What is Japanese culture?

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Where do I even start on this broad topic? How would you start describing your own culture?

I suppose that anything Japan related has something to do with their culture. There are so many facets to any culture. I have chosen a few to talk about which describe my daily life. These probably will not even scratch the surface of describing the entire culture of the Japanese, but I hope that it will pose a little bit of an insight. Karaoke, hanami, Shinto shrines, and sushi are my topics for discussion in this post.

Karaoke is something that I feel many westerners would find to be somewhat more popular in eastern countries. They are probably right. I have found that Karaoke is easily found pretty much wherever you might find yourself in Japan, Korea, and China. Each country I have been to has a little bit of a different version of it. Here in Japan it is a very common place to let loose some stress and have fun for any occasion, usually following a full night of drinking at a nearby all-you-can-drink bar. These places are literally in every city I have visited so far within walking distance of wherever I might have been. Some places are belong to a chain such as “Jankara” or “Big Echo” but there are many local places too. Some of these places are full out relaxation places and have things like billiards, table tennis, or even massage chairs to read manga as well as karaoke on the side. They usually have all-you-can-drink packages to keep the party going throughout the night!

Hanami literally translates to “flower viewing”. It’s an activity that takes places during the spring season around the beginning to middle of April. Sakura, the special flowers, bloom around this time of year and last only for about a week or two until the second or third heavy rain after blooming. It’s an enormously popular event in Japan during these two weeks to visit a local shrine while the sakura are in full bloom. The shrines are generally very crowded during this time, full of groups coming to see the beautiful flowers and enjoy a picnic beneath them or a heavy drinking party.

Sushi, an example of Japanese culture that people all around the world associate with Japan. Here in Japan I can say that it is pretty common to see sushi places, but maybe not as common as one might think. The sushi places that are popular in Japan usually have a rotating belt that circles around allowing about 6 tables access to the sushi. The kitchen will also make orders specifically but generally the patrons will just select pre-made sushi from the conveyor belt as it circles past. The sushi in Japan is a lot different than what we have in the U.S.. In the U.S. we have many rolls labeled as things like “spider roll” or “California roll” whereas in Japan they have just one piece of meat on top of a little ball of rice. The reason why I say meat is because they don’t just put fish on top of the rice, the interesting thing that I have found is that they have things I would not have thought of on top of the rice. Some of the interesting sushi that I have seen include things like horse (yes, real horse meat on top of a rice ball!), eggplant, turtle, and even corn to name a few.

I could probably write for years on this topic, but alas, I will end it here and start another post later on. I hope that these minuscule facets help to gain even a little bit of insight into the culture of Japan.

What do Japanese people do?

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After living in Japan for as long as I have now, I developed a lot of insight as to what Japanese people actually do during their daily lives. In many ways they live a life similar to the way I have been living while I was in the U.S.. They go to school. They live in apartments or live with their family while they are in college. They have part-time jobs to support their apartment, extracurricular activities, and/or school. I feel that its the little differences though that make them stand apart from a western-esque lifestyle.

The sex trade, as I’ve noticed, is enormous in Japan. There are different levels to this trade that many Japanese people take part in at least once, but usually way more, during their lives. They definitely see it everywhere as well. At the lowest level, in my opinion, are the maid cafes and butler bars. These may seem very different to what pretty much every other country has if not unique to Japan only. In the maid cafes for example, a patron would enter the cafe and be immediately greeted by extremely cute Japanese girls dressed in maid outfits who welcome the customer with greetings including the word “master”, as if to say the person is going to be in charge of the whole experience. The person is shown to a seat and the maid will tend to their every need over the course of their stay. The maid will also never leave the customers side and will always call them “master”. Butler bars are similar except that the servers are men. At both of these places, it is generally assumed that the patron will not really be carrying on much of a conversation with the maids/butlers. I have been told that the general rule of thumb is that it is 500 yen (~7 USD) for anything at the cafe, whether it be drinks, dessert, or even a picture with the maid/butler. By the end of the endeavor, the customer has rung up around 2000 yen (~25 USD) for coffee, cake, and a picture alone.

The next step up from the maid cafes and butler bars, in my opinion, are girl bars. Girl bars differ from maid cafes and butler bars in that the women are not unusually dressed and the women are supposed to carry on conversations with the customers. The conversations do not have to be flirtatious in any way and are usually just menial. The set up for these places is that the customer would sit at the bar and on the other side of the bar is a woman who serves the drinks or food combined with idol chit chat to ease the stress from a long work day. These places can get really expensive really fast as they start with around 3000 yen (~38 USD) for an hour and a half of all you can drink not including the drinks that you will pay for the girl on the other side of the bar.

I think that beyond these are host and hostess clubs. It is very common that salary men will attend these places after a long week of work. There are also other people, usually rich people, who attend the clubs seeking an alternate relationship than their current one. At the club, a number of girls/guys will accompany the customer and join them in drinking/smoking it is assumed that everyone will be more flirtatious as well. The goal of the host/hostess is to make the customer come back, so no sex with the clients will occur, but they will try to get the patron as close to that edge as possible so they will always return to the same entertainer. These clubs are quite expensive to get into I’ve heard, in the price range of around 6000 yen (~80 USD) per hour per person!

There exist other forms of the sex industry in Japan, some of which are borderline illegal. Japan even developed their own take on a hotel in order to cater to the sex entertainment industry. I have found it hard to spend even a few days in Japan without running into some form of sexual entertainment.

(Pics will come soon I promise, It turns out I have to fabricate new ones)

Spring break.. Thailand!

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During the last two weeks we had spring break! I have noticed since I started living in Japan that most people during a break like to travel to different countries so my friends and I did just that too.

Next stop, Bangkok!

One thing became very apparent immediately on my arrival, I had to be very much in careful control of what I was doing during the day. Thailand is a very different place than many of the places I have been before. I had this preconception that going to Thailand was going to be a lot like China in many ways: cheap food, amazing and unique scenery, poverty, barter shopping, etc. I was right on these ideas, but what I had not expected was how much corruption there was. A small example of this being taxis and tuk-tuks. Some context to this is that it’s illegal for taxis and tuk-tuks to not use their meter while driving customers around, however they get around this by bribing the police. What EVERY taxi and tuk-tuk will try to do is to give you a flat rate (which will seem super cheap anyways, when in fact the price they give is literally around five times that of what you could be paying) to take you to whatever place you are trying to go. For a specific example, I tried taking a taxi for a total distance of around ten downtown crowded blocks and the driver offered to do it for around six US dollars, which I paid. Then I took a return taxi with the meter and only paid a dollar and twenty-five cents. I remember getting burned the first two days while I was there but quickly tried my best to turn that around. Even then it still took a week to figure out only some of the various ways that locals will try their best to rip tourists off. Even though I may come off as being a little sour about this, I actually am proud that I was able to adapt to the environment so fast. I feel that it is important to shrug off the fact of being bested, learn from the mistake and move on. By the end of the week I was getting “I <3 (insert name here)” shirts for about two to three US dollars a piece after bartering the price down from around ten US dollars. I feel like I could ramble on for ages about difference in prices. The most notable of which being that I took a train ride from Bangkok two hours into the northern country side to a place called Ayutthaya (the old capital of Siam) for only about fifty cents!

There are few to no restaurants outside of hotels and malls, I slowly started to noticed this fact after about day of exploration. There are street vendors literally everywhere with delicious and exotic foods. It was extremely easy to be able to eat for less than two dollars. Walking down the streets of Bangkok I would see vendors of every sort. The whole scenery of the streets change a great deal around dinner time: street vendors begin putting out all of their sex trade items, bar scenes start becoming very crowded, girls at massage parlors start coming outside to sit and seductively lure tourists in, lady-boys start prowling the bars. I have heard rumors of the lady-boys in Thailand before I went. Let me clear up the rumors and say that they are absolutely true! There is hardly a way to tell them apart from a woman, except maybe that if it looks too good to be true then it probably is. The lady-boys in Thailand have the sexiest legs of any super model in magazines with a generous-cup bra size in addition to a slim figure, simply gorgeous.

To give a kind of idea on what the street vendors will sell, I recall walking down a famous street called “Khaosan road”, a place well known for its street vendors. Foreigners from all over the world have been walking down that road for the last century (at least) and as such, the locals have started catering to everyone. I saw at the beginning of the street a McDonald’s and right next to it was a vendor selling real hand guns, grenades, and tasers. Next to him was someone selling a fake ID to every country in the world followed by an old woman selling pad-thai (a famous Thai dish) for only about eighty cents.

Poverty in Thailand is really nothing to joke about. Along with all of the flashy lights lining the streets I saw people of all sorts: a very seductive looking Thai woman walking hand in hand with a middle-aged, balding, overweight, yet extremely wealthy looking white man. Next to the couple would be a mother who was sitting on the street with two children in her lap all dressed in rags, barefoot, malnourished, mother with a cup in her hand, awake all night begging. I think the worst case was probably a child outside of a mall, no older than four, again dressed in rags, this time no mother or father around, all alone on a busy walkway.

Phuket was my second stop in Thailand and was pretty much a whole new country. The same foods and merchandise were being sold but the population was noticeably different. Everywhere there were foreigners. Scenery changed a whole lot. Instead of the flat lands of Bangkok I was now on an island the was very mountainous with numerous beautiful beaches littering the coastline. Prices were about double to triple that of Bangkok, yet still pretty cheap compared to the US and Japan. The focus of wealth shifted dramatically from seeing the poverty stricken to the wealthiest people in the world having beach houses on the cliffs overlooking the Andaman sea. I remember that I had a funny moment in one of the hotels I had stayed at concerning what to watch on TV one night when I decided to not go out and let my sunburn cool off. I ended up watching all of “Harry Potter” all in Thai with no subtitles followed by “Fight Club” all in Russian with no subtitles. I can only guess that Phuket is a very famous place for wealthy Russians to vacation.

Although Thailand the way I have described may seem like a fairly dangerous place, there is safety to those who are cautious. I truly had an amazing adventure and cannot wait for an opportunity to go back.

My Neighborhood! Oguracho, Hirakata, Osaka, Japan.

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I suppose the title of this deserves a tiny bit of explanation as it seems like I just named three cities and a country arbitrarily however, this is my address. To explain, first off I live in Japan, and a little bit more specifically Osaka prefecture (similar to a state in the US), more specific than that Hirakata city and lastly Oguracho neighborhood. Oguracho neighborhood actually only consists of about maybe ten square blocks of houses, maybe one convenience store, not a single gas station, a few Shinto shrines, and a few vending machines in different places. For the most part though, the whole area is just residential buildings with a really small park somewhere a midst of all of the tightly packed houses.

I decided to get a house in this neighborhood after staying in the dorms the previous semester. I like the location as it is relatively close to three of the four most important things that I have come to know over the last six months of living in Japan: The foreign exchange students dormitories, Kansai Gaidai University (my school), and Gotenyama train station. The fourth thing that I am missing is that I am not exactly within easy walking distance to a convenience store (ironic as that is). Being close to a train station is important because you can therefore be literally within a walking distance of the means to get anywhere in Japan. The public transportation system in Japan is an absolutely amazing thing.

The reason why the convenience store is really nice to be close to is that they actually sell relatively cheap groceries such as milk and other assorted beverages (COFFEE), cereal, cup ramen, fresh vegetables, smaller housing necessities like cleaning supplies, bicycle locks, stamps with random peoples names on them used for legal documents, pens, headphones, bowls, chopsticks and pretty much everything else that is small and probably desired on a daily basis. The best part is that some of these convenience stores sell almost everything for only 105 yen after tax, which is pretty much the cheapest that you will find anything in Japan and thankfully there exists at least one within a short bike ride from wherever you happen to be.

There happens to be small man-made rivers all over Japan and there happens to be one in my neighborhood, but there are also run-off-water drains from the streets that all lead to these rivers. I believe that all of the drains exist because Japan really gets hit with a lot of typhoons during the year. It all seems almost as intricate as our circulatory systems. The small drains from the streets lead to the bigger river in the neighborhood and that leads to a slightly bigger one just outside the neighborhood, which leads to the bigger one that I have pictured in a nearby neighborhood, that eventually leads all the way to Osaka port and into the Pacific Ocean. I also noticed that if anyone in my neighborhood has any sort of yard area, they most likely have quite a bit of money. I have actually seen a few houses in the area that seemed just as big as a smaller sized house in my mid-western town. I remember seeing two Mercedes-benz cars parked outside one particular house inside an intricately designed gate. It really seems like each neighborhood really has a diverse class makeup so as not to have a specific area just for the low or high class citizens.

Early Impressions of Japan

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I may already have a little bit of a bias, since I have already been living in Japan for around 5 months, however I do remember my first impressions pretty clearly of what it was like to take my first steps into the reality of Japan.

I remember that if I tried to look for images of Japan that circulate frequently throughout the world as what a foreign concept of western culture would be it was fairly easy to find. Things such as Oriental art or what most people would envision to be completely different from the countries culture that they are from stuck out like an eyesore in the first 2 weeks of my visit… maybe even the first 5 to 10.

Being an American I even found daily tasks to be extremely different. Each day, people in Japan go shopping for that days groceries so that they can cook food that was recently purchased. Buying things in bulk just seems unfathomable to the typical Japanese person apparently. Later I would understand that today’s Japan is changing heavily in that respect, but I think that even still there is heavy emphasis on buying only what one needs in the near future.

Japan is littered with shrines and temples all over the Kansai area especially. As I mentioned before that it seemed like these types of things stuck out like an eyesore to me as a fobby (meaning Fresh off the Boat). Japanese people as you can imagine just consider it an everyday sight and I’d imagine that without counting they probably couldn’t tell you just how many shrines they would pass to get to their neighborhood convenience store.