Whenever I look at videos about Japan, it’s almost always about how “in Japanese culture [insert harmless action] is considered rude” and people eat it up like it’s the wisest thing they’ve heard all day. On TikTok some content creators are making a living off what to me feels like cringe-inducing exotification of Japan, yet it has a huge audience of foreigners who watches it and somehow don’t realize these etiquettes are not unique to Japan (and just like back home is nowhere as codified in Japan as media would like you to believe). For example, one video was about how in Japan it’s considered rude not to nod along while people are talking to show interest as if this is not a universal phenomenon to signal engagement. Every action performed by a Japanese person is not reflective of their personality or being, but reflective of their very culture. And the word “culture” comes up much more frequently when talking about Japan than it does with barely any other country as if people forget everyone has a culture.
Examples:
How is there so low crime in Japan? “Japanese culture puts a heavy emphasis on conformity yadayadayada..”
How could such a heinous crime happen? “Japanese people are too submissive to speak up-”
At times it’s even contradictory what this supposed monolithic culture is described as. But no matter how it’s described, I can’t not feel like it’s othering to the maximum degree.
I honestly don’t get it. Why are Japanese people being treated like taxidermy in a zoological museum that people inspect and try to learn about as if they are undecipherable mysteries of creatures? Is Ruth Benedict at core fault here for her orientalist work being treated like the bible?
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The culture is, overall, very different from western cultures and people are interested in the differences. I dont think it’s that deep tbh.
different cultures have different sensibilities, and you have to start somewhere. i think anyone who is interested to participate in a culture would do well to learn common etiquette. there is some magical thinking at play but on a superficial level it is easy to talk about any culture monolithically first and then learn the exceptions after you are able to participate in it firsthand. i do agree that framing around “all japanese do this” or “all irish do that” and “american pistol burger” leaves a LOT off the table in terms of true cultural understanding.
Orientalism in the west is a mixed bag with a long history. It’s not healthy to put anything on a pedestal to worship, regardless of where it’s from or how it relates to you. Family, money, culture. On the other hand, it is incredibly important to learn about cultural sensibilities outside of your own, in order to become a more empathetic and well rounded person.
So i agree, it’s naïve to hyperfixate on the low crime rate and the tea ceremony and no shoes on the tatami, but staying strictly in the lane of the culture you grew up in will also lead to a sort of intellectual-emotional pickling. So i think, as long as the math checks out, no one is spreading outright misinformation, and the checks and balances are in place that it can be a useful if flawed tool to start learning and thinking about another culture. not everyone has a one way plane ticket and ten spare years to learn about this stuff firsthand.
why the hyperfixation on japan stuff? i just don’t know, exactly. this is kind of an aside; i was a child in the 80s and when the internet boom was happening in the 90s, the hot take was that the internet and home computing weren’t really big in japan. However, If you know anything about the famicom craze, the msx and the competitive home computing market, you would know that personal computer culture was quite more entrenched than it was in Europe and the states at that same time. Just because it looked different didn’t mean it wasn’t there. So, a swing and a miss from the cultural speculation guys. I suppose this kind of thing would be a good case study in the deep flaws of a eurocentric worldview, observable reality and all of that. maybe these kinds of cultural popcorn moments miss their own point a little from time to time. best to independently verify.
Hasn’t Japan encouraged this obsession with their “soft power” approach that portrays Japan as a rarefied, unique, and obscure place? I also wondered why people are so obsessed with Japan and what’s with the fetishisation…it’s because the Japanese government decided several decades ago that their culture was their best export and would drive tourist dollars, so they started exporting massive amounts of media/culture to the west.
There is a NYT article: “Marie Kondo and the Life-Changing Magic of Japanese Soft Power” that states “The tidying guru is heir to a long tradition: Japan marketing itself as spiritual foil to a soulless West.”
Is some of it racism, jingoism, othering? Of course. But some of it is also Japan’s own marketing of its own culture as exceptional, authentic, and superior.
Japanese culture is very different to what you can find in western countries. Put that together with the fact that they have very strong media presence and voilà!
To be fair, all cultures do it. Asian countries look on Europeans and Americans with curiosity and project their fantasies on us. You can even see this in works by intellectual people: I just read a book called Nietzsche and Zen. The author mentions that asian philosophers –compared to Western philosophers– tend to see Nietzsche as a radical individualist (even though he is not), possibly because they are collectivist societies and find individualism striking and exotic.
It’s not just a japanese thing. People of any culture “mystify” other cultures.
Uncharitably, we could say it’s a form of racism. Actually I think that’s too accusatory and negative, but certainly we exoticize them way too much.
The cultures *are* very different, but not as different as people think. We’re still all… human.
That said at least we are now exoticizing other Europeans a LITTLE bit – I saw a bookshelf recently with “the little book of Ikigai” next to “the little book of Hygge”, which honestly is just as bad.
Did you know in Japanese culture it’s considered impolite to drop trou and defecate all over the sidewalk? This is because such an act is thought to interrupt the mystical flow of the _gi_ (義) ✨
Firstly, Japanese culture is pretty good.
You get pros and cons everywhere, but on the whole, it’s fundamentally better in many important ways. Low crime, high convenience, high tech, good quality civil institutions, polite people. And copious popular cultural products. And great food.
The US, for instance, is not those things. Nor are any other anglosphere countries. At least relatively speaking.
So it’s no surprising some people who are dissatisfied with their home culture and own lives might make fantasies out of Japan. But why Japan specifically? Why don’t they, say, glorify New Zealand? There’s reasons behind it.
I don’t think, therefore, there’s actually much problem with this. A lot of countries would do well to copy paste certain aspects of Japanese culture onto their own.
My only objection is that a Japan fetishist can be incapable of recognising the trade offs that come as part of the package, which are important to understand.
High customer service, for instance, is great, but the people providing it may be getting paid 800yen per hour to work like a machine. And a culture that’s struggling to reproduce itself isn’t something that should be overlooked. How good can a culture be that doesn’t think it’s continuation is a priority? Etc
Look up “orientalism.”
That’s called culture difference. The reason why Japanese is more prominent with these is because of being excluded. America is different than Europe too. But they are so close and people often goes from one to another, so the culture is mixing easier and more.
Remember that 99% of the culture rules are made out of the blue. For example savior vivre and how You should eat. Nobody does that. And I also doubt people from Japan really do care that much about these stuff either. It’s only depicted as traditional, same way the cutlery behavior is for America/Europe. Also don’t believe in everything anyone says. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t mean it’s true(!). Because it might be like that… but on certain circumstances, like only in the past or on specific conditions. But media and people often portrays these things like it was daily thing.
If You watch anime and would suddenly go to Japan, trying to mimic the characters, everyone would think You are a weirdo. Not just by the way You talk. But Your behavior too.
I agree.
A pet peeve of mine is “in Japan, people take off their shoes at the entrance, right before stepping into the house.” Well, this isn’t unique to Japan:
* i saw it in Korean dramas
* we do it in Romania [and likely other European countries]
* many Americans also say they do it
And they also say that it’s rude/offensive to stick your chopsticks into the rice/food. Well, it’s not a very nice gesture over here either -sticking the fork into the food/steak, straight up and leaving it like that, though it can be a sign of the food/meat being cooked/ready to eat if it’s done before starting to eat.
I also see Japan as a “mystic” country of sorts. Mostly because of its use of technology, the “Japanese” toilets, and some other aspects that we don’t have in Romania, like the punctuality of the trains.
Some Japanese “things” can be replaced in Romania, but i don’t consider them “equal” or “better/worse”. For instance, instead of shrines and temples, we have churches and monasteries [and many of them are really beautiful], instead of kimono we have the traditional outfit known for its “ie” (read it like EE-eh, or the Japanese word for “no”], but the “ie” is just the shirt part.
There are a ton of factors that contribute to what you’re describing – first, YouTube and TikTok are content machines and there are a critical mass of creators and viewers who only care about the illusion of insider knowledge, othering, fetishizing, or feeling culturally superior. This kind of shit is clickbait, and it works.
Then there’s the very real fact that most people, let’s be honest, are terrible tourists. People who would make a scene if someone asked them to remove their shoes in a hotel or museum, who would yell at their kids while eating and littering on the subway. People who would, in fact, zone out while someone was talking to them because they’re daydreaming about how well-done they’re going to order their steak later, or how they’re not going to shower before cannonballing into an onsen. Any advice these people are willing to consider is a step in the right direction.
While I agree it’s an obnoxious trend in travel advice content, especially in online videos, which are easy to self-produce and easy to ingest (as opposed to a travel guide or travelogue show which ostensibly is being fact checked and edited), you truly do get the same type of thing searching for advice about France, or Italy, or Thailand, or Disney World. You just swap out one set of overblown and borderline fetishized specifics for another.
I think it’s the kind of race to the bottom you see in every corner of fandom/hobby/enthusiast content. The REAL Secret Hidden Ending to the Snyder Cut. One Weird Trick that George R R Martin HATES. 10 things you didn’t know about the purple Lego spaceman.
If you understand the difference between. Take a medecine and drink a medecine then youre good to go
Well said, I agree. It pisses me off whenever I see people hype stuff like that up on social media.
Every country gets generalized this way. It’s definitely not unique to Japan. People just tend to condense information into easy to remember anecdotes and it catches-on.
I do.
More and more people getting into japanese culture and since they’re new they can’t filter out bs from the facts yet that’s my logic