International Living, Marriage & Travel

dave23 wrote:Visiting Japan and China is one of the most important things I want to do in life. From growing up looking at karate films, I've always had a desire to visit both countries. The language seems hard to understand, but I think I can learn both with determination and effort.

I think it's definitely a marking experience. One thing that was particularly confusing, if I am not mistaken here, is that they don't have numbers for the streets, so finding an address can be something extremely hard. We can be really close to the place, but even asking to the locals they don't know where it is! I suppose it's a different kind of urban organization.

Japan is definitely something different from most of the countries around the world, especially western countries. There is a certain etiquette you must learn when meeting people, when eating and so on. The most important stuff to learn are how to greet people and even less important stuff such as holding chopsticks could turn out to be important, so you should research that too.

manmad wrote:Japan is definitely something different from most of the countries around the world, especially western countries. There is a certain etiquette you must learn when meeting people, when eating and so on. The most important stuff to learn are how to greet people and even less important stuff such as holding chopsticks could turn out to be important, so you should research that too.

Yes, I remember watching a video one YouTube once about how Japanese people behave in public and if you are a westerner, you should be careful how you behave so that you won't offend anyone.

Japanese culture is about respect and honor. They value nature too. And this culture is not something abstract or vague like what we see in some other places. Believe it or not but the Japanese do not even sing their National anthem but we can never accuse them of being unnationalistic.Why? Because the first susbject that they learn in school is Japanese and it has so many learning hours to it. Unlike in the Philippines where we master English first. their love for country is shown in the way the make their own quality products for the world like: Yamaha guitars, Toyota and other cars, Sony radio products, Seiko quality watches and many more. In our schools we teach the young Filipinos pedicure and foot massage unlike the Japanese whose grade school kids can already make solar calculators and remote control gadgets, that Filipinos can also do but fail in their love for country which is only made manifest in the singing of the national anthem every monday mornings.