Japan is the only place where you’ll find a skyscraper-mounted 110-foot poster of three girls in bikinis, and nobody looks up at it. It’s overt and shameless, but also prude. Looking is something only morally perverted foreigners do.
- Feminism is all but dead in Japan. Girls aren’t even expected to work. They go to school to learn to keep up intelligent conversation, for all the brains it takes to shop for brand-name bags and groom their dogs at dog salons. It’s not even as fun as it sounds, not when you’re expected to look like a fucking barbie. I’m not even joking. The makeup, the black crap around their eyes, the soul-crushing heels that look like they could stab through a McChicken, the unnatural hair colors. And it’s not even patriarchal oppression. They buy this shit because they want to look like that.
- Okay, not really. Those were a small minority. There are morons in this country too. All of their weird Japanese shit comes because the rest of their culture and society is more tame and polite than a huge majority of the world.
- The idiot white tourist on the subway doesn’t understand that he’s not being anybody’s fucking hero with his stupid American jeering and hollering. The subways have a courtesy shut-the-fuck-up notice posted because in Japan, they like their silence, as in silencing your phone, your voice, and your ego.
- Individualism isn’t really a big thing. They make their students feel like the immature psychopaths they really are, because honestly, they’re a lot more quiet when they don’t try to differentiate themselves. Screw freedom.
- I never knew the trains and schools and uniforms and annoying-ass cicadas from TV animes were all real and typical in most of Japan.
- The people in Kyoto were generally more friendly and less plastic, by volume, than those of Tokyo. The city does things to you. There are too many strangers and overhead telephone lines.
- They are so fucking homogeneous. Here in America, I feel like there are fewer people than there really are in any given space, since most of them are so radically different from me that I can tune them out. In contrast, I sense every single Japanese millennial, and there are a metric shit-ton of them in some of the bigger subway stations. I found a face-clone of nearly all the Asian friends I know, and subsequently realized how cliché some of their fashion and hairstyles are the Orient.
- 16 hours ahead of LA time, it’s really easy to knock out at 9PM.
- They get more and more bad-ass as they age. I’m going to get a motorcycle when I start graying too.
- How I love America, land of the diverse and refuge of the wasteful. It’s pretty tough separating your trash by material, and even worse when you know Americans are screwing it up beyond repair anyway. We trash the planet enough for a dozen countries.
Sorry for the language, but if you could navigate your way through syntaxionist, you’re probably old enough not to care.
