Appreciate the nuance of your description/explanation of culture shock. I have definitely seen the clips from interviews of tourist saying the lack of trash cans was their biggest culture shock from visiting Japan.
As for the trash cans, they tried that a bit. But the high-density means they instantly fill up, attract flies/bugs/rats, and requires an army of workers and equipment to empty them. While in a crowded city environment. They chose the most sensible approach, require people to take their trash home. No expense or odor. No tax money spent. Plus it fosters less consumption and more preparedness.
I wish I could 'thumb up' this video more that once! Truly a great video! Your comments about culture shock sort of remind me of the steps of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In this case, it is dealing with the transition from one's old 'normal' to one's new 'normal'. The greater the difference between one's old 'normal' and one's new 'normal', the more difficult this 'grieving' (or coping) process can be. I emphasize 'can be', because I think that the more flexible, resilient, positive, and outgoing an individual is, the better the transition can be endured by them. Hope this makes sense.
Spot on content. I think my wife, who is Japanese and lived in the US for 20 years, experienced more "culture shock" than me when we moved to Japan. I loved the "honeymoon" phase, never really had a "frustration" phase other than the language barrier and have experienced only a mild "adjustment" phase. It's all a great adventure.
As someone who wants to be a foreign resident this is a really interesting topic. I think a lot of foreigners see things like reliable public transport and vending machines, and call them "culture shock" because they don't want to call themselves out for being jealous!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this interesting topic. It has made me think back to my first year in Japan in the eighties when I moved there with my Japanese husband and our first child. Although it’s a bit foggy now due to the time that has passed, I do remember struggling a bit after the honeymoon phase as my Japanese was still very basic then and I felt quite lonely as I still hadn’t made my own friends yet. I remember what helped me to move on from that phase was my husband telling me that his co-worker who was married to a foreign guy had told him that her husband puts a 100 yen coin into a jar every time he complains about something in Japan! Although I never did this myself, it did make me reflect on how I may be thinking/acting. This was the turning point for me to consciously be looking for the positives in everything around me. It definitely worked and now my love for Japan is deep and lifelong! Thanks again for sharing!!
I had 2 moments of big culture shock in Japan I think. One when I was with a bunch of online Japanese friends and I felt very lonely because I was the only one not really understanding the conversation (language barrier / culture references missing) and I thought "what did I work so hard for up until now that I still don't understand anything?" The second part was when I was struggling really hard with school (language barriers and things) and it had been a few months, and then as a legally blind person I got really angry with myself with how hard I was struggling with what should be the stupidest of all things: flushing toilets in public restroom. I swear I kept wasting time finding the flush button and at some point it got really frustrating. Now I'm fine though. So yeah, when people say "TRAINS ALWAYS ON TIME CULTURE SHOCK" all I can think of is "Get out of here!" Haha. Thanks for making this video ＾＾
Glad you found the video interesting. And yes - the moments I have felt the most down are when I had some sort of breakdown due to language barrier.
День назад+3
When I went back to the States for vacation couple of years ago I had reverse feelings, I felt things had changed and felt odd even though it was my home country.
@ yeah, but not as dramatic as he was saying culture shock is or as negative. But, I agree with him that culture shock is something negative, cause being surprised by amount of vending machines or washlets isn’t a culture shock to me either. That’s why I said reverse feelings cause of the changes I saw/felt.
I was a high school exchange student. The thing that depressed me the most after the honeymoon phase, was when I was talking with my language tutor in English and their facial expressions showed they didn’t understand my emotional language. Yet they said they knew what I was saying. It drove me mad 😅
@@Exjapter absolutely, and i went in the 90's, so youtube, tiktok... hell even the internet was not widely available to me. it was quite the challenge 🤕
I feel the age of influencers, or just the internet in general, has started shifting the meanings of terms by over using them to loosely adjacent circumstances. But this is the way of things. Not the first time a word or phrase has started meaning something else. Anyhoo, I absolutely appreciate this correction, though I do think even honeymooners can experience legit culture shock if they encounter something enough, and it breaks them down. I feel like I have witnessed it, maybe even felt it a little myself during my last trip. That extreme fatigue of not wanting to figure out how to navigate a simple situation like ordering food in a restaurant. Even if they have pictures or an English menu, you still feel like you're being a burden. We may have insisted on only restaurants with the self-ordering kiosks a couple times because we just didn't want to deal with it. We may have just been too exhausted, too. 🤷♀️
That's a really good point, and I know and applaud you for being so conscientious. (A lot of tourists seem to rumble around not caring how they might be inconveniencing others). However, I think being aware of it is enough - and realize that the Japanese really are pretty patient. So (when) you come again, I don't think you need to be bothered by it!
Happy New Year, Paul! Thanks for the defense of the (current) meaning of culture shock. While I am not an absolutist on linguistic usage, meaning, and drift, I do think it is right to adhere to standards of meaning that are consistent and keep them stable. Linguists (e.g., "A Way with Words" podcast and John McWhorter of NYU [and who I otherwise tremendously respect]) often cite meaning/definition drift and sometimes flipping to mean the opposite. I haven't yet seen any papers on how that tension plays out, what kinds of words and phrases are more prone to change (if there are identifiable types), and what kinds of social phenomena promote or inhibit meaning change. There have been some studies of Mancunian dialect, but no one has gotten a grasp on the larger sociological picture. You pointing this out, though, is more than just linguistic--it has bearing, as your rightly noted, on mental hygiene which is something to which we should all be sensitive. Thanks for discussing this topic.
I am not a prescriptivist by any means and generally embrace language change and variation. That said, in this instance I worry about the person who might be experiencing 'real' culture shock, and finding only trivial stuff online when searching for help, and that would be really unfortunate.
My chronic health problems, are the main reasons I could not live in Japan. I've listened to another RUclipsr "chase the traveler". He talks about the frustration some people deal with seeing Japanese doctors.
I watch Chase from time to time if the topic interests me. Honestly I am impressed how he keeps everything in one take. I flub my words often enough I have to hit the editing. 😂 There are indeed areas where Japan is behind in medical care. I am sorry to hear it would be tough for you to give Japan a go.
@@Exjapter I wish I could try it out. Lower cost of living, not having to worry about people stealing, are the pros that come to mind. You ever thought about collabing with chase for a video?
Im hopeing in the next year ill be able to refer back to this vid and go 'Ahhhh, thats where im at, its all good, its normal to be like this ' another very helpful insight 😊
Yeah, I needed to put that in there because I wouldn't want anyone to take what I was saying as "culture shock is always trivial". Although in that case it probably isn't culture shock itself, just the culture shock is making the depression worse.
Happy New Year to you and your Family. Another great video Paul. Thank you! So much to unpack!! I think culture shock is a matter of education, expectation and resilience. If you are the sort of person who has travelled a bit and if farily resilient, with an expection only upon yourself then you are less likely to be shocked by things excpet perhaps for some of the more extereme settings. I have only ever been a tourist in Japan and I have NEVER experienced culture shock. What I have experienced is just edless fascination with everything I see and hear and eat...this is what keeps me coming back. A lot of people have tried to convince me that this is all "honeymoon", but I'm not convinced. The feeling of fascination for me is a lot deeper and like you, I dont think I would ever cease in that fascination if I lived there for a very long time.
The key is not to let the problems of mundane every day life bog you down. Whether you actually get cultute shock or not, maintaining the honeymoon feeling is not sustainable.
Fantastic video as always Paul and happy new years to you and the fam! As someone who has been living in japan for about 3 months now (and did a lot of research prior) I definitely feel similarly about the content online regarding this country being sensationalized or misrepresented so your video has helped me for sure in processing these different phases. Right now I am at a sort of crossroads trying to decide what I should do here in terms of finding a job; since my nihongo is very basic still I feel relegated to the english teacher route however I am unsure if thats what I want to do long term but don't know what other options I have realistically other than maybe a recruiter or some sort of sales for a language school. I'd appreciate any insight you may have as all I see online is to work at a ski resort lol... thanks and keep up the quality content this year :D
Well, along the ski resort lines pretty much anywhere there are lots of foreign tourists it should be possible to find work in the service industry. It may not be fun but I bet your Japanese ability would skyrocket!
Since you were walking around Zushi, is that where you live? Because I DON’T know Zushi like the back of my hand even though the very first full-time job I had in the private sector was in sales with a Japanese trading company that had its head office about a football field away from tiny Zushi Station which hardly had any buildings around it or up and down the street back then-----and which was also a 3-hour train ride and/or car ride from where I lived. As a lover of the beach, decades later I was surprised to find out that Zushi is next to the ocean with beaches which I didn’t know back then. As far as culture shock goes, I guess I’d be culturally shocked if I went to a Zushi beach in the summer nowadays and saw a bunch of gaijins from the Navy base all sporting arm, leg and body tattoos? And that’s because in my day, Navy tattoos were far and few between and mainly limited to green-colored anchors on the forearms like Popeye.
You are 100% right about the beach being overrun by navy personel in the summertime. We used to live in Hayama, and I still love that area. There are some shops I still visit, and some friends there, so when I go I sometimes film.
@@Exjapter Hayama & Zushi are the same? Meaning Zushi is part of Hayama or vice versa? The reason I recognized Zushi is not because I recognized Zushi. Rather it's because I saw the 046-8 telephone number on the motorcycle shop which used to be 0468 which were the first 4 numbers for the telephone number at my company.
Being extremely independent, I found having to ask for help from a Japanese native, either from work or a friend, to read and translate documents written in Kanji. Also, it sucks at Christmas to see everyone in my home country, Australia, enjoying family time, and you're doing nothing. So I planned Christmas dinners with other friends after the first year.
The holidays can be the roughest, and a lot of 'fresh out of college' types have been in the country exactly 3 or 4 months at that point - easy to hit a feeling of lowness.
the ultimate real shock that anyone not of East-Asian ethnic background is bound to experience is that for all practical purposes you one will always remain a "foreigner" - even if you get a Japanese passport: like, every time you would pass a group of people someone would mutter "ah, gaikokujin da"... obviously, if one can't bear such psychological burden, then Japan is certainly not for them long term two small notes: 1. Sakurako or any other Japanese company would not send their merch "all over the world" (there are certain countries which you cannot send to from Japan) 2. Tokushima must be referring to Tokushima prefecture proper (not a place in Kagoshima)
I wouldn't call it culture shock exactly, but I think my one big shock moment was when applying for a dependent visa and being denied because there was too much money in my bank account. Like what does that have to do with being the spouse of someone with residency? They demanded I have at least that much money in my account when I first came over as a student, now I'm not allowed to have it?
They said that it meant I would not be financially dependent on my spouse, so there was no requirement to live with them, I would be capableof surviving on my own in my home country. After going back to the US and reapplying through the embassy there, I was approved without any issue. I don't think it was any rule, I think that one agent thought it seemed off and decided it was safer to deny the visa instead of looking into it or asking a superior.
Great topic. Just finished my first twelve months in Japan after moving at short notice after my wife got an English speaking position in Japan .It had not been a long term goal to move to Japan so we arrived with no Nihongo and only a limited knowledge of Japanese culture.I have certainly gone through those phases to various degrees .Luckily my wifes employer helped greatly and she has some fantastic colleagues with near native english. Learning the language to a basic level is a major goal but learning the culture is important as you said . Knowing why a lot of these so called culture shocks exist makes it easier to assimilate them .If you are from a modern country for instance a European country most of these so called culture shocks are normal there too. Trains that run on time , no tipping , good service, public health to a decent standard lack of rubbish bins in public places due terror threats and decent manners .It's just taken up a notch in Japan . Videos like yours and the Japanese Nihongo learning channels which also cover culture are a great help. It is amazing how stressful it can be just to get something as simple as getting your cars tyres swapped to winter tyres even with google translate . We had a paperwork issue recently and even with two Japanese helping us at city hall it was a major pain. As you mentioned having something to look forward to like exploring different parts of Japan certainly helps as does doing Nihongo classes where you are meeting other expats going through the same things .looking forward to improving my language so that I can do things here that require making connections with Nihonjin who are not proficient in English although its definitely a hard challenge in my mid 50s as retaining that much new learning is hard. The closest things I have had to actual culture shock was finding out just how badly Japan suffered after its it's economic golden era . Thanks for another interesting discussion.
Thanks for the detailed comment. Your final sentence is something I have felt as well - even places that are still alive with tourists have a sense of 'decay' where places haven't been updated or reformed since the 70s or 80s. There is a charm, but a sad charm about it.
@Exjapter just back from a week in Okinawa over new years and it is an awesome place to visit but the incredible devastation from WW2 is evident in the almost compete lack of timber structures of all sorts you see elsewhere in Japan. Lots of very tired looking concrete buildings away from the Tourist areas although some are very imaginative in their forms. I am lucky to be living near Hiroshima and it's still a relatively vibrant region with few abandoned buildings and new builds of houses near us.
As someone who has visited Japan a bunch of times and a lot of other countries too, I can't remember ever having culture shock in Japan. Maybe there's something I've forgotten. I can't remember it in other countries either but it's a bit more likely I have had it somewhere that's not springing to mind right now. (I've never stayed more than 3 months at a stretch in Japan and never stayed more than 6 months at a stretch in any other foreign country though.) Now I do have more "WTF moments" in Japan than anywhere else in the world except China, but that's something different.
I think culture shock really only happens when you are questioning your decision of living in a foreign country, so it's pretty unlikely to happen when you are just visiting.
@@Exjapter Having thought about it more, I have had culture shock in India where I was somewhere random where almost all of the locals were too poor to wear shoes and then parked right there randomly was a brand new Rolls Royce that had all of the chrome bits gold plated. Coming close to culture shock but not quite would be all the houses with tons of razor wire and shops with guards with assault rifles and banks with guards with machine guns in Central America. Beggars with missing limbs pushing themselves along on skateboards on my first visit to Vietnam in '99 was also a culture shock. (Vietnam has come a long way since!)
People are just ignorant. I LOVE the vending machines, especially the ones with ice cream!
День назад+1
Haha, not that I disagree, but you make culture shock sound like the five steps of grief. Step one culture shock, step two adaptation step three acceptance, etc…
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Appreciate the nuance of your description/explanation of culture shock. I have definitely seen the clips from interviews of tourist saying the lack of trash cans was their biggest culture shock from visiting Japan.
As for the trash cans, they tried that a bit. But the high-density means they instantly fill up, attract flies/bugs/rats, and requires an army of workers and equipment to empty them. While in a crowded city environment. They chose the most sensible approach, require people to take their trash home. No expense or odor. No tax money spent. Plus it fosters less consumption and more preparedness.
The fluff seems to outnumber the helpful content, for sure.
This is something that hits me much stronger in Taiwan than in Japan or anywhere else. But it doesn't shock me.
😂😂😂😂
I wish I could 'thumb up' this video more that once! Truly a great video!
Your comments about culture shock sort of remind me of the steps of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In this case, it is dealing with the transition from one's old 'normal' to one's new 'normal'. The greater the difference between one's old 'normal' and one's new 'normal', the more difficult this 'grieving' (or coping) process can be. I emphasize 'can be', because I think that the more flexible, resilient, positive, and outgoing an individual is, the better the transition can be endured by them. Hope this makes sense.
Old normal transition to new normal is a great way to put it.
Spot on content. I think my wife, who is Japanese and lived in the US for 20 years, experienced more "culture shock" than me when we moved to Japan. I loved the "honeymoon" phase, never really had a "frustration" phase other than the language barrier and have experienced only a mild "adjustment" phase. It's all a great adventure.
Honestly, I never had serious shock either, but I have known people who had it terribly.
As someone who wants to be a foreign resident this is a really interesting topic. I think a lot of foreigners see things like reliable public transport and vending machines, and call them "culture shock" because they don't want to call themselves out for being jealous!
Interesting. I can see that.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this interesting topic. It has made me think back to my first year in Japan in the eighties when I moved there with my Japanese husband and our first child. Although it’s a bit foggy now due to the time that has passed, I do remember struggling a bit after the honeymoon phase as my Japanese was still very basic then and I felt quite lonely as I still hadn’t made my own friends yet. I remember what helped me to move on from that phase was my husband telling me that his co-worker who was married to a foreign guy had told him that her husband puts a 100 yen coin into a jar every time he complains about something in Japan! Although I never did this myself, it did make me reflect on how I may be thinking/acting. This was the turning point for me to consciously be looking for the positives in everything around me. It definitely worked and now my love for Japan is deep and lifelong! Thanks again for sharing!!
Thats an interesting strategy - and I can see how not having had the chance to make your own friends around that time would make things tough.
About two and a half years living here and I have to admit that I’ve been feeling some of the things you’ve mentioned. Thanks for the upbeat advice 🤙🏼
How do you feel around the holidays? That's when it can get to me.
@@Exjapter yeah, holidays can be tough, but it’s also fun to get my Japanese and American families family together on FaceTime!
I had 2 moments of big culture shock in Japan I think.
One when I was with a bunch of online Japanese friends and I felt very lonely because I was the only one not really understanding the conversation (language barrier / culture references missing) and I thought "what did I work so hard for up until now that I still don't understand anything?"
The second part was when I was struggling really hard with school (language barriers and things) and it had been a few months, and then as a legally blind person I got really angry with myself with how hard I was struggling with what should be the stupidest of all things: flushing toilets in public restroom. I swear I kept wasting time finding the flush button and at some point it got really frustrating.
Now I'm fine though.
So yeah, when people say "TRAINS ALWAYS ON TIME CULTURE SHOCK" all I can think of is "Get out of here!" Haha.
Thanks for making this video ＾＾
Glad you found the video interesting. And yes - the moments I have felt the most down are when I had some sort of breakdown due to language barrier.
When I went back to the States for vacation couple of years ago I had reverse feelings, I felt things had changed and felt odd even though it was my home country.
Reverse culture shock
@ yeah, but not as dramatic as he was saying culture shock is or as negative. But, I agree with him that culture shock is something negative, cause being surprised by amount of vending machines or washlets isn’t a culture shock to me either. That’s why I said reverse feelings cause of the changes I saw/felt.
I was a high school exchange student. The thing that depressed me the most after the honeymoon phase, was when I was talking with my language tutor in English and their facial expressions showed they didn’t understand my emotional language. Yet they said they knew what I was saying. It drove me mad 😅
Yes, those types of mismatches can add up to feelings of frustration and even paranoia.
@@Exjapter absolutely, and i went in the 90's, so youtube, tiktok... hell even the internet was not widely available to me. it was quite the challenge 🤕
I feel the age of influencers, or just the internet in general, has started shifting the meanings of terms by over using them to loosely adjacent circumstances. But this is the way of things. Not the first time a word or phrase has started meaning something else.
Anyhoo, I absolutely appreciate this correction, though I do think even honeymooners can experience legit culture shock if they encounter something enough, and it breaks them down. I feel like I have witnessed it, maybe even felt it a little myself during my last trip. That extreme fatigue of not wanting to figure out how to navigate a simple situation like ordering food in a restaurant. Even if they have pictures or an English menu, you still feel like you're being a burden. We may have insisted on only restaurants with the self-ordering kiosks a couple times because we just didn't want to deal with it. We may have just been too exhausted, too. 🤷♀️
That's a really good point, and I know and applaud you for being so conscientious. (A lot of tourists seem to rumble around not caring how they might be inconveniencing others). However, I think being aware of it is enough - and realize that the Japanese really are pretty patient. So (when) you come again, I don't think you need to be bothered by it!
Happy New Year, Paul! Thanks for the defense of the (current) meaning of culture shock. While I am not an absolutist on linguistic usage, meaning, and drift, I do think it is right to adhere to standards of meaning that are consistent and keep them stable. Linguists (e.g., "A Way with Words" podcast and John McWhorter of NYU [and who I otherwise tremendously respect]) often cite meaning/definition drift and sometimes flipping to mean the opposite. I haven't yet seen any papers on how that tension plays out, what kinds of words and phrases are more prone to change (if there are identifiable types), and what kinds of social phenomena promote or inhibit meaning change. There have been some studies of Mancunian dialect, but no one has gotten a grasp on the larger sociological picture. You pointing this out, though, is more than just linguistic--it has bearing, as your rightly noted, on mental hygiene which is something to which we should all be sensitive. Thanks for discussing this topic.
I am not a prescriptivist by any means and generally embrace language change and variation. That said, in this instance I worry about the person who might be experiencing 'real' culture shock, and finding only trivial stuff online when searching for help, and that would be really unfortunate.
My chronic health problems, are the main reasons I could not live in Japan. I've listened to another RUclipsr "chase the traveler". He talks about the frustration some people deal with seeing Japanese doctors.
I watch Chase from time to time if the topic interests me. Honestly I am impressed how he keeps everything in one take. I flub my words often enough I have to hit the editing. 😂
There are indeed areas where Japan is behind in medical care. I am sorry to hear it would be tough for you to give Japan a go.
Mental health care in Japan is barely medieval, the answer to all your problems is, apparently, to just "gaman" harder. Who knew?!
@@Exjapter I wish I could try it out. Lower cost of living, not having to worry about people stealing, are the pros that come to mind.
You ever thought about collabing with chase for a video?
あけましておめでとうございます！
今年もよろしくお願いします！(=^・^=)
明けましておめでとうございます。今年もよろしくお願いします。
Im hopeing in the next year ill be able to refer back to this vid and go 'Ahhhh, thats where im at, its all good, its normal to be like this ' another very helpful insight 😊
I actually forgot one important point, which I will make a short for this week.
9:16 that escalated quickly 🫨
Yeah, I needed to put that in there because I wouldn't want anyone to take what I was saying as "culture shock is always trivial". Although in that case it probably isn't culture shock itself, just the culture shock is making the depression worse.
Happy New Year to you and your Family.
Another great video Paul. Thank you! So much to unpack!!
I think culture shock is a matter of education, expectation and resilience. If you are the sort of person who has travelled a bit and if farily resilient, with an expection only upon yourself then you are less likely to be shocked by things excpet perhaps for some of the more extereme settings.
I have only ever been a tourist in Japan and I have NEVER experienced culture shock. What I have experienced is just edless fascination with everything I see and hear and eat...this is what keeps me coming back. A lot of people have tried to convince me that this is all "honeymoon", but I'm not convinced. The feeling of fascination for me is a lot deeper and like you, I dont think I would ever cease in that fascination if I lived there for a very long time.
The key is not to let the problems of mundane every day life bog you down. Whether you actually get cultute shock or not, maintaining the honeymoon feeling is not sustainable.
Fantastic video as always Paul and happy new years to you and the fam! As someone who has been living in japan for about 3 months now (and did a lot of research prior) I definitely feel similarly about the content online regarding this country being sensationalized or misrepresented so your video has helped me for sure in processing these different phases. Right now I am at a sort of crossroads trying to decide what I should do here in terms of finding a job; since my nihongo is very basic still I feel relegated to the english teacher route however I am unsure if thats what I want to do long term but don't know what other options I have realistically other than maybe a recruiter or some sort of sales for a language school. I'd appreciate any insight you may have as all I see online is to work at a ski resort lol... thanks and keep up the quality content this year :D
Well, along the ski resort lines pretty much anywhere there are lots of foreign tourists it should be possible to find work in the service industry. It may not be fun but I bet your Japanese ability would skyrocket!
Since you were walking around Zushi, is that where you live?
Because I DON’T know Zushi like the back of my hand even though the very first full-time job I had in the private sector was in sales with a Japanese trading company that had its head office about a football field away from tiny Zushi Station which hardly had any buildings around it or up and down the street back then-----and which was also a 3-hour train ride and/or car ride from where I lived.
As a lover of the beach, decades later I was surprised to find out that Zushi is next to the ocean with beaches which I didn’t know back then.
As far as culture shock goes, I guess I’d be culturally shocked if I went to a Zushi beach in the summer nowadays and saw a bunch of gaijins from the Navy base all sporting arm, leg and body tattoos? And that’s because in my day, Navy tattoos were far and few between and mainly limited to green-colored anchors on the forearms like Popeye.
You are 100% right about the beach being overrun by navy personel in the summertime.
We used to live in Hayama, and I still love that area. There are some shops I still visit, and some friends there, so when I go I sometimes film.
@@Exjapter Hayama & Zushi are the same? Meaning Zushi is part of Hayama or vice versa?
The reason I recognized Zushi is not because I recognized Zushi. Rather it's because I saw the 046-8 telephone number on the motorcycle shop which used to be 0468 which were the first 4 numbers for the telephone number at my company.
Being extremely independent, I found having to ask for help from a Japanese native, either from work or a friend, to read and translate documents written in Kanji. Also, it sucks at Christmas to see everyone in my home country, Australia, enjoying family time, and you're doing nothing. So I planned Christmas dinners with other friends after the first year.
The holidays can be the roughest, and a lot of 'fresh out of college' types have been in the country exactly 3 or 4 months at that point - easy to hit a feeling of lowness.
the ultimate real shock that anyone not of East-Asian ethnic background is bound to experience is that for all practical purposes you one will always remain a "foreigner" - even if you get a Japanese passport: like, every time you would pass a group of people someone would mutter "ah, gaikokujin da"... obviously, if one can't bear such psychological burden, then Japan is certainly not for them long term
two small notes:
1. Sakurako or any other Japanese company would not send their merch "all over the world" (there are certain countries which you cannot send to from Japan)
2. Tokushima must be referring to Tokushima prefecture proper (not a place in Kagoshima)
The expression "all over the world" does not have the same meaning as "every country".
I wouldn't call it culture shock exactly, but I think my one big shock moment was when applying for a dependent visa and being denied because there was too much money in my bank account. Like what does that have to do with being the spouse of someone with residency? They demanded I have at least that much money in my account when I first came over as a student, now I'm not allowed to have it?
That sounds like a bureaucratic rule nightmare. I have never heard of having too much money to get a visa....
They said that it meant I would not be financially dependent on my spouse, so there was no requirement to live with them, I would be capableof surviving on my own in my home country. After going back to the US and reapplying through the embassy there, I was approved without any issue. I don't think it was any rule, I think that one agent thought it seemed off and decided it was safer to deny the visa instead of looking into it or asking a superior.
Great topic. Just finished my first twelve months in Japan after moving at short notice after my wife got an English speaking position in Japan .It had not been a long term goal to move to Japan so we arrived with no Nihongo and only a limited knowledge of Japanese culture.I have certainly gone through those phases to various degrees .Luckily my wifes employer helped greatly and she has some fantastic colleagues with near native english. Learning the language to a basic level is a major goal but learning the culture is important as you said .
Knowing why a lot of these so called culture shocks exist makes it easier to assimilate them .If you are from a modern country for instance a European country most of these so called culture shocks are normal there too. Trains that run on time , no tipping , good service, public health to a decent standard lack of rubbish bins in public places due terror threats and decent manners .It's just taken up a notch in Japan .
Videos like yours and the Japanese Nihongo learning channels which also cover culture are a great help.
It is amazing how stressful it can be just to get something as simple as getting your cars tyres swapped to winter tyres even with google translate . We had a paperwork issue recently and even with two Japanese helping us at city hall it was a major pain.
As you mentioned having something to look forward to like exploring different parts of Japan certainly helps as does doing Nihongo classes where you are meeting other expats going through the same things .looking forward to improving my language so that I can do things here that require making connections with Nihonjin who are not proficient in English although its definitely a hard challenge in my mid 50s as retaining that much new learning is hard.
The closest things I have had to actual culture shock was finding out just how badly Japan suffered after its it's economic golden era .
Thanks for another interesting discussion.
Thanks for the detailed comment. Your final sentence is something I have felt as well - even places that are still alive with tourists have a sense of 'decay' where places haven't been updated or reformed since the 70s or 80s. There is a charm, but a sad charm about it.
@Exjapter just back from a week in Okinawa over new years and it is an awesome place to visit but the incredible devastation from WW2 is evident in the almost compete lack of timber structures of all sorts you see elsewhere in Japan. Lots of very tired looking concrete buildings away from the Tourist areas although some are very imaginative in their forms. I am lucky to be living near Hiroshima and it's still a relatively vibrant region with few abandoned buildings and new builds of houses near us.
As someone who has visited Japan a bunch of times and a lot of other countries too, I can't remember ever having culture shock in Japan. Maybe there's something I've forgotten. I can't remember it in other countries either but it's a bit more likely I have had it somewhere that's not springing to mind right now. (I've never stayed more than 3 months at a stretch in Japan and never stayed more than 6 months at a stretch in any other foreign country though.)
Now I do have more "WTF moments" in Japan than anywhere else in the world except China, but that's something different.
I think culture shock really only happens when you are questioning your decision of living in a foreign country, so it's pretty unlikely to happen when you are just visiting.
@@Exjapter Having thought about it more, I have had culture shock in India where I was somewhere random where almost all of the locals were too poor to wear shoes and then parked right there randomly was a brand new Rolls Royce that had all of the chrome bits gold plated.
Coming close to culture shock but not quite would be all the houses with tons of razor wire and shops with guards with assault rifles and banks with guards with machine guns in Central America.
Beggars with missing limbs pushing themselves along on skateboards on my first visit to Vietnam in '99 was also a culture shock. (Vietnam has come a long way since!)
Tourists generally only experience the cliches and stereotypes they come here with.
Yes, it takes time in a place to get beyond the surface you see on a trip.
People are just ignorant. I LOVE the vending machines, especially the ones with ice cream!
Haha, not that I disagree, but you make culture shock sound like the five steps of grief. Step one culture shock, step two adaptation step three acceptance, etc…
There is often a pattern, but it won't be the same for everyone.
Dude read the Wikipedia page on "Culture Shock" and turned it into a video.🤣👍
It's a tough calling, but I am up for the challenge.
First!!!!
😂
My advice to people is just go to Japan and see for yourself what’s what.