I recently had dinner with a friend of mine, a former McElroy colleague, who went on to live and teach in Japan for four years. He noted some interesting cultural peculiarities regarding how the Japanese feel about what it means to be Japanese. This article talks about it at length. My friend noted that a Westerner who has completely immersed himself into the Japanese culture is less likely to receive citizenship than a person of Japanese descent that lacks knowledge of the language and culture and was born elsewhere, like Brazil or Peru, for instance. The takeaway from this is that the United States isn't the only country that struggles with notions of what nationalistic characteristics are, and what its place is in a world where boundaries are being rapidly blurred by globalization.

Despite some significant changes in citizenship definition and the legal status of resident Koreans in Japan, it appears that Japanese citizenship remains reserved primarily for "Japanese" people, who were born to Japanese parents, grow up as Japanese, and spend most, if not all, of their lives in Japan. Sociologist Kosaku Yoshino calls the Japanese national identity based on the notion of cultural uniqueness "cultural nationalism." Japanese citizenship has been the embodiment of this cultural-nationalistic thinking: To be a citizen of Japan, one must be "Japanese" in every conceivable way, not only legally, but also culturally and, most importantly, biologically.

Have you been putting off that Japanese website translation, or Japanese translation of your marketing materials until the Japanese economy bounced back? An article in today's Washington Post indicates that Japan is ready to spend.

"With Japanese consumers spending again, we could be looking at the start of the longest period of economic expansion in Japan since World War II," said Takahide Kiuchi, senior economist at Nomura Securities. "This is something that is going to be felt around the world."

Tags: Japan | Japanese | economy

This is a pretty informative link to an online Japanese paper that devotes an entire section to language and culture differences in the U.S. and Japan

A recent article, Cultural Conundrums / Careful About Care, deals with expressions ending in "sama", which denotes an emphasis on a word or implies an honorific. The author talks about the difficulty in going from Japanese to American culture and back, and trying to provide the equivalent expression along the way.

On a trivial note, a funny news item has appeared recently where the Australian Tourist Industry made an obvious faux pas when trying to export the idiomatic 'Where the bloody hell are you?' to Japan.

Tags: Japanese | Japan | culture