up one of the sharp turns and put out the turn signal too late once).
My conclusion is that it depends totally on the examiner. It doesn’t matter if you do perfectly (or as close as one can get to perfect), if they want to fail you, they will. On the other hand, if you get a nice guy (or just one who isn’t dead set on failing you) then you can make mistakes and still pass.
My case as a prime example.
Remember that article about how Japanese don’t have sex anymore? And that other (raging weeaboo) in response to it claiming they do?
Well. As you may well know if you know anything about me, i’m in the light music club of my university (yes, that light music club). We had our usual autumn festival last weekend, and the family of one of the third-years dropped by too. The guy’s a twitter addict, i mean it. I’d even go as far as to say he’s a typical nerd: video games, anime and playing his instrument is pretty much all there is (and also tweeting about all these activities). Thing is, he has a little sister and since the gig, he’s been going on about that a lot. How we mustn’t even dream of hitting on her. How perfect she is.
Then there was this interesting thing: his sister and mother asked him if he has a girlfriend – and he answered it’s too much time and effort (a sadly very common answer from japanese guys). “You’ll never get one then,” was the natural reaction.
Thing is, he’s still occasionally saying “dang i want a girlfriend so much,” and that confuses me. Want a girl but don’t want to make any efforts? Is that it? Considering how he’s quite average, i guess there you have one example from the inside of the problem cited in the articles i mentioned before.
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