Japanese Culture

[SeijiSensei]

"Naked" festivals

Japan is home to many local festivals, but some of the best known are the ones in which men run and jump around nearly naked — not for dirty reasons, but for ancient religious ones.

The hadaka matsuri or "naked festival" dates back centuries in Japan. Men perform in traditional fundoshi (loincloth) to purify themselves before gods, to bring luck and prosperity or to welcome new seasons.

To see one for myself, I headed in early July to Shimadachi, a village high up in the Japanese Alps — where elementary schoolboys keep up the tradition of marching around town in only loincloth.

[SeijiSensei]

Squeezed between the generations

This video from the New York Times follows a middle-aged man as he cares for his aged and sadly incompetent mother and his six-year-old daughter. He also works at an advertising agency where he is under pressure to resign because of his cross-pressured life. Unlike the men in Usagi Drop and Amaama to Inazuma, Hayate-san is married, but his wife is away ten days a month working as a flight attendant. And neither of those men in the idealized world of anime also have to care for an aging parent.

The aging of the Japanese population will put more and more people into this situation as the number of young people, who might work in fields like elder care, declines. Of course, permitting greater levels of immigration from places like the Philippines and Southeast Asia to take on those jobs might help mitigate the problem, but we all know Japan is unlikely to relax its immigration standards anytime soon. Here in the US, about a quarter of home health aides come from foreign countries.

[MrTerrorist]

Japan parliament legalises casinos

So no more pachinko and hello slot machines?

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Japan parliament legalises casinos

So no more pachinko and hello slot machines?

Who says you won't have those in casinos? They are way more fun than mindless traditional slot machines anyway

[SeijiSensei]

To be accurate, this isn't a story about Japanese culture but about Western views of Japanese culture. The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players intended to mount a production of The Mikado last year but scrapped it after concerns about the racist stereotypes the show portrays. This issue has plagued a number of recent productions including one where the story was relocated to Italy with the first line of the opening number changed from "We are gentlemen of Japan" to "We are gentlemen of Milan!" Thankfully the New York G&S have not gone quite so far, but they are taking pains to avoid things like taping back the actors' eyes to make them more "slanty" and using yellowcake makeup.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/ar...-of-taste.html

The production will emphasize the work’s satire of Victorian mores, and do away with racially charged performance tics and excessive bowing and shuffling in its choreography. While the ensemble would never be mistaken for, say, the multicultural cast of “Hamilton,” it is the troupe’s most diverse yet.

[Pen3]

This years 67th Kouhaku was very weak compared to last years.

[IceHism]

Originally Posted by Pen3

This years 67th Kouhaku was very weak compared to last years.

But there was hikki this year. She was great. Female host was terrible though.

But hey, red team won twice in a row. That's nice but I kind of feel oddly about how the judges overrided the popular vote who leaned more towards white.

[SeijiSensei]

With Manicures and Makeup, Japan’s ‘Genderless’ Blur Line Between Pink and Blue

http://nyti.ms/2j83nmw

Mr. Sasaki, a model and pop band member who goes simply by Toman, does not regard his look as feminine so much as genderless. As one of a small but growing group of “genderless danshi” — “danshi” means young men in Japanese — he is developing a public identity and a career out of a new androgynous style.

[kari-no-sugata II]

"How Japan has almost eradicated gun crime":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38365729

I'm not sure how accurate the article is, but I thought it might be an interesting read. The historical instances of gun control in Japan feels a bit miss-characterised to me but I'm not an expert.

Japanese police officers rarely use guns and put much greater emphasis on martial arts - all are expected to become a black belt in judo. They spend more time practising kendo (fighting with bamboo swords) than learning how to use firearms.

"The response to violence is never violence, it's always to de-escalate it. Only six shots were fired by Japanese police nationwide [in 2015]," says journalist Anthony Berteaux. "What most Japanese police will do is get huge futons and essentially roll up a person who is being violent or drunk into a little burrito and carry them back to the station to calm them down."

[kari-no-sugata II]

Rock, paper scissors and the fierce world of Japanese pop:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-38413206

What most people did not know was this was a contest that decided which member of wildly popular Japanese girl group AKB48 would get to front the band.

"For the last decade, I didn't get to do much TV work or didn't stand in the front row of our performance at the AKB theatre," Tanabe told the BBC.

Suddenly her hysteria made much more sense. What lies behind the almost comic melodrama is actually a story of personal ambition, disappointment and an insight into Japan's unique music industry.

[IceHism]

Originally Posted by kari-no-sugata II

Rock, paper scissors and the fierce world of Japanese pop:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-38413206

Japanese music has been moving away from idols in the last 4 years that I wonder why foreign news agencies only ever report about idols or anime or memes. It makes no sense to me. Unless they're there to just make money and are using them as punching bags for that sake. I can get that. Why not report something about fantome or hoshino gen for example. Actual stuff that the average Japanese person actually likes.

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by IceHism

Japanese music has been moving away from idols in the last 4 years that I wonder why foreign news agencies only ever report about idols or anime or memes. It makes no sense to me. Unless they're there to just make money and are using them as punching bags for that sake. I can get that. Why not report something about fantome or hoshino gen for example. Actual stuff that the average Japanese person actually likes.

Because media....

[SeijiSensei]

Eighteen-year-old Hataoka Nasa has joined the LPGA womens' golf tour and had a good start (-1) in yesterday's first round of the season-opening tournament in the Bahamas.

Normally that wouldn't be sufficient for me to post here, except for an amusing tidbit about her name. I had never heard any character in anime named "Nasa," and it turns out there's a good reason for that. She's named after the US space agency NASA. Apparently her mother was a big fan of the US space program.

Wonder if the two of them watched Uchuu Kyoudai together?

[Cosmic Eagle]

http://vote1.fc2.com/browse/30692961/3/


Poll (unofficial) going around which will be submitted for consideration.



Asks which artistes would you like for 2020 Olympic celebrations



Vote 和楽器バンド please

[IceHism]

Wow a lot of people I would vote.

宇多田ヒカル Please.

[Toukairin]

Can they have the option to vote more than one pick as well?

[Cosmic Eagle]

Well you could vote differently per day I think...

[SeijiSensei]

More on low-wage immigrants working in Japan

Warning, it's not pretty: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/b...ers-trump.html

Japan’s total foreign-born labor force topped one million for the first time last year, according to the government, lifted in part by people entering the country on visas reserved for technical trainees.

That growth has also led to an increase in cases of worker abuse and fraud, labor activists say.

Ms. Liu is part of that debate. She arrived in Japan in debt after paying brokers $7,000 to arrange her visa. Once there, she said, she found onerous working conditions and lower-than-promised pay.

Her bosses, she said, “treat us like slaves.”

These workers are called "trainees," though they receive little training. They are basically second-class citizens who can be exploited by business owners. Often the "trainees" are only allowed to work for a specific company so they are powerless if the company fails to live up to its promises.

American cars? Japanese say, "no thank you."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/b...ican-cars.html

Mr. Kobayashi [executive director of the Japan Automobile Importers Association] sees a difference between European and American efforts to woo Japanese car buyers. European brands advertise aggressively and have done more to customize their products for Japan, for instance by producing right-hand-drive versions of their vehicles — a seemingly obvious selling point, in a country where the driving lane is on the left, that American producers have long been criticized for ignoring.

The best-selling American brand in Japan is Jeep, which last year accounted for close to half of all American auto sales there. It offers right-hand-drive vehicles — a legacy of the customized delivery vehicles it once made for the United States Postal Service, which let drivers step out onto American curbs instead of the road.

Catching up to the Europeans would require investments that American carmakers are increasingly reluctant to make, Mr. Kobayashi said. Ford scrapped its small dealer network last year, and is focusing in China.

[IceHism]

I don't even understand why anyone would ever want to be a foreign technical worker in Japan. at least research where you are going to work at. Black companies already exploit their native population.

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by IceHism

I don't even understand why anyone would ever want to be a foreign technical worker in Japan. at least research where you are going to work at. Black companies already exploit their native population.

Honestly, rule of thumb to working in Japan seems to be...you must be a specialist in a field and you must be good (for science it seemed to be minimum PhD requirement. Not sure about now. Arts like music will of course be way harder) otherwise you'll just end up no where. General labour jobs is obviously a no go (and pointless also...why would you spend so much to go to another country just to do a slave job which even locals find terrible)