Kokuhaku: Japan’s Love Confessing Culture (2013)
tofugu.com
tofugu.com
He said, not sharing the anecdotes :)
Having lived in the US all my life I'd love to hear more. Even if you don't want to share the anecdotes I'd be curious to know which European countries do this.
And if you don't want to share that's fine, too. If I want 'slice of life' anecdotes there's always This American Life :)
From the anecdotes on the page, it also sounds like creepy or awkward folks have a formal way to be weird. Which sounds like a net positive. Society expects you to give your interest a heads up.
You go on dates. Among people looking for a serious relationship, many women won't have sex - may not even kiss - if you haven't agreed to a serious relationship. Of course hookups exist, but looking for a hookup is a more or less separate activity from looking for a relationship, and happens in different spaces with (largely) different people. Whereas AIUI American culture is that you're supposed to do some drunken hookups and then eventually after you hook up with the same person a few times then you sort of come to a silent understanding that it's now a relationship.
I wouldn't say "way more important", but I think people would rather have a partner who they fit well together with as a household, enjoy spending time with, raise children well together (or not, if that's what they're after) etc. and have mediocre sex than someone who they had great sex with but didn't have a great relationship outside the bedroom.
(If you want to be cynical you could say it's because Japanese culture puts less emphasis on sexual fidelity, particularly in the case of paid sex workers; while a lot of westerners overstate how common or normal it is, it's certainly not unknown to have a more-or-less happy marriage where one or both partners are having sex outside and this is known and accepted by the other)
> What happens if they eventually have sex and one partner is severely disappointed, but they've already invested so much into the relationship?
Either you decide you can live with that, or you can't and you break up, which is presumably the same thing that happens if Americans date for a while and then find out they have incompatible life plans. To me it be worse to get invested in your relationship with someone who you have great sex with and then you find out one of you wants kids and the other doesn't, or one of you wants a high-income lifestyle and the other doesn't want the stress, or you never find the same things funny, or...
(I wouldn't say it's a huge investment - we're talking a few months of dating and going exclusive with that person. But you've got to put in a bit of sincerity)
If that's not how it works in Japan, cool, but what happens then? Is sex just not as important there? Do they break up soon afterward if it's not good? Do they just suffer silently?
Different cultures have always had different approaches to sexuality and partnership, and it's interesting to learn about them. Not sure why you thought that's trolling.
I think the mistunderstanding is on the word “serious” here.
I think the OP means “serious” as in “we are seriously commited to try”, not as in “we garantee it will last a decade or more”.
Also, let’s both acknowledge that serious relationships without sex are possible and not even rare. I mean, I have relatives who married again at 75, and it certainly wasn’t for the sex.
sorry, I really thought you were baiting someone to reply “relationship is not only about sex you know”…
I was just curious how the Japanese handle those "ah, you're great but... the sex was not" situations, especially being a high context and super polite society. Like do they just culturally place less weight on it, and accept that they're going to not enjoy sex much, and that's okay if the rest of the relationship is great? Do they communicate about it and try to improve it? It's hard to imagine sex therapy in that culture. Are things changing with the younger generations? Etc. I want to learn about these nuances (just out of curiosity).
And yeah, I can believe there are romantic relationships where sex isn't the primary driver, especially when you're older, but I think by and large that is no longer the norm in the US. We use hookups as a "trial run" for more serious relationships... even if sex isn't the only consideration, it at least a major one for most Americans, I think. But we're also a more individualistic and hedonistic culture than the Japanese, so I'm curious how it works there. What we might call "sex positive"... is that even a thing there?
If a man declared that his efforts towards a girl were an intention to get married, and subsequently reneged without good cause, the local community would deem him untrustworthy. This could make him unfit for marriage but also for employment. So not declaring one's intention if pressed was suspect.
My grandmother did the housewife school to make sure she was going to be a good wife, which stems from this kind of worrying about public rejection. People didn't move around so much so your local community's estimation of you was important.
As for the Japanese practice, the country was essentially "locked up" culturally until the 2nd world war so I'm not surprised old practices are still remembered. (Again, not a historian.)
If you've started going on dates, then at some point someone will ask the other to namorar. It's a very explicit ask, e.g. "let's be boyfriend/girlfriend".
While in the US it's not unusual to just organically become a couple and never actually discuss it "officially", the official ask is usually a really meaningful event in a relationship in Brazil. Technically it means that hooking up with someone else before it wasn't cheating, but afterwards it definitely is.
But namorar is definitely not "love". And you'd never declare it before going on a first date. Usually it would be after several weeks/months of dating, depending on how serious you felt about each other.
It's definitely just like.
Sure, we say "I loved that donut" or "I love her personality!" but you'd never just straight-up say "I love you" with that meaning because it would be completely misunderstood.
So this whole article seems premised on a mistranslation that the author brings up but never actually admits.
1. I like you. Me gustas. Suki-desu -> very early in the relationship, or to start off
2. [blank]. Te quiero. Daisuki-desu -> formal couple, to express feelings of love
2.5 I love you -> formal couple after long time dating I believe, a bit stronger than those two terms above
3. [blank]. Te amo. Aishiteru -> poetic, life-partners, basically we can get married
The "I love you" in English sits somewhere between those two in Spanish/Japanese. If forced to put it in a group, probably the second one would be better and I'd say there's no 3rd one equivalent, since it's really not as strong as the 3rd one, but stronger than the 2nd one.
Are you sure this isn't actually "aishiteru (愛してる)"? I've never heard of 'koishiteru', but 'aishiteru' occupies roughly the same level you described.
Actually, I have heard of 'koishiteru' (which I assume is 恋してる) but usually in the euphemistic context of sex.
Additionally, and not totally related, "soulmate", rendered in katakana (ソールメイト, sorumeito) is often used to breezily describe someone, often a coworker or classmate, with whom you have some level of camaraderie or friendship with. It is a perfectly unserious concept, which is amusing given its weightiness in English.
> 恋と愛とは違うものだよと
Koi to ai to wa chigau mono dayo to
“Romance and love are different things”
If you want to say “te quiero” without bringing up the word “love” (and risk being interpreted as being “in love”) you might try use phrases like “I really care for you” or talk about feeling close or that they are important to you. I agree the phrasing is awkward. I really like the Spanish phrase “te quiero” because it’s so much simpler! What is the phrase for 2.5?
The author seems to not realise in English you can say “I (really) like you - will you be my girlfriend/boyfriend?” which would imply you want an exclusive relationship. It can happen this way but I agree the prevailing culture might generally be murkier.
There is no 2.5 in Spanish/Japanese AFAIK? Like the 2 can be extended to include 2.5. I wanted to point that out, that IMHO in English "I love you" as a romantic phrase in a couple feels to be in a bit of an awkward position between 2 and 3; when you are starting/just a couple it's too early to say it, when you have found your soulmate and are totally in love it's not strong enough of a feeling.
* weeell, technically, "amo/amar" can be used as a figure of speech in some situations where it's not purely romantic; but it's kind of uncommon and a wordplay, like trying to describe that you are in love with pancakes everyone would understand it's not "real love", you just want to express how much you like them.
Japanese people would be just as put off by someone confessing with the loftier 愛している (ai siteiru) "I love you" as someone saying "I love you" in English.
Although I don't think it applies to modern Japan, it certainly resonates with me somehow. I don't trust people who talk about love.
Slightly more seriously, the format of a confession is pretty basic ("I like you, wanna hang?") and the article does include several canonical versions. But at the end of day it's just confirming that the attraction is mutual, and most of the fails are about randos totally failing this part.
That's half the point of the article, that the culture is to follow that one clear format to avoid ambiguity, and that other formats are seen as creepy, privacy-invading, etc.
In contrast to a big difference from US culture, I found most of the examples to be pretty much the same kind of stuff that happens here.
The article is obviously written for young female readers, this is the author's perspective, and all of the impressions, reactions and comments are from females.
So here's something a young womaan isn't typically going to notice: depending on whether the guy looks more like a j-pop idol, or the sterotype of the ugly guy that the last girl at the gokon gets stuck with; whatever words are said will be interpreted to give the opposite responce to the two otokos 8-)
In most cases this is probably subconscous. It's also not at all unique to Japan. Although in Japanese culture this can easily be included in 面子を立て, or saving face.
Not the point of the article, but this is a personal bugbear of mine - no it wasn't. Text-based communication is asynchronous. It's rude to _expect_ that someone is present and available if you message them out of the blue (or, rather - rude to get upset if they don't immediately reply), but it's not rude to send the message in the first place. Particularly - it is never correct to send a Delayed Message on Slack "because it's the evening/weekend and I don't want to bother them". The four possible outcomes are:
* You send delayed; they could have benefitted from the information earlier (e.g. there's an outage overnight and your delayed message contained helpful information) -> your delay had a negative effect
* You send delayed; they read the message when they come online again during business hours -> your delayed message had no impact (assuming you correctly guessed their business hours)
The only situation where "sending delayed" has a positive impact is where there is a culture whereby a message _must_ be replied to at the time it's sent. In such a situation, you need to fix that broken culture rather than working around it with delay-hacks.
You're the one sending the message, so you're the one who should wait to do it when it it will be convenient for the recipient. If you're texting me in the middle of sleeping hours, you're telling me that your convenience is more important to you than mine.
Sure you can blame the other person. But what good outcome do you gain by such an attitude?
People need to learn to take control of their situation and not rely on others to do it for them? That seems to be the norm in Western cultures, at least.
On Personal alerts though I gave up the granular filtering a long time ago, real people in my contact list all go through without any specific rules, and I'll actually tell people to stop sending me links to facebook rants in the middle of the night.
Some of the companies and automated services have special rules (my bank, Google account alerts etc.) to let notifications through, but by default I won't allow any service to have notification bells, mail and SMS are silent as well.
Instead of expecting them to guess your waking hours, you could just set your DND to not alarm during those hours. If I didn't do that, I'd be frequently woken by things like Facebook Messenger message alerts.
That's irrelevant. They still get a notification to disturb them, they still can see it when looking at their phone, they can still be concerned about the content and how to respond later even if they don't answer, they can still be concerned about the content even if they don't read it, they could very well be waiting an important message at the time, they might have an experience with other people/ex-partners/etc pressuring them to answer immediately, and so on.
Technical terms like "asynchronous" don't mean anything to how people use a technology. Common social expectations do.
And just the same, Japanese people are not one unified blob and each have their own preferences regarding texting, just like the rest of us.
It's about defaults and majority/average preferences, not about "every single one does this" and it gets tiring to remind people otherwise, as if they don't know.
So even if there was such a thing as default, we wouldn't know it. Let alone from a foreign country that most natives don't speak a foreign language. How many Japanese relationships did you have to form such knowledge on the majority?
Last, but not least, it is not tiring to remind people to reframe the conversation. It is healthy and constructive.
But, I will say that to a greater degree than you perhaps would imagine, Japanese people by and large do know what to expect from other Japanese in minute contextual detail. And with that knowledge, they try very hard to meet others' expectations.
What matters for the analogy to be useful is if there are two big clusters in east and west. Not regional differences within the clusters, or between individuals.
What if they don't want to stop notifications?
What if they don't know how to do it?
What if they want to still get one from the child or partner or friend who's travelling if anything happens to them?
Should they turn it on and off for your convenience, lest you have to forego sending a non-essential text at night?
The receiver has full agency of when they receive notifications and of whom. In fact a person NOT sending a message and keeping it stored later is, in fact, taking away agency of the receiver. The sender assumes he knows better then the receivers.
But you're still sending the message, regardless of if they want it or not, and even if obviously they might not have done those things, not know how to do those things, or simply not want to have to do those things, but still not want to have to get some message at night.
Sorry, but you're intruding with your late nightn message. And that's irrelevant to what they have or haven't set on their phone.
>In fact a person NOT sending a message and keeping it stored later is, in fact, taking away agency of the receiver. The sender assumes he knows better then the receivers.
It's not about agency, it's about courtesy.
if they don't know how, the first time they bring up this issue, i'll help them change their settings.
yes, there are always corner cases, and there may be a situation where it is necessary to avoid sending messages at certain times. but this can be communicated. what bothers me is people getting upset if they receive a message at the wrong time as if it was the senders fault.
Text messaging, yes is asynchronous - but you don't know what the settings of the persons device are. They could have forgotten or not have quite hours set and now it is very much a synchronous notification even if it's not synchronous communication.
Sending delayed - again things happen. I would rather send a delayed message when I am in full control of the situation rather than possibly not the next morning due to any chain of events from weather, traffic, family, etc.
I feel like this comes from my philosophy of even if individuals are correct, it doesn't mean they are kind. We live in a community with individuals and we should compromise and balance things where needed.
FWIW, this is the prevailing opinion of almost everyone I know. The only question is what is the appropriate window when you should text. 8-22? 10-22?
Some people, including myself unfortunately, are uncomfortable with unread messages. The biggest problem is, you’ll read the message, but not respond right away to avoid creating the impression “keep messaging me at this hour”. Then, when the appropriate time to answer comes, whatever your definition of that is, you’ll forget to actually answer.
I don’t have this problem with email, but messaging platforms create this with read receipts, online/offline status, etc.
Let people manage the settings on their own devices - whether they’ve forgotten to set their quiet hours is not your concern. Trust other people to take care of their own responsibilities. If they mess up, they deal with the consequences - it’s not your problem. If they feel the need to answer your text immediately when for you it wasn’t necessary, let them choose for themselves. Don’t presume to take that choice away from them.
Following this direction puts the default for each medium, regardless of its properties, into "it's rude to attempt communication".
IMO, it's overkill. We invented communication to communicate, and we built in things like being asynchronous to some forms of communication. So we should not give them up just because someone might find it rude. There's a level after which the sender should have more say over what is rude than the receiver.
If I’m working outside of business hours (a few instances per week) I don’t like to slack my direct reports because I personally don’t want to create an “always on” culture at our company.
If your manager messages you at all hours of the day and on weekends, it can become unclear whether the same is expected of you. So, I like to delay messages to 8am the next morning, especially if they’re not time sensitive.
Imagine a message “Just a quick reminder that project X is due next week” sent at 7pm on Friday. Unless the person is expected to work over the weekend, why not delay it to 8am Monday?
Its the same reason I don't make jokes deprecating them to them within a group (and try not to in private with them). What can be a joint form of bonding where you make light fun of each other can start becoming bullying (even if inadvertently) when one party feels like they aren't free to fire back anymore. I've witnessed that dynamic before, where childhood friends worked with each other and one was the owner and continued the familiar personal reactions while the other started feeling less and less able to interact that way (at least in group settings).
Many of us are somewhat blind to certain power imbalances, others of us are very aware because they deal with it in many aspects of our lives. In any case, it usually matters if there's an imbalance, whether we want it to or not.
If my manager sent this, all it will do is make me think about it over the weekend, irrespective of the "lowering of importance". I would rather keep my mind free over the weekend and see the message Monday morning.
I get no sort of he's-a-hard-worker credit for working late, but plenty of up-and-at-'em plaudits when they receive an email at what they think of as the "correct" time of day. Meanwhile, I'm asleep, and catch their first round of replies when I wake up. It's somewhat ridiculous, but not a big deal.
yes, i agree that getting upset when you get a message while sleeping is not right, but sending a delayed message when you have the option to can be a good idea.
Probably saves a lot of time. On the other hand, Japan's population is declining.
> Can you financially support me and my parents
Seems pretty honest, and maybe good to know up front.
> He suddenly showed me his pay slip
See above.
> “Dating? I’m not sure, we have only started sleeping together a month ago. They might still be seeing other people.”
This seems specifically American to me, and I think this is a weird thing to most Europeans.
In practice teenagers are horny and will fuck around if they can, and their relationship can be as blurry. Same for adults going to bars and having one night stands, or ducking it out while drunk after a party and being in limbo trying to to sort it out for weeks afterwards.
Same for online dating of course, wanting to be sure the alchemy is there before mentally commiting isn't some culture's exclusive trait.
If you haven’t had that, it’s because you’ve chosen not to partake.
As a Chinese I can't wrap my head around the concept of running away because someone loves you. So to enter a relationship with someone you have to not love them while still loving them...?! Do western people all have fear of commitment?
I'm just glad I'm married now (to a Chinese girl) and not having to deal with this mess.
There, did I scare you?
This is not exhaustive, America is a big place, but in the major cities and on social media you will more often than not come upon this. Hence why you'll hear terms like 'chemistry', 'rizz', 'ick', etc amongst Millennials and Gen Z at least, as these terms describe positive and negative attenuations of the fantasy of spontaneity.
The majority of my co-workers are Tamil and Kaneda folk from India, many of whom are women, who're all in arranged marriages. I learned a lot talking to them about this experience as its mere existence is anathema in mainstream American culture.
Because it happens all the time, it's no fantasy at all. You might not like it, but it very much exists. It's not just something from the movies, it's how basically everyone I know who's married got started.
You're right that arranged marriage is very much anathema to mainstream American culture, since arguably the most central value of the country is that of individual choice/liberty.
I should've been clearer: 'fantasy' doesn't mean 'false' here. More like 'embellishment', an additive, framing, to reality that makes it more palatable and exchangeable (symbolically). The point of bringing up arranged marriage demonstrates spontaneity itself is more radical than is framed in the case of mainstream rhetoric around amorous relationships rather than a partisan approval.
The implication is that someone telling you they love you out of the blue implies they very likely do not know you well enough to justify such a sentiment.
It's weird and even offending to hear "I love you" (said seriously) from a person who doesn't know you well.
My take is that you can say you are _in_ love and this may sound fine if delivered right. Still, better be sure that there is at least some mutual sympathy. Also highly language-specific I guess.
EDIT: I personally find the non-verbal communication preceding the relationships much more fascinating.
I am also curious if there are cultures with a polite probing mechanism which are not humiliating for both parties regardless of the outcome (reciprocity or the lack of such).
I think to some degree, it's supposed to be humiliating in the failure case. The type of confession being discussed here is a "costly social signal". The willingness to bear the humiliation that ensues in the failure case is part of what makes the confession meaningful and a social trope in the first place.
That being said, there's a lots of cultures with established social signals for relationship status. For example, the outdated "Ms" vs "Mrs" distinction, which is present on lots of languages/cultures, engagement rings, certain fashion choices... I guess in "western culture", the solution for probing is "asking someone out a few times". In the failure case, the rejecting party can say "I'd love to but I'm really busy at the moment" a few times and the rejected party takes the hint. I'm not sure this can be any less humiliating, barring some stuff involving cryptography.
There are lots of variations on that theme, but the point is that when it’s offered without the backing of a safe and intimate, developed relationship, it reads more like “I am obsessed with you”. It can suggest a failure to be in touch with your own emotions and/or a gigantic failure to see and appreciate the recipient as an individual. An obsession with surface appearance or even the speaker’s own fantasy about the recipient.
“How can you love me? We barely know one another. I don’t know that I currently trust you enough to have even shown the parts of me you could claim to love. You must love your own conception of me and I don’t trust that.”
That said, variations on “I like you” are basically the same sort of relationship-opening confession and are often welcome. It’s considered normal to “like” someone’s public and non-intimate social identity enough to want to get to know them more (through more intimate dating).
The other big confession to note is “can we be exclusive/go steady?” This one implies you like someone enough that you’d prefer if you and they focus exclusively on this relationship. Its rejection may end the relationship (or may not, it can be done lightly) and usually comes between “like” and “love”, if it comes at all. Not everyone practices dating non-exclusively.
My understanding is that when someone gives you a gift, in Chinese culture there is a social obligation to give them a gift of similar value at some point in the future. So giving a very expensive gift can be a very rude gesture, because it effectively inflicts a large, unexpected expense on the recipient.
In Western culture, there is a similar dynamic when it comes to dating and courtship. The general expectation is that men will ask the women they are interested in, and the women will then accept or refuse the offer. The difficulty with this is that it puts women in the position of having to reject someone who is 20 cm taller/20 kg heavier than them -- this can be very scary.
So it is artful/polite for a man asking a woman out, especially in the initial stages, to do so in a way that is ambiguous enough that if she decides she doesn't want to continue, she can back away without having to forcefully reject him. An overly strong confession of love removes this ambiguity, and thereby forces a woman into the uncomfortable position of having to directly reject the man. This is rude, in exactly the same way that giving someone an overly-expensive gift is rude in Chinese culture.
Naturally, though, in China very close friends wouldn't be bothered by how expensive gifts are, and that in the West, a woman pining for a particular man would be delighted if he directly declared his love for her. But we have etiquette to handle the failure cases, not the success cases!
Anyway, I'm always surprised how even though people are basically the same everywhere, and share the same desires and impulses, we end up building very different cultures. It's just amazing how situations can be radically different and utterly familiar at the same time.
To enter a relationship with someone, you have to like what you’ve seen of them, enough so that you’re willing to work together to see what could be between you. Again, it takes two willing participants. If one of you falls for the other faster, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but along the lines of those responses I gave as examples above, the expectation is that when one confesses the other is ready for it.