Going to Japan

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Great Youtube Channel for Going to Japan

Would you move to another country because of politics?

Nope. But I would to visit.

Japan is highly nationalistic, and they're not massive fans of American ex-pats. Plus, they live to work; rather than working to live. The incredible amount of stress a Japanese person endures in school and at work has lead to a fairly high suicide rate and a low birth rate.

^yes.
It makes me wonder when they're going to have something equivalent to the American hippy movement, where the kids revolt en masse.

I can see this actually happening now, it is really interesting.
The free thought and art coming out of Japan is amazing, I think they are on the precipice of a major cultural movement.

Politics would be my last reason for going to Japan.

If i was in the market for a girlfriend, I might go. Apparently Japanese women are suffering some sort of eligible batchelor shortage because their indigenous men prefer to stay at home with their love pillows and virtual girls on their Nintendo DS's.

The problem has got so bad the Japanese government is worrying about a low birth crisis. I'm not even joking.

It's best not to draw generalizations. Japan has 130 million+ people. If you're looking for a buddy or something, you can find one.

sometimes people just don't click with people of their own national culture.

I totally empathise with anyone going abroad to find romance or friendship.

It's the toxicity of extreme patriarchy; if I were a Japanese man, I'm not sure that I would want that kind of responsibility, either.

The Japanese have a word for foreigners: gaijin. I was an exchange student to Japan in 1982. I frequently received comments about my appearance. Why do your eyes look like that? Why is your nose so big? Do you bathe everyday? They always wanted to touch my hair. That really freaked me out. I wouldn't live there. It's too expensive, especially food. It's too crowded and there are too many earthquakes.

None of what you said is true, except the fact that Japan has a low birthrate; and it makes you sound super ignorant. Japan is not as freaky and weird as everyone likes to think it is. Pop culture does not really show what a place is really like. In pretty much every country the people are overwhelmingly normal. The low birthrate is mostly do to lack of support/resources for the mother and the cost of raising children.

I saw a documentary about that recently. Apparently it is related to the hierarchical structure there and the incredible stress that people are under regarding work. They have to dedicate themselves totally to their jobs and work ridiculous hours as competition is fierce. Getting married, especially for the women, is effectively the end of their career as Japanese society expects them to stay at home and raise children. So women have to choose between a career and marriage.

Sorry, I over simplified my answer. My point was that it wasn't because Japanese men are weird shut ins. Thanks for the info. Stuff like this is never simple.

I would have thought Japan would be an autistic nightmare for a non-native. A strict and rigid social structure totally different to anywhere in the World. You'd have a lot to learn and not a lot of time to learn it in. The Japanese are not very tolerant of foreigners or those that break their social conventions.

If you're looking for advice on learning Japanese, read the free articles on All Japanese All the Time and Fluent in 3 Months. Each of those two approaches is different, but they provide a lot of good advice and help cut out a lot of the self-defeating, negative thinking people interested in learning a foreign culture and language go through.

Though both sites sell stuff now, there are a lot of insightful free articles on both sites and they're designed to help low-budget learners.