Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Common Is It For Japanese Kids To Spend Time Overseas?
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vonPeterhof
Posts: 729 |
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I work at the Japanese embassy in my country, and at least in my department the diplomats seem to be split between two extremes - those who try to get their kids integrated into the local culture as much as possible, and those who keep their families in Japan so that they don't have to deal with foreign cultures. Those in the former category tend to be very critical of the Japanese mainstream educational system, saying that it's very parochial and doesn't foster critical thinking, so they try to place their kids as far out of its reach as possible even upon returning to Japan (not sure if the Japanese school in our city is more akin to an international school in Japan or just a normal Japanese school on foreign soil). Those in the latter category likely just don't want their kids to have trouble fitting in among classmates and later co-workers, in case they choose not to pursue a diplomatic career.
Suzuno from The Devil Is a Part-Timer! is an example of the former. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5876 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Foreigners in America are also targeted like that, so it is not solely a Japanese thing. |
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Just-another-face
Posts: 324 |
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I'm curious as to if it's ever actually happened and it's been put somewhere online for viewing.
I never said it was exclusive to Japan. |
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unready
 Posts: 400 Location: Illinois, USA |
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Presumably Justin means "school" is high school. Anyone who thinks high school in Japan is like what is represented in anime is horribly misinformed. Perhaps ANN could try to get someone who is (or has been) an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Japan to write a brief article about what high school is like. It would probably be better not to make familiarity with anime a prerequisite for writing it. |
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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While it sounds like a good idea, I can't help but wonder it's just gonna be one of those self-indulgent, ethnocentric rants about how the way Japan does things is "out of scope to the rest of the world" and should be handled with kid gloves. We don't need anymore of those floating around the web. |
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Juno016
 Posts: 2397 |
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I worked at an Eikaiwa in Toyota City last year. The city itself is actually named after the company that pretty much carries the financial burden of the city's success. Totoya's HQ is there, as well as many of their heads and workers. It was no coincidence that many of the Eikaiwa's students were returnees from abroad, usually the U.S., whose families had moved there due to work from Toyota. I don't have all the details, but it seemed customary for most families to be transferred for a 2-5 year stay abroad. A few students went to the Eikaiwa to study English before their family was sent abroad, too.
For the most part, what Justin says is pretty true. The younger they are, the weirder they seem. The older they are, the more open-minded they are about it and the more likely they're impressed with each others' experiences. Several of the middle and high school students were really passionate about studying abroad or living abroad, due to their experience.
It hasn't happened to me, but it HAS happened to many people. There's a nationalistic group in Nagoya that drives around in black vans with megaphones on their cars who like to drive around, blaring statements about needing to close off Japan. One of the foreigners I know who knows Japanese really well said he got told to go back to his country by one. They didn't know he knew Japanese, but he stuck his middle finger up at them and they got really angry. He says the people around him were mostly just trying to avoid the situation, but after it was over, a Japanese person approached him and asked him to not think of most Japanese people like that. And in my own experience, I've had biased, oblivious discrimination against me (people who don't discriminate out of spite, but they don't really know any better than to shoo the foeigner away because they think they can't help someone they think doesn't speak Japanese or who isn't a citizen). I've also had blatant racism against me. But you'll find that most people are either just intimidated by a lack of experience interacting with foreigners or are very welcoming and happy to interact with you. That's the problem with labeling the "Japanese" as a xenophobic race. It has its truth, but that should never cloud your judgment of the people you meet there. There will always be people who treat you as one of them, even in a country where such a concept feels impossible. |
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manapear
Posts: 1526 |
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Ahh, well yeah. That just makes sense and like you said isn't exclusive to any one group. I kind of felt it was a given so I didn't think to mention an extended/year+ stay.
Seriously. I don't know how bad other countries are, but the US is extremely xenophobic (and racist, so yeah). |
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Juno016
Posts: 2397 |
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You can find plenty of these around the internet, actually. A lot of ALTs document their experiences, and you can certainly find ones who like to add things like, "It's just like school life in anime!" or "It's nothing like school life in anime..." I attended a Japanese high school for a short time myself. With my extent of the experience, there's no real way to say that anime is completely realistic or unrealistic. You'll often see the people and their typical personalities in school misrepresented (no-name background students who don't have lines, but act in the background are often more realistic than named characters). School isn't nearly as awesome as it sounds (tests, tests, and more tests, especially in later high school years...). But then, a ton of great memories are easy to make with friends in Japanese high schools (I'm not just talking about myself) because of club activities and how people tend to be pushed to interact and work together for annual events. These memories are often what closely resemble the representation of high school and even earlier stages of school in anime. Atmospherically, KyoAni's slice-of-life works are the most realistic. I mean, you won't be going to school with innocent moe blobs, but you'll probably be able to talk and have fun doing things outside the club's normal schedule, too. And KyoAni is great at giving its viewers a spacial representation of real architecture and life, often exaggerating light and detail and such for extra atmospheric spark. |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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I find this is very common throughout Asia. While there is modesty and reservation in other areas of life, dealing with certain bodily issues is not one of them. Funny: https://youtu.be/Lc9UgkgzJeQ?t=11m00s (and ~12:00) |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11431 |
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Living abroad for a few years even as an adult can change people. A Korean friend went home for Christmas after a couple of years at college here and returned with stories of how his friends and family said he had become too Americanized (and they were probably right, since he later ended up rejecting the arranged marriage his family had brokered and chose his own wife). After he finished his degree, he went back to give a presentation at a job interview and was embarrassed to realize that he couldn't give it in Korean because he was so used to giving it in English and, aside from having trouble reorganizing it into his native language, he didn't know the Korean terms for many technical concepts (happily, he still ended up getting the job).
So I can see how it would be hard for children and teenagers to adjust to the culture shocks. It's hard enough to change schools when it's in the same city. |
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AnimeLordLuis
 Posts: 1626 Location: The Borderlands of Pandora |
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Japanese foreign exchange students may have a difficult time adjusting back into Japanese society but I wonder if the same can be said about say an American foreign exchange student inter grading into a Japanese school and then coming back to the states after a few years abroad.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Oh yeah, I didn't pay much attention to it before, but that is definitely from an early filler arc ofBleach. (They're not transferring from another country, but from another realm of existence though.)
Oh yes, definitely. I remember in Bizarre Foods America, the host, Andrew Zimmern, will make a beeline to an Asian district in that town because Asian cultures developed compeltely independently of western ones. While I can't speak for differences between Japan and the west, I can for Thailand. Americanized children are considered a problem for a lotof older people there, as chuldren who come to the United States or Canada for at least a couple of years almost always reject Thai values in favor of North American ones (namely in speaking one's mind and questioning authority).
There are a lot of the latter in the United States, from what I see, which is the reason why Chinatowns, Japantowns, Koreatowns, Thaitowns, Little Saigons, and so forth pop up in every major city: They are havens for newly immigrated east Asians who are not comfortable with integrating into American culture. I currently work in a district with a lot of mixed Asians, and the Japanese are much less likely to be timid around other people than non-integrated Koreans and Chinese though, which I always found was odd ever since learning that Japanese culture discourages socialization with strangers. On the flip side, I've also eaten at Korean and Chinese restaurants where I felt unwelcome (both by staff and its customers, and I would see similarly frosty treatment by non-Korean and non-Chinese people who walk in), whereas every Japanese restaurant I've been to that's actually owned and/or managed by a Japanese person has felt inviting.
It is definitely nowhere near as xenophobic as a lot of other countries are. Rather, because the United States has historically been a country people immigrate to, the xenophobes in the United States are just the loudest bunch. Look at the situation in Germany: The xenophobes there pretty much stayed quiet because they had nothing to complain about until the wave of people coming over from Syria. Now there's a national issue about closing off Germany's borders that's way more intense than Donald Trump's wall over Mexico and the same stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists that Americans have been trying to shake off for a while. Hence, the xenophobia and racism do exist in most other countries, some of them to a greater extent than the United States, but most other countries don't have the melting pot the United States has to agitate them. Japan does have problems with xenophobia and racism, but from what I can gather, most of it is non-malicious and just stems from their centuries with an isolationist government. |
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Wandering Samurai
 Posts: 875 Location: USA |
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Several years ago I had a cousin and his family who moved to Australia from Japan. Before they left Japan he was fluent in Japanese but then they did not keep up the Japanese studies while in Australia. They're back in Japan now but he goes to an international school instead of regular Japanese school.
I would actually be happy to indulge you sometime with this since I was actually educated in Japan as a regular student and went through the traditional entrance exam path instead of using special privileges that would have been afforded to foreigners. |
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aereus
Posts: 574 |
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I've taken two 3 week trips to Japan in recent years, and this was largely not the case. Granted, my Japanese is fairly decent and with proper pronunciation fluency, so YMMV. There was of course visible signs of apprehension at times when say, staff at a store may have been hesitant I was going to put them on the spot to speak English. (Which the relief on their face when I conversed in Japanese instead was always funny) But mostly, if you were polite and took care to follow proper ettiquette and could somewhat converse in Japanese, it went a long way. But the only time I really noticed was when a gruff hotel owner in Takayama told me they didn't have any single rooms and his suggested "hotel" for me was the international backpackers hostel down the street heh... To which I instead went to the "business hotel" next door that gladly rented me a room with no fuss. (Business hotel basically means crash pads for salarymen: Very small hotel rooms with the all-in-one contained bathrooms etc) Even had a funny time the 2nd trip where we were looking for some yakiniku place and stumbled into some local mom and pop dive bar in Nagano or Matsumoto, I forget which. The menu was entirely in heavily stylized handwritten script, so I couldn't make out damn near anything. Had fun watching J-league baseball with the locals though. And learned a useful phrase for bar hopping in Japan: nama hitotsu, kudasai! aka essentially "one draft (beer), please!" 
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manapear
Posts: 1526 |
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While the US is definitely a melting pot, we also have to remember that a lot of people brought here early in were done so against their will, or under horrid circumstances (given very little rights, set up to create conflict and oppression between the marginalized groups, etc). They were given the jobs the WASPS/higher class white people didn't want/thought were below themselves, and to this day, there's plenty of lingering racism. (This applies to Mediterranean groups less so but it did strongly then, and it applies to various Asian groups, Black people, etc.) I understand what you're saying on the other points, but honestly, the wall isn't something Trump alone has said and it has been talked about for a while by most of the Republican party. Looking at the way people have been treated or deported, or how people that speak any language aside from English are harassed about it (or bullied; there were three people killed over not speaking English in Milwaukee), like, I don't condone it but people getting loud over the Syria thing at least shows people getting fussy over a very large group of people coming in all at once. On a daily level though, the level of racism and xenophobia in the US is frighteningly real and heavy, but it also gets very little talk/highlighting in most media and people try to suppress discussion of it because we don't want to have a national discussion about it (because that means confronting it lol). Japan is certainly a different level of xenophobia. Given its history with just China, Korea and the Philippines, yeah, that's very inexcusable; but a lot of people are also unaware, or try it like "lol Japan," ir "it's not so bad/can you blame them~?" |
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