Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore

While this could be posted in many of the sub-forums. I'm going to keep this in the random section. I've read this on Kotaku:

http://kotaku.com/5484581/japan-its-not-funny-anymore

While most of us dream about living in Japan,I think it would be better to only live there for maybe a week or two. This man talk's about is 5 hard years living in Tokyo Japan. From anime sucking, to work being insane, to the food making you sick, to life style being completely.

If your bored, got nothing to do. This long read can keep you busy,and start up a nice conversation. Japan,isn't what most of us make it seem like.

I'll be back once a few people read this lol.

"life style being completely" what? That's incomplete.

I skimmed the article (don't have time to read the whole thing now) and I saw this:

Yea, fuck you vegetarians. FUCK. YOU.

Done reading, lol.
I can't say anything about it. <.<;;
Just wow...

Yeah i kinda lost my idea in the process... And it's still not coming back to me.

And yes i did also go Wooow. After reading this. Somethings i learned, somethings i already knew. Made me notice, beside video games, some manga & H, i don't give a shit about Japan

I love anime but never once desired living in Japan. I kind of lol @ the people who strive for it.

Don't live in Tokyo, problem solved.

This guy is a FUCKING VEGGIE LOVING PUSSY! Quit whining about the people smoking and how everything has meat and how theres too much smoking!

If you dont want that shit around you then you can move to the fucking rainforest.

THIS GUY IS LITERALLY THE WHINIEST BITCH TO EVER WRITE SOMETHING DOWN IN AN ARTICLE!

Reading that whole article seriously pisses me off. This guy should just fucking move and quit giving his bitchy opinions to people...

I whine about smoking alot, but that's pretty much the only thing I give a shit about.

Eh I've been to Japan before it wasn't too bad. If you want to learn about Japan daily life from a less pessimistic and more funny point of view go to TDR. Otherwise everyone I've known other than Vitor (My Very Brazilian and Very Gay friend living in Hashima) Don't have many major complaints that can't be found in the people I talk to living here in the US or Britain.

This is Tim Rogers. He's a pretty notorious douchebag. Up until recently, his writing was pretty much the opposite. He'd overanalyze the shit out of things like Final Fantasy games and talk about how cool he was for his hip urbane lifestyle in Tokyo.

He makes a living as a blogger, so he has to ratchet up the drama to get more pageviews. You'll notice he's working in an extremely nerdy industry - video games. Based on this and his past blog entries, his sense of social perspective is stunted, like a lot of nerdy people. He doesn't really analyze these problems he has as sociological issues but turns them into a list of grievances against his own fragile person.

I've been to Japan several times with several groups of people, and for most of them it was their first time in the country. There are several different reactions people have, but what's most common about people who have bad reactions is that they're unwilling to adapt. They can't conceive of a lifestyle that's different from what they're comfortable with. You have to adapt to the host culture, there's no way around it.

Some of these problems are legitimate, like being a vegetarian tee-totaler in Japan is probably impossible unless you live in a Buddhist monastery. But the tone of his article is that the country is his own little private wonderland that's gone to shit. If he had any maturity he'd consider the wider perspective and realize that social problems are best approached with empathy and not anger, and that a lot of these issues are common to other parts of the industrialized world. I could write up something even longer about how awful American suburban life is, but I'd just get laughed at for being a whiny baby. The only thing that's unique about this article is that it's in a news source frequented by people who have a favorable impression of the country.

'What a cunt' immediately springs to mind. I'm more amazed that he actually wrote that without realising how his whining and camp phrases undermine his points, though; the opinions might be controversial in the site's context, but his attempt at being edgy and provocative is so badly formulated and unbalanced that it doesn't raise any questions, it just makes him look a twat.

Actually, I think he makes some very good points. I will not go into detail now because I don't have the time for today. I will only quote this (very truthful) excerpt:

More information on the great crap that is FFXIII here.

I stopped reading at the end of this paragraph:

The general consensus is that, if a guy doesn't want to go to a party and get terribly drunk with everyone else in the company, then he obviously has some element of his outside life — a girlfriend, a hobby, et cetera — that is more important to him than the company, so any work he does is less worthy of trust than any work done by anyone who "respects the company" enough to go to all the parties and match the boss drink for drink. Try skipping a party as an employee of a Japanese company: Instantly, you're The Guy Who Skipped The Party, you're The Guy Who Doesn't Care About The Company. Or try going to the party and not drinking. I literally have to say "I'm allergic to alcohol" 40 times before they'll stop pushing me to take a drink.

Was there a reason why with that paragraph?

He just takes so damn long to say things. He could have said it in two sentences: "Most people who skip out on company parties have something else to do. If you skip out on a Japanese company party, you become That Disrespectful Cunt Who Skipped The Party." Whiny bastard.

you dont have to be happy just being there..

you have to feel joy for being there.. XD

um wow is all i can say

it is alright to produce a game that "would not stress the player" because it opens up the game to a larger group of players. (read: you wouldnt have friends who whine about how sucky monster hunter is just because they cant clear a yian kut-ku)

i am going to assume people in japan live in a relatively stressful life, therefore stress-free games is gonna be a push factor towards a sale. there are games like demon souls and (probably) monster hunter that are comparatively stressful. delving only into the single player mode difficulties of games, i can almost be sure that a difficult/stressful game limits the potential pool of customers -> less sales.

"feels like a game, is easy to play" is actually kind of valid (game) culturally since there is a term: 作業ゲー(objective) which is a class of games which ultimately involves the player slogging it out in-game just to progress. (read: am i playing a game or is the game playing me?)

I just realized that the things he likes are not the things I liked. Some of the complaints were just personal dislike that he feels the need to tell everyone to hate, four examples:




Some of the shit he also complains about happens EVERYWHERE. In America, you also don't always get what you want(worse, you might get nothing at all), there are plenty of restaurants here that are just complete rip offs from popular chains too, there is smoke everywhere and etcetera.
This guy probably works in a shitty job in a shitty neighborhood, but at least he mentions a few good points that Japan has. Things can get expensive.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the way he communicates this bit; he's clearly fed up with some of the 'tradition-before-thought' culture that seems prevalent in Japan (from what people do generally say having lived there). A lot of his points are sound, but that isn't the problem; the problem is that he is a man on a mission to pick everything about Japanese society that annoys him, half of which revolves around him being foreign. There are an equal amount of problems in the same stead about any society, surely. We tend not to recognise them in ours unless they are pointed out, in which case you might well say 'yeah, that is a bit odd, but it's just how it is', because what else can you do? For the spectator to that culture, it might be something of quizzical interest or minor annoyance, but if you have any desire to be in the country rather than - as this guy seemingly does - just moving from one to the other to find out what you don't like, you should be seeing them as quirks or minor annoyances. He might get pissed off with store employees shouting slogans just like I get pissed off with supermarket checkout workers asking if I want X or have X to bolt on to what I went there to buy, but you live with that shit because you ultimately can't or wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Valid points, but essentially non-issues.