After living in Japan for nearly two decades, I’ve made certain observations about the Japanese people. They are, for example, the cleanest people in the world, and probably the most polite. I’ve also met more than a few Japanese who struck me as incredibly meticulous, able to focus on something intensely for a long time. While my son studied for a year to get into a good high school, I’ve taught students who thought that studying was the entire reason for being alive, and they’d been preparing for their university entrance exams since the fourth grade. Near J-List there’s a guy who loves to fly RC airplanes on Sundays, and he’s been doing it every week without fail for a decade and a half — how does someone keep up that kind of intensity? In the fun anime B Gata H Kei, there’s a girl (Mayu) who’s loved the main character all her life, but she’s to shy to work up the courage to tell him. It sounds like a quaint anime archetype, but I taught a girl like that back in my ESL days. Every week in English conversation class we’d talk about this boy she’d liked for years, yet she could never bring herself to confess her love for him.
Japanese can be meticulous and obsessive at times.
