Japan: It's Not Funny Anymore

I bet any of us can write a rant about where we live and how we hate it.

I do agree with LD to a point even if we have the disagreement that I don't want to go to Japan ever.

I bet any of us can write a rant about where we live and how we hate it.

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.

If I got on the internet and wrote a lot of overwrought whining about how I didn't like how I felt obligated to go to them, people would think that it was the result of a social anxiety problem. But because he's writing it about another country, he hopes he can dodge that accusation.

ziggy you're wrong "any" should be "all" finding the things we dont enjoy isn't hard

Don't like Japan, then gtfo...

It's a valid opinion. The culture is different from American at a very fundamental level, and some people have a distaste for it. I'm semi-neutral. I like some parts of it (examples: simple art, wabisabi) and dislike others (example: working at one company from graduation to death) ... He says pop songs consist of the same basic premise (a sentiment not lost in American pop), and I could see radio stations not wanting to expand--for fear of losing ratings.

I think he is either homesick, or lost his honeymoon period glasses. It happens.

I bet any of us can write a rant about where we live and how we hate it.

Now there's the ADHD-addled Dragon-Ball-Z-inspired One Piece, a manga for the Twitter age if there ever was one.