this isnt my name said:
Scorched_Cascade said:
this isnt my name said:
Damn I envy them. Why couldnt the UK be more like that ? Werent we big on manners, where did we go wrong T.T
Because we are less tolerant when other people arn't as polite as us. We are also very jaded and cynical as a nation and have a lack of national pride. The Japanese are very proud of their country and their people as whole.
Were we always like that ?
Thought the victorian times was everyone had to have loads of annoying manners about everything. Why couldnt our culture just have frozen then. We dont have pride anymore, thats for sure, but we had pride. Allthough I dont see how pride is relivant here. Still I envy them, japan must be a great place to live if you get over the weird things they come out with, and also how are they big on manners ? Isnt there a real problem with groping and other pervy stuff in the trains there ?
TBH, Japan is awesome... if you're Japanese. If not, prepare to feel really weird for a while. The Japanese will be really nice and polite to you, but they will take a long, LONG time to really trust you as they would another Japanese person. Add to that the very unique language and other cultural things that just go with culture shock, and it can get to be a hassle for a foreigner moving here. They don't really tell you much of anything you need to watch out for either, just trusting you'll figure it out on your own. In other words, they don't really know how to deal with anything foreign to them, and will assume you're just like the stereotypes they've seen of foreigners in the media, or exactly like the last foreigner they may have met. In a sense, they're a lot like Americans who've never been outside the country that way. Trust me, I know from experience... Also, it's expensive to live here, even compared to America.
But as far as politeness goes, the "worker-bee culture" thing is very true, and within that culture, and even within the language, is a pronounced emphasis on respect for one's role and place within the group. You speak differently to people at different levels of authority in the group, and you show different levels of politeness accordingly. Those at the top have more leeway in how polite they have to be to those under them, while the ones near the bottom have to be very polite to everyone above them in the hierarchy. There's also different ways of acting and speaking depending on how close you are with somebody. You would talk and act much differently with a friend you know on a first-name basis than with somebody you're meeting for the first time. This is especially true in a business environment. If you're just going out to the bar or something, you might act the same towards everyone, but if you're on a business trip, you really have to be careful of how you act and speak towards the people you're working with. It's all to preserve social harmony, which the Japanese value strongly, perhaps more so than individual rights. It's rather ironic that Japan has the collectivist, "worker bee" culture and yet has a very conservative, capitalist political economy, yet Communist China has more of an emphasis on the individual in its culture than Japan does.
I think the West's almost downright rejection of politeness and courtesy in our culture is a product really of the last 50-60 years or so. As people have pushed the boundaries of individualism and free speech, mass communication became ever easier, and people began pushing the envelope just to see how much they could get away with, we've come to just get used to our television, music, movies and even general speech just spewing obscenities right and left at anyone who has ears to listen. Further, our focus on individualism has also been much more encouraging of the individual fighting against authority than in Japan, and in the confrontational nature of our society, there will always be someone we want to direct our disrespect towards. In a "me, me, me" culture, people will be much less willing to offer someone a base level of respect until they "earn" it than in Japan, where people are just expected to at least respect each other enough to work together for the greater good, no matter how much the individuals may actually despise one another.
At least among English-speakers, I also have a theory about the influence of non-native speakers, but that could get rather controversial, so I won't push that one.
Anyway, that's just my take on it. I also feel like the West really needs to make a gravely serious re-evaluation of its own culture, and how much we respect one another is high on the list of things I feel we need to look at. Sorry this may be TL
R, but I find the subject really interesting.
