Seeing "Foreign Influences" as I am Given My Final Goodbyes
Friday night: A 2-hour farewell drinking party followed by all-night clubbing; Saturday night: an early afternoon symposium on international education followed by another 4-hour farewell drinking party, followed by another almost all-night clubbing; Sunday night: another farewell drinking party will be happening a few hours from now...my last weekend here in Tokyo has surely been an emotional exhilarating (and physically damaging) one...(I am at home so rarely that I can barely muster a couple of hours outside of intense sobering-up sleeping sessions to write my weekly post)
Too much fun, just too much fun, that I would not be able to have if I had my mind concentrated on work...and too glad, just too glad that after 8 months of randomly meeting people both inside and outside the company, there are so many people who are willing to spend sleepless nights with me to celebrate my future and enjoy my "companionship" one last time. Of course, the regular drunken comments take over at some point, but still, I enjoy watching all that Japanese drunken humor one last time before I head back onto the "world stage."
But speaking of the Japanese drinking culture that I have been so ready to criticize in the past, it is now interesting to note that the unique Japanese awkwardness, often related to talks about work and coworkers, associated with them have been slowly disappearing. Surely, it is my personal opinion that could be highly biased by my newly found desire to reminisce about the good times in the past 8 months, but with increasingly foreign presence in Japan and especially in Rakuten, I see a waning of the "pure Japanese culture" from my farewell party experiences.
That first reason is really obvious and involves trying completely new things. The idea of going to dance clubs is obviously not fitting with traditional Japanese culture that places high emphasis on displaying "polite public selves" even when inebriated. Yet, in the past couple of days, I have managed to get quite a few people, still semi-sober and conscious of "social rules," with little or no experience clubbing to join our hectic all-nighters. The mere idea of having these conservative Japanese people, definitely outside the regular clubbing crowd, to try something new and different as Western-style dance club is remarkable in itself.
The second one involves a much more subtle, yet sudden reconsideration of their own future as someone living their whole lives in Japan. Perhaps it does have a bit of my own personal influence, but I am finding more and more Japanese people around me suddenly pondering seriously whether going outside of Japan for extended period of time, or even just trying to work in a non-Japanese environment in Japan, has certain merits and necessities. They are reconsidering what it really means to be Japanese in an increasingly globalized world, and whether they have been ignoring the outside world for too long.
A very novel and interesting game I played during a nomikai illustrate it well. The game requires the participant to have a normal conversation in Japanese without using any Western loanwords. Each Western loanword used is fined by 100 JPY in the nomikai bill. While it is highly ironic that the Western loanwords are mostly replaced by loanwords of Chinese origin, the interest and the difficulty with which everyone played the game shows that the role of "what is foreign" in Japan is going through a fundamental rediscovery and more thorough recognition by the public.
It is just as the speakers at the symposium on international education remarked, Japan is alarmingly slowly coming to grips with just how gloomy of a future the country will have if it refuses to accept foreign ideas and implement them within the existing domestic socio-cultural environment. Some speakers criticized just tendency of Japanese education to destroy the characters of individuals for "public good," while others, to the quite shock of the audience, declared the only way for Japan remain relevant in the future depends on a transformation to an immigrant society like the US.
Yes, a nomikai is a nomikai and the Japanese, no matter what they do in free time, will mostly go back to being regular salary-men and Office Ladies when the weekend is finished...but waves made by foreigners and the Japanese with foreign experiences are slowly chipping away at the social status quo. Change is coming for sure, and all the foreigners in clubs and companies in various bottom-rung places in Japan, are helping out to bring about the change. If I can do what I can to be part of all this, I perhaps have just found another, and pretty "moral," reason to quit and leave...
Too much fun, just too much fun, that I would not be able to have if I had my mind concentrated on work...and too glad, just too glad that after 8 months of randomly meeting people both inside and outside the company, there are so many people who are willing to spend sleepless nights with me to celebrate my future and enjoy my "companionship" one last time. Of course, the regular drunken comments take over at some point, but still, I enjoy watching all that Japanese drunken humor one last time before I head back onto the "world stage."
But speaking of the Japanese drinking culture that I have been so ready to criticize in the past, it is now interesting to note that the unique Japanese awkwardness, often related to talks about work and coworkers, associated with them have been slowly disappearing. Surely, it is my personal opinion that could be highly biased by my newly found desire to reminisce about the good times in the past 8 months, but with increasingly foreign presence in Japan and especially in Rakuten, I see a waning of the "pure Japanese culture" from my farewell party experiences.
That first reason is really obvious and involves trying completely new things. The idea of going to dance clubs is obviously not fitting with traditional Japanese culture that places high emphasis on displaying "polite public selves" even when inebriated. Yet, in the past couple of days, I have managed to get quite a few people, still semi-sober and conscious of "social rules," with little or no experience clubbing to join our hectic all-nighters. The mere idea of having these conservative Japanese people, definitely outside the regular clubbing crowd, to try something new and different as Western-style dance club is remarkable in itself.
The second one involves a much more subtle, yet sudden reconsideration of their own future as someone living their whole lives in Japan. Perhaps it does have a bit of my own personal influence, but I am finding more and more Japanese people around me suddenly pondering seriously whether going outside of Japan for extended period of time, or even just trying to work in a non-Japanese environment in Japan, has certain merits and necessities. They are reconsidering what it really means to be Japanese in an increasingly globalized world, and whether they have been ignoring the outside world for too long.
A very novel and interesting game I played during a nomikai illustrate it well. The game requires the participant to have a normal conversation in Japanese without using any Western loanwords. Each Western loanword used is fined by 100 JPY in the nomikai bill. While it is highly ironic that the Western loanwords are mostly replaced by loanwords of Chinese origin, the interest and the difficulty with which everyone played the game shows that the role of "what is foreign" in Japan is going through a fundamental rediscovery and more thorough recognition by the public.
It is just as the speakers at the symposium on international education remarked, Japan is alarmingly slowly coming to grips with just how gloomy of a future the country will have if it refuses to accept foreign ideas and implement them within the existing domestic socio-cultural environment. Some speakers criticized just tendency of Japanese education to destroy the characters of individuals for "public good," while others, to the quite shock of the audience, declared the only way for Japan remain relevant in the future depends on a transformation to an immigrant society like the US.
Yes, a nomikai is a nomikai and the Japanese, no matter what they do in free time, will mostly go back to being regular salary-men and Office Ladies when the weekend is finished...but waves made by foreigners and the Japanese with foreign experiences are slowly chipping away at the social status quo. Change is coming for sure, and all the foreigners in clubs and companies in various bottom-rung places in Japan, are helping out to bring about the change. If I can do what I can to be part of all this, I perhaps have just found another, and pretty "moral," reason to quit and leave...
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