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[spidey]

How about some "urban legends?"

Urban Legends About Japan
by William Lise
(Started 2005-08-01; last updated 2005-09-20)

A frightening amount of misinformation about Japan has been spread around and (more frightening) believed for decades. A disturbing aspect of these legends is that some of the originators are viewed as Japan experts by some of their willing victims.

What I focus on here are the things the Japanese will not tell you--some of them related to the prominently visible dirty underbelly Japanese society.

Spreading these legends requires willing believers, and there is certainly no shortage of credulous legend-beievers. Often the most credulous are those who come to Japan prepared to worship a culture far superior to their home country culture. When they find anomalies, some tend to take refuge in the more-comfortable legendary version of Japan.


People who are accomplished in martial arts in Japan register their hands with the police.
RIDICULOUS What might true is that, if a martial arts "artist" gets into a fight and injures someone, the courts might take into consideration the possibility that he/she could have used less force than someone without skills in martial arts.

Buddhists do not drink.
RIDICULOUS Some poor non-Japanese will believe anything they read in an English book about Japan. While in my 30-plus years in Japan I have met many people in Japan who do not drink, not a single one has said that it was because of religious belief. Usually it is because drinking causes other, more basic problems, including redness in the face and nausea.

Japanese people are extremely polite.
PARTIALLY CORRECT The Japanese are usually very considerate and polite to people to whom they should be considerate and polite. The Japanese are good at using the correct level of politeness in the confines and requirements of their social system, which definitely does not mean they are polite to everybody all the time. Naturally, if you are foreigner in Japan, until you have demonstrated that you are more permanent than the average tourist, you will be accorded the requisite level of politeness. After you settle in, the politeness you receive will be governed more by the relationship you have or are assumed to have in particular situations.

Japanese people are intrinsically incapable of originality.
FALSE My take on this is that there is no truth to this, although the Japanese seem not to put much effort into things like basic research, for example. They elect to spend their energies in less-risky application of basic research done elsewhere, and have competed very well with things like commodity type ICs.

The population of Japan is homogenous.
FALSE This is a myth promulgated by the Japanese themselves. Although it is hardly ever talked about (a virtually taboo topic), the myth of homogeneity falls apart when you look around at Japan, which has about a million foreigners (mostly children and grandchildren of Koreans who were brought to Japan as forced labor before 1945), a vestigial out-caste class (still a social problem), and a fair number of other demographic classes (e.g., children who grew up with only a single parent) that are not treated very well in the Japanese social system. Heterogenious as it is, however, many Japanese feel uncomfortable talking about this aspect of their society. For example, mention of the vestiges of the outcaste problem, in fact, could get you in trouble with both mainstream Japanese and members of that group.

Vegetarianism is common in Japan.
FALSE Compared to the US, where yuppie vegetarians abound, Japan has virtually no vegetarians. Pity the poor foreigner vegetarian who tries to live the "good life" in Japan. While Japan's consumption of meat is much less than that of the US, for example, almost all Japanese eat meat, the McDonalds is full of Japanese people, and almost all Japanese meals involved eating things which were once alive. Even having a perfectly good native word for vegetarianism (saishokushugi), the Japanese most often refer to this dietary preference as bejitarian, strongly hinting that vegetarianism is seen by the Japanese as being distinctly non-Japanese.

Japanese commonly eat unbleached rice with the outer covering remaining
FALSE Ordering genmai in anything but the strangest of Japanese restaurants will get you the strangest looks. It took Japan centuries to get to the point at which the entire country can eat white rice. The trendiness of genmai in Western countries has done very little to convince Japanese to go back to their "origins." White rice is standard.

Japanese eat sushi all the time
SOMEWHAT OVERSTATED In Japan, sushi is considered rather classy and expensive, and good sushi is quite expensive. A small number of Japanese almost never it, a slightly larger group rarely eat it, a significant number don't like it, and even the large number of Japanese who do like sushi probably don't eat it as often as an American who likes sushi and lives in the US. In short, one should not judge Japanese tastes in food by the proliferation of sushi restaurants in the US.

Japanese bars commonly have girls you can take out and have sex with.
FALSE What is true--and probably quite surprising to the people who believe the "girl-to-go" myth--is that any urban area worthy of the name has a large number of establishments where sex (of the Bill Clinton variety, at least) is available on premise, sometimes in view of other customers. Although the vast majority of places do not provide girl-to-go services, a diligent seeker of the baser pleasures will surely find such a place. These days it is likely to offer non-Japanese women and likely to be located outside of large cities.

Foreigners should figure out how to write their name in kanji characters, as that will allow them easier entry into, and acceptance by, Japanese society.
FALSE Being a translator, I sometimes (too often) get requests from (usually) non-Japanese-capable aficionados of martial arts, flower arranging, the tea ceremony, and the like who are anxious to learn how to write their names with kanji characters. While these characters are interesting, the unexciting truth is that all a foreigner does by writing his or her name in kanji is to invite laughter or confusion. Almost no long-time Westerner residing in Japan does this. It is almost exclusively the newcomer, and usually the newcomer who does not yet know the Japanese language. Some have asked me about obtaining a chop (inkan, seal) with kanji characters and my advice is the same. I have written about seals in much more detail elsewhere.

S

[Aramas]

Urban legends, eh.

British people who visit Australia almost invariably believe that we call them 'poms' or 'pommies' because convicts allegedly had P.O.M.E. (Prisoner Of Mother England) written across the back of their convict jim-jams. Absolute piffle, of course. The origin given most credence is that it's actually a contraction of 'pomegranate', being rhyming slang for 'immigrant'. Personally I prefer the lesser known version, being that it's a contraction of 'pompous'.

I'll let you guess why we call Americans 'Seppos'.

I suppose no one has mentioned the LSD tattoos or Satanic Child Molesters yet? They're still cropping up from time to time on TV and in the press, apparently.

[ls650]