Japanese Restaurant VS Foreign Tourists: Why You're Not Going In

so there's a place in Tokyo that I want to take you for dinner place where the chicken is grilled so slowly meticulously by hand it practically melts like butter in your mouth a place where the Edam are so crisp and refreshing they taste like they've just been plucked from a medows of c a place where the fresh fish is so delicately sliced it glistens like stars in the night sky a place where oh wait never mind you can't can't go in there uh H well look don't worry I do know a good place around the back of the Senoia Temple I think it's called Burger King or something let's go let's go there instead come on oh [ __ ] so recently a Tokyo restaurant enjoyed some viral success online after declaring only Japanese speakers can enter obviously a subtle difference from outright saying Japanese only but call me Mr cynical but it does seem like the owners found an ingenious loophole to basically rolling out most foreign customers now I've always said if you're moving to Japan for God's sake learn the language you'll find it deeply rewarding and also as a matter of courtesy I think it's only right you should learn the language of the country you're moving to but to come here on holiday for a couple of weeks I think it's a bit too much to expect foreign tourists to master the world's most complicated language for a few days stumbling around Tokyo as a tourist in Japan you pretty much need to know only five key phrases to get around again as a matter of courtesy more than anything and those phrases are saw the open up my eyes saw the life isand without what I love about this rule is it even rules out people who have been studying Japanese for like 3 to 6 months we take a look at the menu you need to know three writing systems to get around this as well as complicated vocabulary involving fish that's not something you're going to learn over a casual weekend now you might be thinking well I'm smart I've got Google translate I'll take a photo of the menu and translate it over into English and actually it can work pretty damn well up until you find an indecipherable handwritten menu you know I've walked into restaurants with handwritten menus so complicated even the finest Japanese Scholars of the written word would struggle to understand what the [ __ ] is going on still of course there's two sides to every argument and in this case a lot of local restaurants in Tokyo are family-owned businesses riant on regular customers usually locals repeat customers are the lifeblood of a small business so it's understandable baps that restaurants want to prioritize locals and the owner of this restaurant argued that foreign customers weren't spending as much money as his regulars as well but before we crack out the violin imagine coming to Japan on holiday and being berated just for walking into the wrong restaurant as happened when a couple walked in and were made to feel guilty for not being able to speak Japanese and told to bring an interpreter in a completely over-the-top and unkind manner he also likes to vent his frustration at Japanese customers as well if they don't like is cooking God forbid as we can see in these very happy upbeat Google restaurant reviews cheap and fast are the best but unfortunately the taste is not good I hope you try a little harder on the taste you are a stupid tongue it's not that the taste isn't good but cheap and fast food is bad so you should change your stupidity then go to a restaurant that's expensive and delicious I'll say it again let's go to a restaurant [ __ ] up that serves expensive and delicious food a stupid tongue the worst kind of tongue that there is it wasn't tasty this is a restaurant that seems to be established with regular customers price per person 2,000 to 3,000 yet 49 likes I'm glad I was able to write about the fantasies of the garbage scum of fantasies of the garbage scum I'm glad I was able to write about the fantasies of the garbage scum of a human who hasn't visited the store fantasies of the garbage Sky I love it it's the tolken Masterpiece I never knew I needed and the final and perhaps most scathing review of all simply says shopkeeper with a Paleolithic head food one service one atmosphere one you've got to admit Japanese reviewers are pretty damn Savage anyway what if you desperately want to enter this prestigious restaurant and be served by a shopkeeper with a Paleolithic head how much Japanese would you need to know how long would it take and where the hell would you even start so in this video I want to go over the three main hurdles you'll face when studying Japanese and some potential strategies forgetting around it the rewards of studying Japanese are great not only do you get to enter this restaurant but you get to communicate with the 120 million people gain a whole new way of thinking and perhaps above all you can watch Shogun without subtitles oh I need my ship back I want to go to Wales and before we get to the Japanese I have to say this sort of thing is incredibly rare you know I don't want folks thinking that this is the norm because in 12 years of living here I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've walked into a restaurant and been made to sort of feel uncomfortable for not being Japanese the topics are especially preent right now as over tourism is a very popular theme in the media a couple of months ago I discussed how Kyoto's gisha District of guon unfortunately decided to ban tourists from certain streets to protect neighborhoods after a few incidents a sad but necessary move to protect that historic quarter of Kyoto and the gisha who still live and work there since then though every week There's been an onslaught of new stories about over tourism about this topic like a few weeks ago during golden week one of the busiest weeks of the Year this laughable Ann news report did the rounds showcasing the horrors of an overflowing bin than you CH oh my God how will Japan recover from this I mean the other day I was walking through a Saka at night doing phography probably about 10: p.m. and I watched a group of very drunken 20-year-old Japanese guys walking towards me screaming shouting slamming half drunk cans of strong zero into the pavement terrorizing pedestrians and I thought gosh if onlyn news were here to cover this incident with their painstakingly objective news coverage if a strong zero can falls in the forest and there's not a Japanese TV crew to film it can we still blame the mess on foreign tourists yes yes we can anyway Kyoto itself benefits massively from tourism in 2018 alone it made $8.7 billion and they would do well to invest the money in handling the very tourists they're profiting from by I don't know buying another bin should we buy another bin for 8.7 billion put another bin out on the busy week another bin on the busy week no all right still Kyoto is so last week anyway thanks to Tik Tok there's a far more t anzing tourist hotspot doing the rounds right now tourists have been flocking to a foot bridge and a Lawson at the base of Mount Fuji after some Tik tocks went viral showcasing the view of Mount Fuji majestically floating in the sky of a lost with swarms of tourists descending upon the streets to get the shot dashing across traffic and causing all around Mayhem for the locals now it might just be me right but I don't so much see a floating Mount Fuji over Lawson as Mount Fuji being [ __ ] blocked by Lawson this is a [ __ ] angle I don't understand they say beaut is in the eye of the beholder but this is just bollocks I don't get it I don't understand who needs the iconic chur Pagoda when you can have a concrete foot Bridge it wouldn't be a trip to Japan without it and you have to wonder what kind of wacky original brilliant angles that we'll find going viral on Tik Tok next you haven't seen Himi Castle until you've glimpsed it from the family Mark car par you simply haven't experienced the king kakaji golden Pavilion until you've witnessed it sandwiched between between the Coca-Cola vending machines at dawn you know it's kushima Shrine doesn't look the same as when it's obstructed by the daily amazaki at Sunset no more fun for anyone they're going to build a wall 8 ft tall obstructing this must see view forever necessary or radical you decide but this issue will be resolved forever more well that is until everyone discovers the family Mar just around the corner with the exact same view oh God here we go again now you might be thinking wait a minute aren't you the same guy that claimed you could speak Japanese fluently in 6 months in that video all those years ago back when you looked good well I maintain it can still be done I think you can learn to speak Japanese fluently in half a year and have a good conversation however what you can't do viewers is read my decadent menu and all the Kani characters that come with it three writing systems 2,200 characters an undertaking so difficult it takes the average Japanese student 12 years of formal education to master again you might be thinking nonsense I can learn kanji characters look at this one it means tree and it sort of looks like a tree for God's sake of course I can remember that and this one means fire and it sort of looks like a bonfire easy all too easy absolutely and tell me what does this one mean uh well that one means um well I going to go home now [ __ ] off unfortunately there's no real shortcut to this even if you have the world's greatest memory you can't break the laws of phys physics you need all the time you can get to pack these thousands of characters into your head now thankfully learning kanji is bloody good fun and you can feel the benefit pretty damn fast when you start to look at characters and know what they mean and I've met people who've been able to learn how to write all 2,200 characters in 18 to 24 months hell it took me about a year to learn a thousand but make no mistake to get this done takes years and once you've learned them you need to practice them revise them over and over again so you don't forget how to write them if you do want to learn the kanji characters get yourself this book right here which teaches you some clever tricks to make sense of the squiggly lines and how to write them and then combine that with a spaced repetition system like Hy essentially a digital flashcard system that forces you to constantly recollect what you've just learned so you don't forget hours and days after back when I first moved here a lot of people I knew were doing language hacking which sounds a lot cooler than it is but essentially finding these ways and tips to get around what seems like an insurmountable task and the people I know who succeeded in learning how to write all 2,200 characters and commit them to Memory combined that b with this system and we're able to shove all the characters into their head learning thousands of words is one thing but being able to fluently communicate with the entire sentence structure is essentially reversed and flipped on its head that will break your brain as I discovered quick example to say uh the person speaking with the teacher is my friend in Japanese you'd say which literally translated means the teacher with speaking person my friend is essentially it's just Yoda they basically stole the Japanese speech pattern and translate it into English literally but to be able to speak like this naturally there's no real shortcut you have to keep practicing over and over speaking aloud with people kind of rewiring your brain almost which takes weeks or months to feel natural shuffling all that around in your head is quite the challenge now luckily there are some useful tips number one when you're speaking Japanese with friends and whatnot like don't ever switch back to your native tongue don't switch back when you fail to remember a word naturally it's not uncommon for a beginner to start speaking hit mids sentence then realize they don't know the word screw it all up and then revert back to their native tongue don't do that think about what we do in English mid-sentence when we're trying to think of something we kind of go some people worse than others a bad habit but learn the Japanese for that um uh and of course early on when you don't know most of the Japanese vocabulary there's going to be loads of words you don't know rather than switching back to English or fumbling for your dictionary when talking speaking with a Japanese friend use explanatory phrases to try and get around it for example if you don't know the word CH means car park be like oh kurum yeah okay well if you don't know the word for scissors you could be like like that's the way to do it right don't keep going back to native tongue don't get your phone out just keep going plowing ahead and using ways around it like that the longer you stay in Japanese the more you think in Japanese and the quicker you kind of learn and master the language obviously if you're in Japan you have a major advantage as you can talk to people around you and you're immersed in it 24/7 but even if you're not here you can still sit in a quiet room and practice the phrases aloud and there's so many good resources these days to help you get the job done like these books right here which I recommend each and every one of them especially this one but I've saved the biggest reason you'll fail till last and it's the reason most people I know fail it's the reason I kind of failed originally I had all sorts of reasons for three like uh politeness the complicated politeness the cultural nuances but actually it's a lot simpler than that so the best way to explain why mastering Japanese is so damn difficult is with this unspeakably crap hand dra sorry I this is all I can do learning Japanese is not so much climbing a mountain as an entire bloody mountain range and it starts with Mount Fiji a steep nightmarish incline where the knowledge comes thick and fast but so does the Relentless brutality of the clim itself but it's in that period that you'll learn the most commonly used words in Kani characters as well as potentially being completely overwhelmed by it all and after a year if you're still committed and you keep on going you can make it over Mount Fuji and begin the long arous climb up Mount Everest where the challeng is massive but a lot more gradual you've learned the basics you can sort of communicate and it gets a lot easier to wedge all the vocab ulary and all the characters into your head it just takes lots and lots of time most folks will fail around here at the start of Mount Fuji and the reason you fail is simple motivation when you discover how much you have to learn to get over this first Mountain how much time you have to commit to study when that Dawns on most people I find they sort of lose steam quite quickly in their studies I actually started learning Japanese about 2 years before I came here as a teacher I took like classes on the side of my degree and I had no motivation because I didn't know if I had a job here waiting for me i' never thought i' would actually end up in Japan it wasn't until I got here and ended up in a school surrounded by students and teachers and colleagues that I couldn't communicate with that I started to actually go oh [ __ ] I really want to know Japanese now it was only then that I really had that powerful motivation to learn bit of a flawed strategy like oh yeah I'll learn how to swim after I've dived into the sea but I know I'm not alone in that I know I'm not alone and being a bit of an idiot and I think unless you've got a powerful motivator like living in Japan working Japan or knowing for 100% sure that you're going to end up in Japan then I just don't think you'll have the motivation to see this through and to keep going I also set myself constant challenges to try and keep pushing me for example I did a jlpt language test uh I did a speech contest I had these big silly goals that kept me going and kept pushing me but even when you do get here many people discover that they can get by on 3 to 6 months of Japanese and sort of do what they need to do in everyday life statistically you're here and you'll always be here and there's nothing wrong wrong with that you only live once and the most important thing we have is time and how you choose to use your time and unless you plan to live or work in Japan or you just want to watch all the anime and manga without subtitles then this is a massive time investment that might not be a good idea after 3 years I switched out my intensive studies of Japanese and switched it to YouTube and filmmaker stuff because that was what I was passionate about and that's what I wanted to do and sometimes I regret not going further than I did but I'm proud that I got over the Fuji bit and I'm glad got halfway up Everest because I never thought I'd be able to speak comprehend or communicate in another language at all let alone Japanese I was you know as an 18-year-old I would never have imagined that that was going to happen so that's pretty [ __ ] cool to me anyway but if you find your motivation to do something even the most seemingly impossible task becomes doable and in the case of learning Japanese whether it's moving to Japan doing a jpt language test or a speech contest just keep finding ways to challenge yourself and you will stay motivated in the long term and of course course if you do keep going if you do become fluent you can set fo in this restaurant for that alone it's completely worthwhile Endeavor of [Music] course I need my ship back I want to go to Wales

Channel: Abroad in Japan

Views: 995,137

Keywords: japan, japanese, learning japanese, abroad in japan

Id: 4Nz22FGtdXA

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024