Why does everyone like Japanese culture so much?

so as long time viewers of this channel will know i lived briefly in japan a while ago specifically i lived here in the greater tokyo area from december 5th 2008 to december 5th 2009 meaning we just recently passed the 11 year anniversary of my return amazing so i will just come out and say it the year i spent in japan was probably the most unhappy of my life i don't think i have ever been more consistently miserable and dissatisfied day in day out i even had this big calendar on the inside of my front door and as i left for work every morning i would scratch off the days one at a time like a prisoner obsessively counting down the months and weeks until i got to go home i mean obviously i wasn't an actual prisoner and i could have left whenever i wanted but i had signed a year-long contract with my employer and i really believed in honoring my word but at the same time when i did leave i vowed to never allow myself to look back at the experience with any sort of sentimentality but you know as that period of my life grows more and more distant i find myself increasingly breaking that promise the nostalgia has begun to seep in and i now often fantasize about going back not to live or work but just to experience and see some things again there are neighborhoods i want to revisit things i want to eat stuff i want to buy and i'm telling you about these confused feelings because i think they represent an important example of how it is possible to feel deeply conflicted about a place's culture so culture is of course a broad concept that's difficult to precisely define but in the sense we're talking about it today culture means the characteristic features of everyday existence and this in turn means a mix of things both material and non-material i like to use this admittedly arbitrary list of cultural characteristics as you can see it features both physical things like food and folk art and clothing as well as abstract attitudinal things like manners and child rearing and work schedules other attempts to chart the component parts of culture usually feature a similar mix of material and non-material there's also the so-called tree or iceberg theory of culture that puts the more material things at the top with the non-material things being the part that's below the surface now here in north america we like to think of ourselves as being quite the little experts on culture after all we have a long tradition of welcoming people from all different parts of the world and we love to celebrate the multicultural nature of our big cities but of course the way we measure the presence of cultures in our midst also tends to be heavily biased towards the material side when we talk about a multicultural neighborhood we tend to fixate on like how many foreign restaurants it has or the number of stores selling unique handicrafts or clothes and of course there's nothing we love more than some sort of big exotic festival with a bunch of traditional folk dancers and musicians playing their weird foreign instruments what we would never think or say however is something like oh what a lovely diverse community did you notice all of their different theories about time or oh what a wonderfully multicultural neighborhood on every block you'll come across a different ideal of how subordinates should interact with their social superiors even our anxieties about multiculturalism tend to be very bound up in the material realm this whole idea of cultural appropriation for instance is very much tied to a fear of using physical things like food or clothing in a disrespectful way and of course a lot of people who say that they dislike multiculturalism tend to fixate on physical stuff too like foreign languages on signs or the way people dress or at the most extreme end their race which is of course buddhist physical as it gets anyway knowing that this is our society's dominant view of culture it is perhaps only natural that we would develop a particular fascination with places whose material culture we perceive to be vastly different from our own places like japan [Music] now i was never a uh you know what do they call them a weeaboo or an otaku or whatever although i did grow up with a healthy interest in japanese material culture which was almost certainly a byproduct of how many japanese video games i played as a child but as much as we focus on contemporary weeaboo types westerners being fascinated with japanese entertainment or art or food isn't something new it has been ruined in some form or another for a boot as long as the west has known about japan in the first place there is just something about japan that makes their material culture uniquely captivating in its exoticism and why is that why did this one random country develop all of these strikingly unique traditions of food and fashion and art and architecture and pop culture that hypnotize us so well the standard explanation tends to be isolationism traditional japanese religious beliefs posited their isolated island nation as a uniquely special divine creation and an obsession with guarding perfecting and enforcing their assumed cultural uniqueness has been one of the defining themes of japanese history in the modern age this famously manifested in the japanese government cutting all ties to the outside world for over 200 years and of course we know that japan was unique among many other asian countries and never being colonized by the europeans the 20th century in turn saw japan go through a fascistic phase of extreme nationalism that helped instigate the worst war in the history of mankind but also did less to discredit their ideas of cultural exceptionalism than you might expect even during times when japan has embraced a more open attitude towards the rest of the world like in the late 19th century or immediately after the second world war they've still always been very big into this idea of embracing foreign ideas strictly on their own terms they even have this whole concept of nihon taki or basically making the work of the foreigner compatible with the sensibilities of the japanese my job in japan was being a private english tutor which is a huge source of employment for immigrants in that country this is because another aspect of japan's continued legacy of isolationism is that the country's english skills remain quite poor certainly by the standards of other first world nations isolationism can also create a sort of shelteredness among the japanese people that is often a source of much mockery by the outside world for example there is a famous anecdote about how japanese sporting good stores didn't want to sell foreign-made skis because they believed they wouldn't work on japanese snow but there have always been a lot of isolated or sheltered countries over the years and no one's weeabooing for them so surely there's got to be more to this phenomenon than just that and indeed there is wealth japan has also been one of the world's richest countries for quite a while and certainly a modern superpower in terms of trade and manufacturing in the post-war era especially the strength of japanese capitalism saw the country develop a very large and powerful middle class known for being truly voracious consumers japan is accordingly to put it simply a country that makes and sells a ton of stuff often very high quality stuff designed to appeal to the consumer tastes of a financially comfortable people with a lot of disposable income and given their newfound openness to the west at least at the commercial level this has accordingly also allowed us to become voracious consumers of japanese goodies as well i've been trying to think if there's any other country that comes close to matching japan in this regard and i don't think there is places like russia or india have some similar characteristics to japan but they've never been able to break through into the western imagination in quite the same way the calculated uniqueness of japan's non-western aesthetics combined with their high levels of wealth able to sustain so many cultural industries is really a pretty exceptional mix as you might be able to tell from my shelf behind me i was really into the material side of japanese culture when i was there i really like japanese folk art in particular like the masks and the traditional wooden toys and some of the textile patterns and these super sentimentalized wood block prints and of course i still maintain my childhood fascination with japanese video games and cartoons the cuisine i could take or leave to be honest but there was definitely more than a few candies and snacks and junk food things i miss quite a bit but as you may recall from the beginning of this video i didn't actually like living in japan the point of this story is that ultimately my attraction to some of the material aspects of japanese culture were not enough to compensate for my dislike of some of the more non-material attitudinal aspects of their culture i made friends with some other canadians and americans when i was there and one of our most popular topics of conversation was always how frustrating it was to work for japanese people given the enormous values gap between us one particularly common complaint was that our bosses even the ones who were super fluent in english were all very bad at communication and explaining why things had to be done we resented being made to do stuff that we considered busy work or counterproductive to the best interests of our company or clients in short resentment for what we saw as irrational policies or instructions on this continent we tend to be very individualistic and rationalistic very demanding of explicit communication and very fond of universal principles of good and bad the japanese meanwhile are said to be more collectivistic and more deferential to hierarchy and rules more into non-verbal communication and more concerned with maintaining order and harmony above all else to put an even finer point on it the japanese have a very elaborate and esoteric system of social etiquette and standards of proper behavior that's evolved on their isolated island over the course of centuries some of it is rooted in the country's buddhist heritage some of it is the legacy of survival tactics that develop during the samurai era and obviously some of it is more modern but it all adds up to a social environment that can be incredibly difficult for an outsider to navigate without constantly getting frustrated angry or depressed as i did at my job and in my interactions with japanese people more broadly hence why i couldn't wait to get out of there so do i like japanese culture or not this is something my foreign friends and i debated a lot when we were there and i'm not sure there is a good answer you could easily say i should have put more effort into trying to understand the non-material side of their culture and certainly among immigrants to japan who are trying very hard to assimilate there is often a lot of contempt for foreigners who only obsess over the material side of things but does liking a culture mean you have to like it all or even like one aspect as much or more than the other stuff i mean the world of the material is pretty great creating physical things that are beautiful or fun or delicious or entertaining is a tremendous skill and there's plenty of substance you can learn about a country's history and heritage just by studying the tip of the iceberg japanese material culture is some of the most remarkable in the world and once travel is legalized again i'll be eager to go back and see and buy and eat a ton of stuff but i also know that i will have a lot more fun this time knowing that i will only be there temporarily so i'm curious to know if any of you have ever had a similar experience with a foreign culture were you ever really into the material side of a culture but really struggled with the non-material side or maybe even vice versa where you say like really like the social attitudes but the food or art or whatever did nothing for you let me know and i will see you next week

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 180,375

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Id: 0IidpOumUhU

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020