Understanding Japan
sivers.org
sivers.org
"Just like all people, all cultures are exactly the same."
It's hard to read through your stream of sarcasm but I think you're building a strawman there. I'm not saying everyone is the same, I'm saying everyone is different and you get nice people in every country just like you can meet utter arseholes anywhere. And really, that's the bit that matters because their height or skin colour and other things you can get handy stats for are largely irrelevant.
"The only generalisation about people living in some country you can make is the language they are likely to speak and sometimes the religion they believe but things like being honest, hard working, self-sacrificing is rather far fetched and either naive (romanticising) or dishonest (advertising)."
It's hard to read through your liberal cant but I think you're building a strawman here. I'm not saying every person in a given nation is the same I'm saying there exist statistically valid generalisations about different nations. While personal experience quickly swamps and renders irrelevant stereotypes/statistical generalisations in long term relationships in short term ones treating people as representatives of their group gives useful information. Not all Swiss Germans are more polite, formal and distant than German Germans but if you bet that way you'll usually win. And really, deliberately throwing away information makes you someone shutting themselves off from the truth. And really, that's what matters because soon we will all be dead and the truth is all there really is.
If three American people are talking together, and a fourth one joins the conversation, he will gregariously interrupt the conversation to talk about himself. Why?
In America, everything is about individualism. People are supposed to be different from each other. Everybody may not have a job, but people understand it as 'The American Dream', just one of the ways in which people dream of being more different by being successful. As a result, not everybody has money to live, but this is understood as a necessary sacrifice. American individualism means that people love guns and are okay with each other having guns. Often times this means that people will live apart from each other in the country in large mansions and in seeming happiness. People also live together in large interesting cities, like New York or San Francisco, but when they do so, they make a point to appear different from each other. How have they achieved this?
To understand the American way, you must understand a few concepts that are deeply rooted into the culture.
< Cowboy role model >
The Cowboy adhered to a way of life, ethics, rules, and a code that spread to all branches of society, and even today affects the way the American thinks.
- The Horse offered the Cowboy a sense of independence and self-sufficiency.
- The Frontier taught them to be ruthless and self-motivated.
- The Town taught them diversity and how to interact with many different kinds of people, including bartenders, sherrifs, outlaws, townspeople, and other cowboys.
- Justice, and honor are central. Toughness, manliness, concealed emotion, independence, and resourcefulness are important key values.
Though the cowboy no longer exists, this way of viewing life is ever-present in society. Students quit school early to seek independent projects they call 'Entrepreneurs'. Workers within a company see each other as opposing cowboys. The American is independent, performance-oriented, and mercenary at work. He/She tries to improve themselves every day and to move from company to company, just as the cowboy galloped across different terrains in their time.
In western countries, words related to the difference between what you really think and what you say are politeness, tact, courtesy, negotiation, and rhetoric. And others, of course, you should get the idea.
Hypocrisy is really something different. Hypocrisy means espousing a self-serving double-standard. It means advocating one thing while practicing the opposite for personal gain.
I've met a large number of Japanese people here in San Diego (people who grew up in Japan but came here on student visas), and one thing I've learned from them is that almost all of the conventional wisdoms about Japanese culture (like those stated in this article) are mostly a combination between out-of-date and just fully romanticized notions mixed with a tiny bit of reality. Roughly the equivalent of writing a guide about fitting into American culture that is based on what someone saw in 1950s TV shows.
>Oscar Wilde has argued that supposed aspects of Japanese culture widely reported in the West take on a life of their own as orientalist clichés long after the phenomena in question have disappeared from the socio-cultural landscape, saying "The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them."
One of my friends is Japanese and doesn't really have a job and lives in Internet Cafes. But it's definitely because he's been Americanized. For example his name is Kenji, but we called him Ken when he was in the US.
Important to note the author does not seem to have ever set foot in Japan (unless that is hidden somewhere outside of his bio), and is adapting this from a book he read
He makes a common mistake when people first visit or spend time in Japan, they are amazed by all the things he talks about it.
On the surface Japan is amazing and can be overwhelmingly impressive, but he needs to spend more than just superficial time there.
(my shortest ever response on HN)