Road to Satori
Woo, that title is quite the mouthful. And now at last I have reached the final required post in this blog. I’m not as sad as I expected because I’ll be staying in Japan for longer than I thought initially (yay!). But, even so, my view of Japan changed quite a bit since my first post. However, I don’t think there’s much that I can relate to my first post, since it was pretty much about recycling and the only difference is that now I hold on to my trash until I find the right trash can. Not that I didn’t hold on to my trash before, but now it’s just much more specific and I usually have to carry it all the way back home with me.
The main thing that surprised me on a regular basis in Japan is pretty much what I’ve written on my past two blogs: how visually interesting this country is. I see something new every day that catches my eye. The whole mindfulness in planning how things work here is something that impresses me always. Everything is made with such care and good will.
Something to see in every corner
One example for the good will I just mentioned is the way in which Japanese people work. This really struck me as it is very different from Brazil. Here, the shop workers (for example) have a specific way to work and act towards customers that isn’t as commonly seen back home. You get an irasshaimase every time you go inside the shop, they speak to you in keigo and always apologize for how long they take doing stuff, even if it’s not long at all. And all of this while holding a smile on their face and screaming irasshaimase at other customers. Back in Brazil they are not so enthusiastic when a customer comes in and I never stopped to analyze that until I stopped to analyze the same thing here in Japan. I guess trying to understand things anthropologically made me understand my own culture better from a distance.
A lot of care is put in almost everything
Following a bit on my last post, I will elaborate a little more on the aspect of Japanese culture that makes everything so visually appealling and generally attractive. Basically, I will talk about the visual and cute culture of Japan.
Getting to Japan, I was surprised when I saw that the most unexceptional things were done in a very attractive and sometimes even cute way. The first thing that I think of to give as an example are the gutter and the sewer covers I see on the streets. They are things that usually go by mostly unnoticed, but in Japan they catch the eyes of foreigners due to the care they received when being made and planned.
Animal grates make the city look happier
Every city has a different drawing on their sewer covers
This article on Wired talks about the cute visual culture that takes over Japan. Basically, cute is everywhere in this country. There are the obviously cute things like characters. For example, in every store you enter, there is a 90% chance to see something with One Piece characters on it, or in the supermarket you can see the most various products being sold with Pikachu or Hello Kitty on the box, even if it is just a box of curry.
Japanese packaging is a whole different matter that I could gladly write a paper on. The packaging here is renowned for being so different, attractive and well thought-out in comparison to other countries.
There is no need to put a bear holding an apple while standing on another huge apple, but it is much more striking if you do.
Not only is this box very eye catching, but the fact that it has an internal view of the food makes it easier to attract attention and quickly explain what the sweets are.
In the other countries I’ve visited, I’ve never actually seen the plastic models of the food that are on the outside of most of the restaurants in Japan to show what kind of food they sell.
Easier to read than a menu and much more attractive for the hungry passerby
With so much visual influence around their daily lives, it is no surprise, after all, that the Japanese make keep making everything even more visual, as I showed in my poster post. In this case, I guess it is a virtuous cycle; they are influenced by the visual culture and therefore keep it alive.
This post has been quite difficult to begin writing. I did not want to venture towards the ‘safe’ side of what I could answer by choosing something obvious (and slightly stereotypical); like hanami or karaoke. I wanted to work on something more unexpected but, nevertheless, still different from what I am used to seeing. And my topic of choice is simply posters. Japanese people seem to love drawing posters.
Picture taken in a book store. They are just reviews about the books, but they are still very appealing visually.
Ever since I got here I not only noticed the quantity of handmade posters, but also their quality. You’d expect to see signs in shops to be printed out, but it is not uncommon to see them hand drawn with colourful markers and be quite interesting to look at. In the beginning of the semester in college you could see Japanese people working on posters almost everyday. The posters may be used for their clubs, for informational purposes or for decoration, but they’re pretty much always very decorated and attractive. Researching about this turned out to be quite the hassle, since there is nothing written specifically about this subject. Mostly I could just find articles and books about Japanese classical crafts like sumi-e or woodcarving.
Making a new poster
So I decided to think of reasons as to why the Japanese would prefer doing posters like this. The obvious answer would be that the Japanese language is so strong visually that it affects the way the posters could look. What I mean by that is that the kanji, as opposed to Roman letters, can loosely be called ‘drawings’ and can therefore make any poster look more interesting.
The physical action of making the poster may also be related to the ganbare thinking of Japan. By getting into the drawing of the poster you involve yourself in making it and show that you’re working hard on doing something. Making posters may not always be isshoukenmei, but you put yourself in it.
Another aspect, and the most relevant in my opinion, is that Japan has a cute culture that is embodied in anything and everything. The smallest of things have something cute or pretty to them, be they gutter covers or danger signs. So Japanese people grow up seeing everything be decorated or visually attractive, so they make their posters attractive by default.
Say hello to Shoko:
（*＾ワ＾*）
Like 90% of the Japanese people I’ve met, she’s very expressive. I was taken aback with how expressive the Japanese are and I can’t help but find it amusing. The way they sometimes give a little jump and say ‘eh?’ or ‘oooh’ is adorable by my standards and what makes it better is that it’s not just with young people like the lovely Shoko, but teachers do that too. Just this week, one of my Japanese teachers gave a high pitched ‘kyaa’ squeal that I would never imagine on my teachers back home.
ヽ( ￣д￣;)ノ
Getting back on track, the expressiveness of their faces really matches the expressiveness of their language. There are various subtle ways of conveying your emotions through verbs in the Japanese language that are pretty much non-existent in English. For example, if you’ve left your wallet at home , you can say ‘I forgot my wallet’ in English or ‘財布を忘れてしまった’. If you translate this sentence, you’d still get ‘I forgot my wallet’, but there is a feeling of regret embedded in the verb that doesn’t happen in the English language. If you have those nuances of emotions in your language, it is only natural to also convey them through your face.
With all these emotions being shown on people’s faces, text messaging feels quite empty, even with the expressive verb endings. So it is not surprising that Japan is the country with the most emoticons (kaomoji) I’ve ever seen in the world. Kaomoji literally stands for ‘face character’ just because it is made with characters instead of figure drawings. It essentially means the same as ‘emoticon’, but is only used outside Japan when talking about the Eastern style of emoticons. This website makes for a very interesting read regarding cell phone usage and kaomoji. This article from the same website shows the top 30 kaomoji used and, not surprisingly, 7 of them mean the same thing (‘laughing’) but with slight alterations. Just like their language, which holds 50 different ways of estimating probability (for example), each with a different level of how likely it is or differing according to the source of why you think that something may or may not be probable that just blows foreigners’ heads away.
It is also not surprising to see how anime and manga deal with conveying the characters’ emotions. It is just an exaggeration of what Japanese people really are like. No other cartoon style (that I have knowledge of) can pull off doing what anime does regarding emotions without seeming to be trying to imitate anime rather than expressing their own culture.
At the bottom is a Brazilian comic book that mixes Japanese elements into the drawing. It ends up not looking as natural as the image above because we are not as expressive visually.
The kaomoji I used in this post were taken from this blog. But beware, the level of kawaiiness that is about to slap you on the face as soon as you click on that link is off the charts.
Hirakata is a small town between Kyoto and Osaka. It isn’t one of the extremes that people visualize as Japan: extreme technology or traditional Japan, it’s simply a quiet, compact city. Katahoko Higashimachi is a pretty residential neighbourhood near the Kansai Gaidai Nakamiya campus, so you can usually find foreigners walking around. However, I didn’t know exactly were one neighbourhood ended and another began, so most of these pictures are technically different neighbourhoods. But I’ll take a poetic license to talk more about the places around my daily commuting.
Shimamura and Avail are the two largest stores you can see around this neighbourhood.
In front of Shimamura and Avail there is the Central Library, a huge building.
The streets are quite narrow when you walk away from the main streets. Although they are two way streets, two cars can’t fit at the same time. Which is OK, since you very hardly see two cars in opposite directions driving at the same time. Most of the time you just see bicycles or motorcycles.
The bigger two way streets and the beginning of the small two way street (left).
Streets are very narrow and have no sidewalks, but there is hardly any danger since cars don’t speed through these. There are gutters on the sides, so it’s better not to ride your bike drunk.
The houses, cars and trucks are all very compact. They are all square-shaped, so you could pretty much stack the houses or the cars if you’d like. This way, they can use up the space in a more intelligent fashion and fit more things in less space. The stores around this area are also small and generally look like houses, except for the fact that they have signs.
You can put them all in a box when you move
In what I like to call an “unfortunate event”, near the Gaidai dorms with all the crazy international multicultural young adults, there is a nursing home. It is right in front of a big park where kids tend to play in during the afternoons and the residents walk their dogs there. I haven’t really seen many people chilling in this park, but my guess is that, as soon as it gets warmer, it will become more lively. To the joy/sorrow of the elderly.
Part of the park at nightfall.
Nursing home in front of park.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been wanting to come to Japan. The expectations were piling high as the trip approached and what I’ve come across in Japan is pretty much what I always thought, only… real. It was hard for me to let myself believe that I was finally in Japan, the farthest place I could go to, after so many years of dreaming this.
I could talk about many things that struck me as different or unique, since Japan is pretty impressionable (especially compared to my own Brazilian culture) but I will talk about something that I never really thought would be different here and surprised me due to its organization: recycling.
To the left, burnable trash. To the right, general plastic.
Recycling, like bicycles, is serious business here in Japan. People separate their trash without really thinking about it and it is collected almost daily. Whenever I see a trash can, I can pretty much assume there is another one next to it for different materials.
The guidelines for recycling are pretty specific. For example, PET bottles, even though they are made of plastic, go to a different container. So, to throw out a bottle, you have to take the label and cap off, throw them into the plastic container and then throw the bottle into the PET container. Since this is what everybody does, you can see that the bottles are already produced in a way that it is easy to separate the parts. Whatever isn’t plastic, aluminium or ceramics isn’t recycled and goes to a burnable container.
Instructions on how to separate trash and where each part should go.
It is impressive to see how this works here. Not so much after you notice everything that has rules works in Japan because they are a people that apparently love to follow rules, but still quite jaw-dropping. This downloadable article shows the laws and specifics of recycling, mainly focused towards companies, and the markings for every recyclable item. It is also interesting that the whole neighbourhood knows how things are supposed to work and go talk to someone in the community if they notice that they’re doing it wrong.
Each container shows where the different parts fit in. In this case, the carton is paper and the straw is plastic.
A few days after arriving in Japan and seeing all the emphasis on recycling, I began to make sense of it. Japan is a very small island, compared to the number of people that live here, so they do not have the means of throwing their garbage in any random way. They need to control this so they don’t run out of space and materials. Since it’s better in the long run and it is much cheaper than wasting space and having to produce more materials, it makes sense to put so much effort in recycling.
