Actually fr! Studied a year there and I had no driver license back then… Which was fuckin painful as there was little to no other infrastructure! It was also fun to start uni with a 2 hour consultation about school shootings…

But the worst thing? They fucken start every conversation with a ‘how are you’ and look at you like you are boinkers if you say anything aside from ‘good’! Well I am not fuckin good at most times…

Lived in multiple eu countries as a contrast and its incomparably worse, while there is an amount of money I would go back temporarily but I would never settle down there

[–] daggermoon@lemmy.world 52 points 23 hours ago (14 children)

Wait, so y'all don't have to lie and tell people you're doing good? This is an American thing?

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

Yeah...

I am an American but have had a lot of friends from all over the world.

We are kind of exceptional in the extent of normalized, utterly disingenuous 'standard social interactions and phrases' that we use.

We talk like NPCs using throwaway, canned dialogue lines, and if we don't do NPC talk, well then that is actually viewed as antisocial...

Even though basically everyone else in the world would view this all as the opposite, inverted. Such forced bullshit conversations are generally viewed as bullshit and disingenuous.

Land of the individual!...

So long as you conform to various social norms that are so routine most of us don't ever even stop to question their prevalence or function.

[–] mrbubblesort@lemmy.world 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I hear ya, but I gotta say, America ain't nothing compared to Japan in that regards. They have actual standardized stock phrases for all types of interactions, at work and at home. I have been in meetings where some participants literally didn't utter a single word that resembled an original thought, and it was completely acceptable.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

That is very true, Japanese corporate business culture is on a whole other level.

Somewhat ironically, all my experiences with actual Japanese people are via Karate... in the Dojo, very strict, formal, no nonsense.

But uh, just casually hanging out? At least the ones I knew,... much more rowdy, haha.

Unrelated to my earlier Karate experiences, about a decadr after I'd gotten my black belt, and had since laid off Karate a bit... I once randomly befriended a Japanese man... who claimed he had been an actual Yakuza, a Yakushi... he explained to me that he had fucked up some operation, and instead of losing a finger, his superior struck him with the blunt side of the... I guess it would have been a waki-zashi?... stuck him on the knuckle, and that finger of his was pretty messed up.

He took that, and permanent exile from Japan, over... losing a finger, and then likely just getting killed... he'd pissed off another group pretty severely.

... We then got to talking about Anime, Yokai, and of course Karate... said he was a 4th Dan, 4th Degree Black Belt and uh... yeah, he was very, very significantly skilled in a few basically play fight, not even proper sparring bs we got into a few times.

Initially, he said he wanted me to prove I wasn't bullshitting about my black belt. Gave him my Style and as much family lineage of it that I remembered... and he then, almost totally without warning, threw a punch right at my face.