Also: Do you use drugs?
Haven’t heard that one in a long time, but it was a standard when I first started teaching (mainly from teenagers).
:: Sunspace wanders back to the Dope from a weekend up north, and finds this thread ::
Japan, one of the most intriguing places in the world. 
Okay, some questions…
What’s the deal with the mahogany-coloured hair? I see that on young Asian women here in Toronto all the time. Did it originate in Japan, and has it spread to China and other places, or is that just a local effect here in T.O.? It seems a shame to replace beautiful black hair with boring old brown…
Are Canadians generally perceived as different from United States people?
When I was in Banff, the resort town in the Canadian Rockies, in '94, there was Japanese all over the place in the tourist area. Do the Japanese still go there a lot, or have tourism patterns changed?
I knew someone who had a plastic sculpture of “Santa on the cross” hanging on the wall in his workroom. He said it was from Japan. Does the average Japanese have a good idea of what goes on in the Abrahamic religions? I have read that Christmas, for example, is celebrated in Japan, but that the meaning is completely different, and it’s a romantic occasion. Is that true?
Do you have a Japanese driver’s license? Is that difficult for foreigners to get?
When I came over in '90, I was married to a Japanese, so I came over on a spouse visa, which allowed me to work. After I leaved here about 12 yeares, I obtained permanent residency, so I’m here as long as I want.
We stayed at her parents house for a while, then found someone who would rent to foreigners. It’s not impossible, just more difficult.
I got the whole spectrium of responses from real estate agents when looking for apartments, all the way from a guy who looked up from his paper, saw a white guy and just waved me off without a word; to agents who were apologetic about the situation, and would try to “sell” me to the owners.
I was hired through a connection, but people can get jobs here in most fields.
The trend it Japan in the early 90s and hasn’t let up since. At one point a Japan magazine ran a survey that said 90s of women in their 20s had dyed hair, and the number one reason was “to be different.” OK, I lied about that last half of the quote, but I tell it so frequently over beers that I’m starting to believe it now, myself. AFAIK, it started in Japan and went out from there.
Yes, but thought to be remarkably like US dogs and cats. 
Seriously, most Japanese think that any Westerner is American. This reguarly pisses off Canadians.
The “Santa on the Cross” is an urban legend, and I believe is debunked on Snopes.
The average Japanese is not clear at all about Abrahamic religions. They know there are the three major religions, but kown, few if any details.
You’re correct abut Christmas, with the addition that parents will give children Christmas presents, although not as many as Westerners. Also, families will eat Christman Cakes (and please note the URL includes happy.woman.excite, a notable goal anytime of the year) on Christmas Eve, which, in the past, lead to labeling women who were unmarried by the time they were 25, as Christmas cakes, i.e., unwanted (unsold) leftoevers. Now the average marrage age has increased, then this is not heard of as much.
Christmas eve is a night for lovers, and restaurants and hotels clean up on this night. There’s a rush in late November and early December to find boyfriends or girlfriends.
Yes, and fortunately for me, when I came over, we could get a Japanese license by just showing a US one. They changed that a number of years ago for Americans, and I presume Canadians, but not for British (since they also drive on the “wrong” side of the road. You have to get a regular Japanese license, which is a pain in the ass. My wife is working on hers, and it will take 6 to 8 weeks and will cost about $2500.
This is probably poorly phrased, but why are Japanese people so screwed up? Someone earlier mentioned the porn, and I’ve had a similar experience. Any sort of weird or bizarre porn is almost invariably Japanese. Any clips you see on the internet of weird TV Game shows are Japanese, and of course there is the whole MXC thing. Every sort of weird/creepy invention seems to come out of Japan too. Is this just a perception thing, that is, the stuff we see in America is only the weirdest of the weird, or do you think it’s something to do with Japan?
That was me. I wouldn’t exactly classify some of their taste as bizzare, but I think the simple explanation described this phenomenon best: sex is not a sin.
Now I know, and have seen lots of weird and disgusting shit that has come from Japan, but I think it stems from the idea that sex isn’t taboo to begin with, so some would like to push it even farther than some of us Yanks are comfortable with.
Corrections are welcome. For my money, most of the really scary shit eminates from either Germany or Florida.
I don’t know where it started, but it was a huge fad in Japan for a while. During the (IIRC) late 90’s, it seemed like every woman and almost every man was sporting a chappatsu (‘tea-head’) hairdo, as well as a curly perm. I hated it, and was very disappointed when my girlfriend got her hair colored (“Coloring sounds great, but could you at least pick a different color from everyone else?”). I wasn’t alone, apparently, since around that time I noticed that whenever I spotted a woman with long, straight black hair (which I think looks fantastic), she inevitably had a foreign boyfriend. Now a lot of women still do it, but not as many as before. For a while it was rare to spot someone with natural black hair. I saw a lot of women in Korea had it as well.
Well, they know you didn’t vote for Bush ;). Other than that and the cold weather, I don’t think so.
Don’t know, but I remember a lot of my students in the 90’s saying they were going there on vacation.
Knowledge of what goes on in Christianity is sketchy, but it’s more widespread than Judaism or Islam. Currently, about 0.8% of the population is Christian, although I don’t know if that includes foreign residents (many of whom are S.American and Filipino/a). Knowledge of the divisions within Christianity is even less prevelant, although most people I’ve encountered have heard of Catholicism and Protestantism. What you heard about Christmas is true. It’s basically the reverse of our Christmas/New Year’s celebrations: Christmas is the party holiday when you give presents and can usually expect to get some loving, while New Year’s is a more solemn religious occasion that’s spent at home with family (NY is also the start of week-long holiday, while Christmas is still a school and work day).
I don’t, although I should get one. I have a US license and an international permit, which will see me through traffic stops, although technically the permits are only supposed to be used for the first year. I don’t have a car and haven’t driven here in over ten years, so the matter is academic, but I’m thinking of going ahead and getting one soon anyway. It used to be extremely easy: just show your American license and have it converted to a J-licence (Canadians can still do this). In 2002 or so it changed so that Americans now have to take a written test (available in English) plus a driving test (far more elaborate than anything I did in driver’s ed in America), plus you need to prove you had a licence for three months before coming to Japan. This is still easier than for Japanese citizens, who also need a certificate from an exorbitantly expensive driving school (so expensive that it was cheaper to fly to America and get a licence there, then covert it in Japan. That loophole got closed quickly at the behest of the schools).
When I think of trendy Japanese fashion, I have images of platform shoes, tanned skin and a light shade of eyeshadow and lipstick (i.e., lighter than the skin). I somehow associate this with Osaka girls. Tell me how out of date I am!
Are they like Taiwanese, where they’re convinced that Catholicism and Protestantism are two entirely different religions? And if you try to explain that they’re not, they’ll assert that you’re the one who’s mistaken?
Banff, from what I can tell is still a popular destination. I’ve met a few people whose reaction when hearing I was from Canada was to say they would like to visit Banff and the Rockies one day.
It’s only when I tried to explain Christianity to a class of Japanese schoolgraders that I realised it made no sense whatsoever.
The vast majority of couples get married in pseudo-christian settings, though. “Wedding chapels” are fake churches where people have wedding that sort of, in their view, looks like what they see in the movies.
I have a driver’s license. With a Canadian license, it was very easy to get. The most difficult part was getting the Canadian authorities to send me a written proof that I had been driving in Canada for more than 3 months. Other than that it was essentially just filling paperwork.
About the weird stuff: a few years ago, I was watching a tv show where they talked about various popular tv shows around the world. After they introduced Fear Factor, one of the obligatory celebrity guests made a comment to the effect that this was outrageous and wondered what was happening to America. Another guest replied: “yeah, that was bad, be we used to do crazy stuff too.”
There’s some really hardcore cinema being made in Japan, but guys like Miike are far more famous abroad than they are in Japan. Sure, there’s tentacle porn being made here, but it’s also being bought abroad.
Some of the stuff that gets shown as weird was originally intended to be weird. That a bit like showing Monty Python’s fish dance and saying “what’s up with these crazy Brits?” … Hmmm… Come to think about it, what is up with those crazy Brits?
The extreme forms of this type of fashion, ganguro, have gone out of style but the basics remain. It’s just that the makeup isn’t quite so dark, the platforms not quite so tall, and the hair not so quite peroxyde.
Heh, you oughta hear what they say about America ;).
To a large extent, it’s selection bias: the stuff that gets noticed is the really weird shit. TV here has actually toned down quite a bit in the last 10 years: nudity is rare (but not non-existent) and brutality toward random strangers is pretty much gone (you can do so much more to apprentice actors and they’ll never complain!). Takeshi’s Castle, for example, aired in japan about 15-20 years ago; the modern incarnation (broadcast in America as Ninja Academy, or something like that) is still unusual but much less geared toward violence or humiliation. When I saw it in the States, I noticed the English commentary is completely different from the Japanese. The E-commentary was sarcastic comedy, while the J-commentary played it straight as a fun sports event.
I don’t about creepy inventions, I think the experimental robots are all pretty cool.
Other than that, I think the main reason is things that are taboo in the west, aren’t taboo here, and vice-versa.
I haven’t encountered that. Granted, since I’m usually wearing a black robe covered in crosses when the subject comes up (see jovan’s comment about weddings and fake churches), they may be more inclined to take my word for it.
I don’t get arguements either, but most of the time I’m fielding questions about religion is over beers.
I notice that Sublight let this one slide by…
Hey, at least the beard is real.
post #51
The commonly given excuse is that the side of the road is different, so Americans have to jump through hoops. It’s a bullshit excuse that takes less time and effort than explaining the real, more embarrassing situation; pretty much textbook tatemae. It’s purely a diplomatic matter as there’s no practical reason for the laws in place. You can see in the link above that practically the only European country that drives on the left is the UK.
The real issue is that Japan required the US to give information on safety and driving standards in order to get a reciprocal agreement in place like the ones they have with most European countries and Canada. The Federal government provided aggregate information, which the transportation bureau said wasn’t good enough. They wanted state-level information. So, until each and every one of the 50 states [del]sucks off the guys at the bureau[/del] fills out the required [del]incredibly invasive body-cavity search[/del] detailed forms, Americans will be unable to simply transfer their licenses over. Details at the US Embassy website.
I did my circus act and passed on the first attempt, probably because I didn’t get rattled even when I didn’t remember where in the course I was supposed to go next and needed to ask for the next step, drove safely and smoothly on an unfamiliar stick-shift with the loosest clutch I’ve ever had to deal with, and kept up my end of the conversation in Japanese while the instructor nattered on rapid-fire about nothing in particular, injecting instructions into the stream without pausing. The process is annoying, and difficult, but smoothly organized. If you don’t pass the road test, it’s truly a pain in the ass because it’ll take a full morning each time to try again, and you can only do it on certain days, but they do have things streamlined about as well as they can. The DMV in most US states could probably learn something from them.
About the bizarre sex, violence, and humiliation in Japanese porn, my theories about it are that, like others mentioned, there isn’t as much taboo attached to sex itself. As far as I know, they don’t make as much of a deal about oral sex as most Western countries do either. (BTW, best BJ I’ve ever had was from a Japanese girl. Good gods, was she a dedicated worker ) Anal sex also doesn’t seem to be a big transgressive thing, but it doesn’t seem to be very common either. In my experience, Japanese women run the gamut from being very conservative to total sluts in bed. In other words, they’re just like women of other cultural backgrounds.
People have argued that the censorship laws led to the now-famous bukkake shots as a way to show more action when they can’t legally show penetration. Doubtless some of the other extremes come from that. The inclusion of slime, spitting, playing with ejaculate, and other stuff that’s kind of filthy and gross is probably in part because those things are transgressive of cultural ideals, which are in turn influenced by Shinto concepts of cleanliness and purity.
I’m not sure where the fetishization of outfits comes from, but it might be indirectly from cultural reinforcement not to divide attention and to concentrate assiduously on one particular thing. I swear sometimes that Japanese are encouraged in OCD-like behaviors. I’ve got no guess where animal participation like eel-stuffing and other out-there stuff like that comes from.
The violence I’ve seen in porn, coupled with real-life behavior, indicates to me that Japanese men are fairly insecure about sexuality. No surprise there. There are still sex-separated schools, and social divisions between the genders are actively encouraged and exaggerated. Social roles are explicitly taught in school and enforced even among adults; men should do this, and women should do that. This creates a situation where a lot of men have difficulty communicating with and relating to women.
They don’t think they can handle things socially, so they fantasize about other ways to get what they want: violence. Something that slightly ameliorates the nastiness of this is the frequent inclusion of concern for the woman’s pleasure in the rape fantasies. They don’t just want to take her by force, they want her to be converted into a willing subject. Of course, that’s not always the case. There’s probably no shortage of porn out there with struggling, crying girls begging them to stop. While most of it is undoubtedly staged, there is always the chance that some of it is real, or a situation where the girl got in over her head. Oogy thing to think about.
I’ve only been to a love hotel a couple of times. When I went there a couple of years ago with my girlfriend (now wife) she was curious about porn, since she hadn’t really watched any. Three channels of porn, and there was some kind of rape on at least one pretty much constantly. She flipped back and forth a few times, didn’t find anything she liked, and turned it off. Checking back a couple of times showed that there wasn’t much of anything that would appeal to her, though she did stay tuned for part of an outdoor sex-scene that was fun instead of mean. That incident showed me that rape doesn’t just pop up in internet porn, but is also part of stuff that’s mainstream enough to show in love hotels.
On preview:
Nope, that’s correct. I mentioned this before in the thread about atheist weddings. Approximately 1% of Japanese are Christian, but a Western-style wedding complete with crosses, a preacher of some sort, and a pseudo-chapel as a setting are very popular. In fact, almost no one gets a traditional Shinto wedding anymore because it’s seen as old-fashioned, as well as being extremely expensive and treating the couple as a side issue to the more important business of creating an alliance between two families. (I’ve been approached to be a “minister” as a paying gig on weekends. I don’t live in the Tokyo area, or I might have been more tempted. Two– to three–hundred bucks for an hour or so of reading from a script and playacting is nothing to sneeze at.)
The agency I work with operates pretty much all over the country, so even if you live far from any of the big cities, you might be close enough to some of hotels and wedding halls that they’d be thrilled to have you as the minister for just those places so they can save on transportation (much cheaper than somebody traveling all the way from Tokyo and back. I work pretty close to Tokyo now, but back when I started I covered halls from Shizuoka to Gunma to Sendai). The money isn’t as good as working directly for the halls, though. Only 13,000-15,000 a pop.
Crap, so much for my sly attempt at humour. That’ll teach me not to read page two before commenting on your lack of comment.
Thanks, TokyoPlayer!
Well, all I know is that the thing was real, a blow-moulded representation of a cartoon Santa spread out on a cross. I saw it with my own eyes many times, but I did not get to touch or examine it. It could have been made in Tuktoyaktuk for all I know, but its owner said it was from Japan.
Well, from my perspective as a Neo-Pagan, the Abrahamic religions look more similar than different.
I used to read a lot of Pagan magazines, and one time there was an entire issue of one of them devoted to Japan: “a modern Pagan country”. Of course there was no representation that Japanese religion was in any way connected or allied with North American Neo-Paganism; it was just that Shinto was native to Japan, arising out of its own landscapes and local beliefs, and that Buddhism had been so transformed as to be thoroughly Japanised.
That’s one reason I’d like to go to Japan: to see a country not under the cultural thumb of one of the Abrahamic religions. Kind of like going to Cuba to see a country not under the thumb of the mega-corporations.
I was going to ask about the marriage age thing; 25 as a desired marriage age seems really young to me, and I’m a bit relived that it’s not that severe in reality.
:: makes note on when to visit Japan ::
Yike! Is that just the cost of courses, or insurance, or humongous Ministry of Transport licensing fees, or what?
I’ll get an occasional call from Japan. Do people follow the financial markets as they do in the United States? I’ll often watch the Asian markets the night before I go to work.