As a visitor to Japan, I know there are a number of cultural differences – but IPWalk has a picture comparing the differences between the home pages of one of the largest “Western” web hosting companies (1and1) and the largest Japanese web hosting provider – Lolipop: and the difference are astounding…. Take a look yourself.
Tag: japan
I’ve just realised something….
When I was in Japan in September 2004, I brought a Japanese DVD. The DVD was in Japanese and since it was intended for the Japanese market, it was entirely in Japanese. I watched the DVD on the plane back and I’ve seen it several times since.
Laying in bed just now, it just occured to me…. The Japanese DVD is in Japanese: i.e. there is no English. How on earth did I manage to watch and understand it and how come it’s taken me over 2 years to realise it was in Japanese?
I’ll now have to find the DVD and re-watch it and see if it still makes sense. If so, somehow, magically, I know Japanese without knowing it… Either that, or I’m really really slow off the mark!
As some of you may be aware, in September last year, I treated myself to a 16 day holiday in Tokyo, Japan. I’ve just got round to uploading around 340 photos (230Mb!) to http://japan04.rac.me.uk/ for viewing. Pictures are variable in quality and most don’t have descriptions at the moment (I’ll try and add them later on).
You’ll notice that the pictures start on “Day 5” – this is because when I went to Japan, I took my little Kodak EZ-200 camera with me: but by day 5 I had filled it up. However, whilst I had the cables and my laptop with me – I forgot to bring the drivers for the camera so I couldn’t download the photos! I had to buy a quite nice Ricoh Caplio RX 3.2Megapixels camera and use that. But when I got back to the UK, I found out the Kodak camera managed to somehow get corrupted! So the first 5 days photos of my first “own” holiday are now lost! It’s a double shame as on Day 2, I had a tour around Tokyo and took lots of good pictures 🙁
I’ve just watched the first 10 minutes of “Cutie Honey” (a Japanese anime where I’m not quite sure what the “target audience” is – the women seem to be very well endowded and bits of clothing keep on being torn off, but not in a sexual way..).
Anyway – the main character “Honey” has just come in for a shock…
How would you feel if:
* You just found out your Dad was dead (murdered)
* But he left a tape recording for you
* Telling you not to be suprised, but you aren’t his daughter
* Because you are an android
11minutes in and I’m laughing like anything (“those crazy Japanese!”) and already trying to figure out quite what is going on 😉
Whale Meet Culture
Following on from the previous Difference Between East And West post, the BBC News has an article about whale meat – cruelty and the kitchen and states “Whale meat was not everywhere…but in every city I visited I came across at least one restaurant which served it in some form.”
I must admit, I didn’t see anywhere offering whale meat when I was in Tokyo, but I wasn’t particularly looking. One of the journalists the author of the article talked to was an Austrlian where they slaughter around two million kangaroos every year: and the Austrialian journalist didn’t see anything wrong with that, but the slaughter of whales were a “barbaric cruelty”. The Japanese wouldn’t think about eating Dog – but Vietnamese people would think its ok, and in Peru they actually drink liquidated live frogs…
It’s amazing on the cultural differences that there exists just between the different style of foods. I’m actually against whale hunting myself – mainly because of the endangered level of some of them and the fact that it’s difficult to make a “clean kill” (it takes around 3 explosive bolts to kill a whale).