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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I think this and the other comments here show an important cultural difference: Western culture places more emphasis on personal responsibility: if you don't want to be disturbed, the expectation is that you turn off notifications. Japanese culture seems to be the opposite, in that you expect others to know you do not want to be disturbed, and thus you don't bother with turning off notifications.

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Western culture is not an unified blob, as it encompasses wildly different languages, customs, and peoples, ranging from Sweden to Mexico.

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.

Doesn't matter, we can still talk about Western culture (meaning mostly Anglosaxon in this context, and including Europe in others) and Japanese culture.

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.

It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island. We don't hold enough information to understand "defaults" or "majorities". Heck, we are at Hacker News, hardly the epicenter of social butterflies.

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.

I won't argue with your perspective on Western culture. I neither agree nor disagree.

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.

>It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island.

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.

My wife is incredibly western and low-context. She still gets pissed off when friends and/or family in different timezones wake her up in the middle of the night with text messages.

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