My personal perspective on Japanese culture after being in Japan for almost 8 months

As a Chinese, when I first arrived in the Fukuoka airport in Japan, I was a little bit nervous because during the days back in China, I have be educated that Japanese are evil, and they killed lots of lots of innocent Chinese, whose corpse piled up like mountains, in the WWII, which is general truth. So, basically the image of Japanese in my mind is always someone wearing green helmet and military uniforms with guns killing Chinese people in the mountains. So when I got off the plane in the Fukuoka airport, you can imagine that how nervous I was, and I was very vigilance that ready to fight. At that time, even the smile of some very beautiful Japanese girl looked evil to me.

When I looked around in the airport, everything in the airport seemed unbelievably familiar to me, which reminds me of something back in China, the Chinese characters on the LED screen and the signs and signals all over the place. Although everyone else is yellow skin and black hair, but something else kept on informing me that I am not in China, but in a country which has ruined China lots of years ago. And that only makes me wondering what they were thing about that time, in the Airport. And also makes me think of if they will shoot me if I say I am a Chinese. I am feeling totally different from going to Australia and other foreign countries. When I was in Australia, I saw signs and signals in English everywhere and I feel quite free to go around simply because I speak English. But in Japan, I don’t speak the language when I arrived. I feel extremely unease when I arrived in Fukuoka.

After coming to APU with a bunch of Chinese, I feel a lot better and started to observe the Japanese people around. Well, at first, most people gave me the image that Japanese people don’t talk much and very shy and quiet. But after a month I discovered that they are quiet when their friends are not around, when their friends are around they can be very loud, even then the Indonesians.

Observing on Japanese people around only is not enough for enlarging my knowledge on the culture of this neighboring country. Then, gradually alone with learning Japanese and everything else, I went to the hot springs with people and even go to KaraOKs with APU students finding that Japanese people can spend a long time entertaining themselves in small places. I find that people can even stay in the Ofuro which is only 1 square meter large of a longtime, and also the Pachinco slots gave me such impressions too. Most Japanese entertainment is about concentration, when they are concentrated enough, they can forget the existence of themselves and gain a feeling of leaving the recent world, which was the feeling I get when I was taking the course of tea ceremony.

The teacher said that, at the end of the tea ceremony, you have to have a clear look at the bottom of the bowl in order to remember the drawing inside for you never know when and where you can drink tea with that bowl again. Such feeling made me confused along with the other things related to Japanese culture that I can’t understand.

But seems that the earthquake happened recently enlightened me by shaking the ground and seemingly rescued me from the culture shock. I suddenly understood lots of things that I can’t understand in the past about Japanese culture.

In such an island country like Japan, where earthquakes and volcano eruption sometimes happens, people don’t know whether they are still alive tomorrow so that they have to take their time and work so hard and even entertain themselves in some way. There is something like sakura that you never going to ever have it again in your life. So that makes some sense of some Japanese behavior and culture as I believe..

I was really culture shocked when I came here, there were lots of things I couldn’t understand. And I believe that there are still lots of mistakes in understanding Japanese culture recently even being ‘shocked’ by the earthquake.

And also the image of evil Japanese solider have gone in my mind. I have some different image now.

Hope that I can learn about more Japanese culture.