This little gem is in this afternoon’s commuter rag.
Cite
(Sorry, but I thought surely that wasn’t true and looked it up. How strange.)
I’ve previously heard this about Japanese living in France.
Paris Syndrome was first coined by a Japanese psychiatrist to describe Japanese who couldn’t cope with living in France. Many of these were women in their 30s, and discovered how difficult it was to live there.
I would suspect that this is an exagerated version of homesickness, really. Also note that single women live with their parents until they get married (predominately), so I think it’s less a matter of French being rude, and more going from a waaaay-overprotected life to having to fend for yourself in a country where no one is going to give you the time of day.
You’d probably get the same (or worse) sending the girls to New York.
Only that nobody would expect New Yorkers to be polite*
*Based on how they are stereotyped by the media.
Dunnow, Mighty_Girl, most people outside the US never make the “local” distinction… to them, JR and Buffy and the chicks from Charmed are all from the same place.
One of the steps of culture shock is, well, shock and rejection. Maybe these people get it harder than others, but I’ve moved enough times to know there is always a couple days when I’d gladly broil everybody in the “new” place - even if I hadn’t been told about the phenomenon, by now I’m probably some sort of first-hand expert in it.
I don’t know any Japanese who’ve come to live in Spain out of their own volition, but I know a couple dozen who were moved by their employer. They usually go through several phases:
- feeling like shit. They’ve been kicked away from the Homeland, but because the Keiretsu demands it, how could they say no? Everything is strange. People are too loud. Things smell funny. The children come home talking in a language the parents have much more trouble picking up. At this stage, the wife goes to do the shopping in her kimono and wooden flat-platform clogs and wants those bits of veggies that us Spaniards routinely throw away.
- discovering that when veggies are so (relatively) cheap and so (not relatively) good, there’s nothing wrong with chopping away the darker bits. Realizing that there is no way José they’d be able to have so many wheels and so many square meters back home. The wife starts doing the shopping in either Japanese or European gear and wants her veggies “clean”. But they still want the children to “be Japanese”!
The solution? - start praying to every foreparent on both sides of the family for a local promotion, to Barcelona, where there is a Japanese school and they can have the best of both worlds.
And at some point the wife starts doing the shopping in whatever she’s wearing, which can often be a mixture of local and Japanese wear. And well, yes, vacations should be spent going Home, butttt… it would be such a pity to be living in Europe and not see Paris!
Apparently it’s very rare for these expats to go back. Too used to the square meters 
and their children have grown up unbearably rude!
Just a word on Venice…What is your impression? Gondolas and romance.
Actually it is full of fat obnoxious tourists in shorts.
Yep. Venice was the most ‘commercial’ place I visited in Europe.
Funny story: My friend and I were looking for a hostel mentioned in Let’s Go: Europe. We found that streets in Venice end one place and take up again somewhere else. We were very tired and footsore. We finally found the hostel late in the evening. The proprietor asked if we were Americans. We were too tired to lie.
‘I don’t want no more Americans inna my hostel! They’re all crazy! Their children scream all the time! They make love all night, and they howl! Awooooo! Awoooo! If an atom bomb falls on the United States, it would be a good thing!’
I thought, but didn’t say, ‘So can we stay here?’ (At least I think I didn’t say it. I was pretty tired.) We found a couple of girls from Helisinki and asked them if they wanted to share the cost of a hotel room. They declined. We finally found a pensione for 25,000 lire. We were awakened by the church bells. A few years later I’d see a The Young Ones episode where Vyvyan is shouting ‘Shut up, you bastards!’ at church bells. Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt.
Nava - My parents used to rent a house to Japanese executives assigned to live in Tennessee. The last family that lived there hasd been in the US for 5 years, quite a bit longer than Nissan usually allows them to stay. When they left Tokyo, they had one child. When they went back they had three children, a labrador retreiver, a Scottie and a cat. In a flat the size of the living room of the house they rented from my parents. They went from having about 2500 sq ft (three bedrooms) and 1/2 acre of yard to a city flat about 350 sq ft. They were miserable. That’s why Nissan doesn’t like them to stay that long.
StG
And the lovely canals are open sewers.
I saw a turd floating in one.
Somehow I thought this would be about Japanese tourists acting like Paris Hilton. :smack:
And even that might have been more pleasant.