hello it's your american friend anming living here in japan i first came to japan in 2015
coming over from china where i had lived for quite a few years and there's just certain
things i wish i had known before i got here they would have made the transition a lot
easier now of course i wasn't completely unaware of japan when i came here i had done some
research i had some knowledge about the country but there were certain things that would have
helped and we're going to talk about those today now yes i knew about the notoriously
crowded trains though that didn't make it any less shocking i knew about the natural
disasters i even knew about the high cost of living here but there were certain things
that i realized when i came over here that just didn't match up with what i thought the
country was and we're going to talk about those things today and we'll start off with
number one the strictness of japan now i was rather nervous to come over here because i
had been told that japan is really strict there's a lot of rules and 14 things you should
never ever ever do in japan but i slowly realized that a lot of people were doing those things
that it wasn't that strict that this isn't north korea that you know you're not being
monitored all the time or people aren't just standing there silently judging you all the
time that it's just a country of people and those are best practices now these images
are not to dox anyone i'm not trying to shame anyone but rather just showing you a slice
of life that i can see as i walk around the country
Yuki san he's eating potato chips.
He's eating potato chips.
different potatoes potato chips.
He's eating potato chips inside the temple okay so don't say that only foreigners do
kind of rude things in japan that is just not even right to say that um anybody can
do rude things in japan including japanese people right yes man people are people let's
be honest but anming you missed the mark here on japanese strictness because you didn't
talk about institutions that's where the strictness is in schools and workplaces well i would
argue that there's a lot of strict things in american workplaces that japanese would
find very shocking like the fact that a lot of us drink alcohol but we're not supposed
to talk about it at work that is considered to be very unprofessional the posting a picture
of you and your buddies drinking on a social media account that belongs to you could lose
you an interview it could be held against you and also the fact that we're not really
supposed to have romantic relationships with our co-workers in a lot of offices that would
be really shocking to japanese people so it's all a matter of perspective well i'd say job
well done we ate it all it's gone nothing left the next thing that i wish i knew before
i came to japan is very specific to me as a person who studied chinese before learning
japanese i had heard of this thing called onyomi which is the chinese reading of the
japanese words and i thought they would be close enough that i could get away with asking
directions using the reading of the kanji in chinese and all it did was really confuse
people
the first time i ever came to japan was to participate in a language program for one
month at a language school so the teacher went to the airport and picked me up and i
thought he would know english but in reality he didn't so thank god for some audio lessons
that i listened to before i came to japan for the first time because it really saved
my butt and made that two-hour train ride back to the school dormitories a lot less
awkward now he told me that the school was providing me with a futon and in my head that
was like a couch thing with a pull-out mattress but in reality it wasn't so i ended up in
a room with with this futon thing on the floor with three girls and oh my gosh i really wish
i had known that because i wasn't prepared for that i can do futons now but being a newbie
to japan that really hurt my back so i was on the floor for a month that was that was
kind of rough
wow this is quite a traditional little room isn't it it's got everything these tatami
floor mats this is a real japanese futon or futon as it's called and then the table is
right on the ground
i don't think a lot of americans know what a actual futon looks like it's just basically
a bed spread on the ground
coming to japan for the very first time and spending a month here was a really shocking
experience and unfortunately i did not come away from that experience with a very good
impression of the country and that's something that i wish i knew before i came here because
i spent almost my entire time in tokyo i thought people were cold that they weren't friendly
and that couldn't be further from the truth so i wish that i had seen more of the country
and seen more of the countryside and i would have come out with a much brighter first impression
of japan now of course i love the country now but that took a while i had to go out
and give it another chance to realize how cool it really is
see people are nice here because they wouldn't really say konichiwa to you in tokyo just
out here it kind of reminds me of michigan where i'm from
you wanted to see the countryside well here it is
Tochigiken Utsunomiya.
Utsunomiya is pretty darn countryside it's um about an hour and a half two hours north
of tokyo by train and yeah it's pretty rural so is this what you expected
wow can you see all these dragonflies in the air okay so we have to admit there is something
quite charming about the japanese countryside that's just really special not as overrated
as you might think it's actually kind of cool