There are both good and bad things about living in Japan. The good points include friendly people, a safe and happy society that treasures children and education, and never being farther than 20 meters from a vending machine selling canned coffee and hot corn soup. Not everything is perfect, of course: apartments in Japan are small and cramped, sometimes ridiculously so in Tokyo, and while the economy is finally picking up thanks to Abenomics, it’s not really a vibrant place to find work. Another “problem” that Westerners sometimes perceive is the so-called lack of “individuality” in Japan, as compared to Americans and Europeans, who are always totally individualistic and never influence each other or form groups of any kind. (That’s sarcasm, if it’s not clear.) A lot of this perception comes from foreigners making assumptions about Japanese people from a distance based on stereotypes, for example that the sarariman on the train must be a normal, boring Japanese guy, when he may in fact have a passion for doing cool stuff like flying RC airplanes, like a man in my neighborhood. J-List’s web designer is from France, but he’s far from a stereotypical Frenchman, as he loves the NBA and watches American basketball games from Japan through the Internet. When Japanese elementary school kids walk to school, they do so in a group called a han lead by the oldest child who is the hancho or leader (this is where “honcho” comes from), who’s responsible for making sure no kids in the group get left behind or bullied. But the way the kids walk in a line looks to Western eyes like ducklings following their mother, and I had a British friend here to couldn’t accept the idea of his child growing up in such a “conformist” environment, so he returned to the U.K. I certainly didn’t agree with his views, and think there’s plenty of individuality in Japan, if you don’t close your eyes to it.
