Koda Kumi is horrible, I can’t stand to even look at her…

The korean tongue thing is pretty old news. They clip the bit under the tongue that connects it to the bottom of the mouth which makes pronouncing certain sounds easier apparently. I saw a documentary about it once and it did seem to make some difference, but not anything I’d be willing to have my tongue cut for （*_*）

My co-worker said there are some really crazy plastic surgery trends in Korea that are gaining popularity… one is Leg Straightening, which I don’t even understand. They don’t have straight legs already? Apparently they want legs like Western women, but I don’t even know what that means. It involves some bone crunching and muscle twisting, I think. The other really pissed me off– it’s a surgery done on little kids. They clip their tongues a certain way so that English will be easier to speak. How can that possibly be real? I have known Korean-born people who learned English as a kid WITHOUT surgery and spoke English as fluent as any other American, with no accent or anything. I just hope those fads don’t make it over here.

There’s a really funny double-standard in Korea that my old Korean friends told me about, though they seem unaware of the irony. Guys think it’s totally okay for women to get plastic surgery. They think if a woman wants to feel better about her looks she should be free to do it.. However! When I asked about if their girlfriends or wives had ever had it done, the men were suddenly very upset and said they would never in a million years allow their woman to get plastic surgery, nor would they want to marry a woman who has had it done. Uh, okay. So basically they all want to marry the handful of natural beauties in Korea, that’s fine and unrealistic. Every single Korean man I’ve ever asked has said the same thing– I think I’ve asked around ten or so. It’s bizarre.

The movie “Kanna No Daiseikou” or whatever is pretty good to watch if you’re curious about plastic surgery in South Korea. It’s a comedy and actually really funny, and the final omake scene during the credits will take whatever moral you picked up from the movie and drown it in the tub, it’s ridiculous.

I noticed that Ikea in Chiba has some sort of holiday chicken dinner thing at the restaurant in their store heh.

Anytime a Japanese razzes you about the whole suki/kirai thing break out the rootbeer and licorice. Most of them can’t stand it.

The only fish I used to eat back home was whitefish, but I’ve started to eat some other stuff here, still just can’t deal with raw though…

Sounds like you had a pretty horrible workplace. I’ve worked in some shitty companies but nothing that bad yet. Then again I guess it’s a lot easier to pick on a girl than a guy too. I know some ex-corworkers didn’t like me, but they never said anything to my face anyway =)

A sister of a friend of mine was anorexic for awhile. Had to be hospitalized and force-fed and such. It exists, just people don’t tend to probe too much behind the social face of things.

I put on weight when I moved to Japan in large part I think because it took awhile to find foods I was willing to eat regularly that still worked out to be some kind of balanced meal.

I don’t know if I’ve ever actually met anyone face to face who has had plastic surgery. Obviously, being male I can’t get away with like staring at the faces of girls on the train or anything, but I’ve never noticed anything out right. I think plastic surgery is pretty big in Korea as well, I’m amazed at how similar a lot of their popstars look.

I have a lot of trouble with seafood and wasabi and I have an allergy to nuts, but other than that there aren’t many foods I just refuse to eat. But sometimes I pick the shouga out of my okonomiyaki (I mean, I like a little ginger, but the whole root is kind of hard to eat) and I always get annoyed when they put katsuobushi on my food. I hate it. It tastes weird and wiggles, so I always brush it off or to the side or something, to which Japanese respond “好き嫌いが多いね” or wahtever. At first I didn’t know what they meant by that, but now that I know it’s got a bit of a negative ring to it, I get upset that someone has to judge my tastebuds. I can’t help that I wasn’t raised on crappy stink fish shavings and wasabi! And I’m pretty sure half of the Japanese menu is an aquired taste. The most seafood I ever ate as a kid was Long John Silver’s once a year for religious purposes, and that’s freshwater fish, I think. But Japanese can seriously eat anything, except for canned cranberries. Every time I’ve fed them to a Japanese person, they freak out and ask why I’m feeding them jelly.

Japanese ARE pushovers. In samurai movies they’re so badass and filled with awesome, but in real life it’s less than spectacular. At my old izakaya job my co-workers sometimes knowingly gave people the wrong meal, but knew they wouldn’t complain, and when kouhai would come in to say hello, they’d make the kouhai eat a giant bowl of mayo spaghetti and like lace it with some Korean spicey powder. The poor kouhai would look at the food and be like “But I just ate…” and the senpai would yell at them and the kouhai would eat it. I asked one why once and he said “Because senpai took the time to make it for me, and I don’t want to meiwaku him” and I was like “You’re not going to meiwaku him, you’re going to stand up for yourself and he’ll probably never do this again to you if you do,” and the guy just shrugged, picked up his fork and said “It’s not really that bad, I guess.” He ate it, and I’ve never seen a more unhappy (and pukey) looking man. The others laughed at him as he sweat and I just shook my head. I used to get picked on at work, like, they’d call me a BOKE and say I was useless, or they’d yell at me for making drinks to slow but get even angrier if I spilled the drinks (the bar was so termite infested that the drinks would wobble when you set them down because the wood surface was uneven). So my new system was to throw up my arms in the middle of whatever I was doing and say “You’re right, I’m a moron! I can’t do anything, so I guess I’ll have to leave these to you!” and I’d walk away and leave like five or six drinks only halfway done. And then my co-workers would come in and yell MEEEEAN things at me while they tried to figure out what drinks had already had what poured into them, etc. Then when they’d yell at me I’d say “Sorry, I’m just so dumb and useless…” That place was sucking the life out of me, and I didn’t appreciate 19-year-old drop outs yelling at me because I wasn’t fast at making drinks or didn’t know the word for “carbonated water”. When foreigners came in they would all hide behind the bar, though.

I just saw last night on TV a thing about a Japanese girl who brought her weight down to 26 kg. All the Japanese were like “Eww, that’s so gross!” I looked it up, and it’s like 57 lbs. But the girls on the show were like “I’m 160 cm tall and 48 kg, I’m so fat.” That’s 105 lbs. I looked it up, and if I or any of my American friends weighed that much, we’d be considered dangerously underweight. I’m 127 lbs and nearly 166 cm tall, and my guy friends, old work place, and boyfriend all joke that I could stand to lose some weight. I’m pretty impressed that the Japanese people on the show recognized that 26 kg is not attractive. Honestly, I think at least one girl from the show probably went home and said to herself “If I only ate an onigiri and bread every day, how much could I lose?” I’ve met several anorexic people (I think… the Japanese word they used was 拒食症 which I’ll assume means anorexia) in America, but I asked my boyfriend and coworkers if they ever knew an anorexic and they said they hadn’t. How in Japan can you go your whole life without ever meeting one? I get on the train every morning and see at least a third of the people are underweight. They must have super bodies, because I will go to restaurants and eat a far healthier dinner than the girls on my right who are stick thin and eating katsudon teishoku with mayo and parfaits after. I know they don’t get fat from eating white rice like I do (but it is sooo delicious… it’s not fair!), but it seems like more than Americans a Japanese metabolism is higher. My boyfriend ate two steaks yesterday, some chicken, cheesey potatoes, and drank four cans of beer, and he doesn’t even get a full looking belly afterwards. I eat corn on the cob and you’d think I stuck a basketball in my stomach.

Yeah, Japan is obsessed with diets but hate exercise, and they use “healthy” on menus when the item is anything but. And it was a big surprise to hear them say “diet” and not actually mean “diet”. I walked up the stairs instead of used the elevator at work and someone said “OOh, diet-o diet-o!” and I’m just like “….uh, yeah, diet-o.” I always thought it was all the walking Tokyo people do, but I’ve got friends in New York who have gained since they moved up there BIG TIME, so I’ve chalked it up to Japanese metabolisms.

I looked over the photos on this site again, and looked through a magazine and realized that the “surprised look” plastic surgery gives these people looks cute to Japanese and ridiculous to everyone else in the world. On the train today there was a woman in front of me who had had her eyes done, but she hadn’t done her makeup and the lines from the surgery were totally 100% visible and ICKY. On TV yesterday I saw some idols who had to be like 16 and they’d had it done. It really just makes them look like bimbos. I love the new trend with wide-eyed bimbo idols, where especially cute girls aren’t doing as well as ugly ones because fans now want a girl who SEEMS attainable. And I’m like, if that’s the case, girls shouldn’t be trying to make themselves cute with plastic surgery and super diets to be idols, because it’s the average-looking or goofy looking girls who make money now. I remember Morning Musume, which had mostly cute girls, was once the big thing, but now it’s Perfume and AKB48. None of those girls are particularly cute (and some are like 10!), so the trends in Japan are now just totally bogus. I’m looking forward to the time when skinny will be out and squishy big girls will be dancing up on stage. I know in America that one is starting to happen…

That sucks about the hotel, I’ve been turned down or away for being a foreigner a few times, but most of the time I couldn’t care less. Personally, no matter how tired I was I wouldn’t sleep in a love hotel though. I’ve watched too many of those tv exposes to not be convinced that every inch of every piece of furniture is covered in sort of bodily fluid or other heh.

Yeah Japanese love their company trips and company parties. I usually can’t stand them. Add together the fact that I’m a picky bastard (about everything, what I eat, where I sleep, the toilet, etc.etc.) and the fact that I’d rather not spend any additional time with a large percentage of my co-workers from any job I’ve ever had here, and I usually turned down the chance to go. If there were people from work I got along with, I hung out with them outside work, but not with the rest of the company/office/ka/kakari whatever heh. Also, I don’t drink, so that eliminates most of the fun from a lot of Japanese social gatherings right there…

Japanese buy crap from vendors and stuff partially for the same reasons as they don’t stand up for themselves in other ways. That’s why they used to have all the big guys in roppongi who would sort of propel Japanese customers into the clubs. A lot of them are so incapable of standing up for themselves, even with simple things like saying no to pushy vendors. It’s like that in Hong Kong as well, they have whole shops there dedicated to targeting Japanese tourists on tours. My wife and I would firmly say no and they would still try and be pushy and I’ll tell them flat out I was not going to spend a dime in their store and they would all the sudden switch from fake happy to snooty.

I’m a picky eater in the first place, so a lot of Japanese food in general is out for me, but I’m not generally huge on Japanese style seafood either. Raw is completely out for me, but even a lot of cooked dishes turn me off. Especially all of the “boiled” varieties.

I hate mayo in general, so for me some of the things it gets put on here are a real horror show. For a society that is supposedly so health obsessed they really like something that is horribly bad for you =)

I don’t know of anyplace that serves turkey dinners other than I think the American Club, but that is like crazy ridiculous expensive as far as I know. I’m sure there are probably some bars/pubs around Tokyo that might do it, but turkey is really hard to find and expensive here (9000 yen for a 7 pound bird I think I saw, the weight might be wrong though, might have been 7 kilo?).

My boyfriend has only ever raised hell once, and that was when I started crying because a love hotel refused us a room, clearly stating that they didn’t serve “gaijin”. I was mad because not only did it imply they thought I was unclean or something, but also because every other place was full and we just really needed to sleep before work in the morning. But my boyfriend didn’t make a big scene at first, and I was upset that he didn’t defend me, and finally he found his cajones and dragged me back to the place and yelled at the woman until she threatened to call the police, and for good measure he punched the sign outside. He’s so laid back usually, and never ever fights with people… he’s the kind who will order beef, get chicken, shrug and eat it anyway because asking the waiter to fix it is too much of a hassle. It’s a good thing he DID go back, though, because I was starting to question if I wanted to be with a man who wouldn’t stick up for his woman. That’s still the only time I’ve heard him yell at someone.

My brother came to Japan for a week in March and raised more hell in that short amount of time than my boyfriend ever has. I laughed when you mentioned getting hit just for looking at someone… my brother basically did that at a bar and kept assuming people were either trying to rape me or picking fights with my brother by acting “like con-men”.　It was pretty embarrassing… I’m used to it from my musician friends, but we weren’t in a slummy little snack somewhere in Otsuka, we were at one of those HUB pubs.

I just got back from a trip to Bali with my co-workers… that is something else that totally baffles me. Company trips to Bali? That’s not normal for American offices! Even when I worked at an izakaya we all went on a trip to Saipan that my boss paid for. But man, Japanese people sure do get suckered into buying useless crap from street vendors more easily than any Americans I’ve ever seen… and they KNOW the Japanese will buy it, so the natives there don’t even learn English, they learn Japanese. “Shenyen, shenyen! Anata-san,
10 mai shenyen!”, as in１０００円… I was completely ignored. Some of them would even follow us onto the bus, and I was the only one who would stand up and say “Get out!”, so I was like a human shield for the whole trip. But because the group was mostly Japanese, we kept getting taken to CHINESE restaurants, which was disappointing. Odd fact I learned: the Japanese seem to prefer fish that smell as much like rotting boots as possible. I hate seafood, but we were given freshwater fish and some mahi-mahi and barracuda to eat and I thought it was delicious. My Japanese companions were like “It smells weird, and it tastes kinda funny…” But then on the airplane they served stinky Japanese-styled fish and everyone was like “Oh yummy, this is more like it!” and I had to breath into my shirt to keep from puking. I don’t think I’ll ever learn to like Japanese sea food.

And although I like corn and potato salad on my pizza, I think they overdo it a bit with the mayo sometimes. Like when the sauce IS mayo? That’s just silly. People are shocked when I tell them most Americans would gag at the thought of tuna mayo pizza.

I’m surprised your boyfriend didn’t know about the removing shoes, but I suppose the apartments thing is understandable. It’s not just Japan that is like that either, in Hong Kong owning an actual house generally means you are loaded. I know people there who use hammocks because they don’t have enough space in the apartments for beds for the whole family. =)

Not everyone can have their dream jobs and such, but not being able to fulfill a dream and giving up on your life before you turn 18 are two entirely different things. One of my Japanese professors loves Takeshi though, thinks he should be made prime minister heh.

I’ve always found the bukatsu thing to be more about having an excuse to have a group to hang out in than actually working towards anything or planing for a future in anyway.

Tests and grades here are misleading. For one thing almost all Japanese are graded on a curve not an absolute scoring system, so since that obviously means somebody has to have a high score they are skewed compared to other countries. That’s why Japan can have fairly high “official” test results and still have kids whose knowledge of history and geography is almost as bad as ours back in the U.S. ;)

There is a huge tendency to study just FOR tests here rather than to actually learn the material. An obvious danger with tests anywhere, but a lot of the tests here seem especially pointless. The TOEIC and TEOSL and the other tests are mostly from the U.S., but they are generally pointless as well. I’ve actually taken parts of the toeic and even though I write/edit/translate for a living and scored perfect on the SAT verbal in high school I still couldn’t score perfect on the sections where they want you to point out what syllables need to be accented in words and such.

Smoking here is bad, but I suppose thats to be expected when the government is one of the major owners of the tobacco company. ;)

The senpai kouhai, etc. stuff never really made too much sense to me. Generally just an institutionalized form of bullying in a lot of cases, but I imagine growing up in the “system” gives you a perspective I’m unable to develop from my outside viewpoint.

There’s plenty I do like about Japan. Fast food places are one of them, they were a bit of a shock when I went home after being here for awhile. Had the misfortune of changing planes in Chicago and having the staff at O’hare being the first Americans I interacted with back home. I went to a McDonald’s (forgetting how incredibly disgusting it is back home) and when I got up to the counter the girl behind it just says “What?”. Not, may I help you, etc. Just “What?”.

I also like not having to worry about some random stranger trying to knock my ass out because I was “looking at them all hard” or some similar intelligent reason, but I have to disagree with you on the corn and potato salad on pizza. ;)

You know that Beat Takashi guy, right? Do you know what he actually said on TV about Japanese youth and planning for their future? He said something like “I think it’s good that only a small portion of people actually folllow their dreams and end up doing what they want to do. Nobody wants to work at a convenience store, so if everyone had dreams and went for their dream jobs, we wouldn’t have anyone working the menial part time jobs. Society doesn’t need everyone’s dreams to come true.” And he wasn’t being cute and sarcastic and using humor to make a point, he was serious. And while yes, we would be a little stuck if every single Japanese got their dream job (because I think at least a fourth of all Japanese girls would then be licensed “princesses”), I’d rather the majority of high school kids consider their futures a bit more. The whole 部活 here is something my American school couldn’t compete with, so I thought kids would have more to think about because they have all these school activities that they can do, but for some reason a lot of kids are still clueless. They study as much as they do for tests but it’s like they don’t really consider life after tests. Also, have you ever noticed that taking tests here and your score on tests is how they decide intelligence? My friend said her Japanese friend told her she was glad she did well on tests because it was her “proof to the world” that she was smart. Like the TOEC (or whatever the English proficiency exam is called), where people think scoring a high score means they are fluent, but then they get a job where they work with foreigners and are surprised the big words they memorized aren’t as useful as words like “thanks”. I was pretty surprised when I said “thanks” to a bunch of Eikaiwa students and they didn’t know what I was saying. Don’t they watch American movies like all the time??

Yeah, smoking and drinking is also pretty bad, though I’ve noticed the no-smoking ads on TV and in the subways have been more frequent this past year. My boyfriend quit smoking after I bugged him for months about it, but he wasn’t a heavy smoker like 80% of my friends are. I used to work at an izakaya and it was murder on my health! The cooks even smoked in the kitchen, so I couldn’t escape it. On nights where it was a full house, and you literally had a cloud of smoke hovering over the whole pub, I would go home, blow my nose, and what came out would be BLACK. And after two years of working there, I can’t tell you how many times I saw people drink themselves stupid because their senpai told them to. The senpai figure would go to the bathroom and everyone else at the table would say “Man, I just want to go home, I wanna see me kids…” “Yeah, but senpai wants to keep drinking, so we can’t go home” “Yeah, that’s true. Oh well.” And then senpai would come out, order a round of imojouchuu and they’d wave their ties and applaud. Go home! See your families! Thank God I’m a foreigner here and the senpai/kouhai rules for some reason don’t apply to me. I used to go along with them, but two years of that left me pretty broke from drinking every other night until morning. Of course, my senpai were all washed-up rockers from the ’80s, so getting drunk with them was never enough. We’d have to drink until we were blind, then go someplace else and drink some more, then take a morning train to some onsen out of the city, drink, call some “chicks” to go karaoke with, drink more, and then at around 11 am we were done when the senpai figure finally passed out on the sidewalk with his pants around his ankles. I wish that had only happened once, and with only one senpai, but that was pretty much the usual schedule. It’s no wonder my views of Japan can be pretty jaded, I hung out with the wrong crowd, heh.

You know what I DO like about Japan? You don’t get any snotty high school brat behind the register at a fast food place sneering at you for ordering something with extra pickles. They smile and say “Kashikomarimashita!” like you are their favorite customer of the day. And most American friends I have known have complained that waiters and waitresses won’t talk to you enough at restaurants, but in America I was always thinking “Stop trying to make conversation with me, I am eating!” And I like that they put corn and potato salad on pizza. Amazing!

I figure since I’ve only been mentioning what I don’t like, I should mention what I DO like to balance things out. :D

Also just to clarify, for the working side of things hosting/hostessing is definitely more appealing than being a prostitute (or whatever they want to call it in the soaplands and such), I just personally find, looking at the customer side of things, frequenting hostess/host clubs a bit more sad/creepy somehow.

Lots of underage girls in places they shouldn’t be here. Most businesses aren’t big on carding and some actually use that as their selling point =P

There’s all kinds of stuff like you mention in that game. Obviously different societal views and cultural views and such, also depends on what age group the game is intended for and such. I know a lot of Japanese tend to be shocked by the idea of letting kids play FPS (first person shooter) game where you are essentially a disembodied hand with a gun, but in the states something like 70% of the market for those games is 17 and under.

Drinking and smoking tend to be other big problems when translating games. I always have fun trying to explain to Japanese ossan that in the U.S. going home from work and drinking yourself unconscious everyday is considered being an alcoholic. Actually, if you look at the alcoholism self-assessment, most adult Japanese males are alcoholics by American standards heh.

Protecting the “wa” is everything here, so making waves in the natural order is considered bad/embarassing, even if the natural order is all fucked up. Same reason unpaid overtime and other abuses at work are so common here, no one wants to make waves =P