As much as I would like to say it's all good

As with any country, time, person, etc, not everything is perfect. And something happened a few days ago that really disturbed me, so I figured that was good initiative to write a post about a few of the less wonderful things in Japan.

I'll start with the disturbing thing I saw Thursday. After badminton practice on Thursday, I got to the station only to realize my train was delayed 55 minutes. Luckily I arrived about 10 minutes before it did, but I couldn't help wondering why on earth it was delayed so much. Sometimes trains are delayed 3-4 minutes, occasionally 10-15, but almost never so much as an hour. I got off the train in Kusatsu to make a transfer, and a screen that usually displays ads and times was showing a screen reading "Biwako line (which is the line I take) delayed 55 minutes due to human damage accident". Yeah. In Japan, that's code for "Someone just committed suicide by jumping in front of the train". I was, needless to say, a little disturbed by the fact that I had just been riding that train. And the really bad thing? It happens quite frequently here. Suicides are relatively common (considering what they are). Why? It's some combination of people feeling stress from work and not wanting to burden others, I think (although I'm sure there are many reasons). This is something I really dislike about the "Japanese mindset". It's like the people feel such a strong need to not be a burden or not fail that they just... kill themselves. You don't have people who just say "f*** it" and get on with their lives like in other countries. It's disturbing.

Train pervs. I despise these. See, when the trains get super packed and you barely have room to breath, there are some people who decide to take advantage of the situation and... yeah. Luckily it's not a tolerated practice and those people are shut down pretty quickly, but still. Just ew.

Foreigner haters. These are only really found in the huge cities where there are a lot of foreign tourists. On some level, I can't really blame them- it must be annoying having to deal with clueless tourists day after day, not to mention tiring. These people tend to not hate if you can speak Japanese or at least know some culture. On the other hand, there are some people who just hate and are very "Japan is for Japanese only". It's really just racism, and like all racism, it's stupid. There aren't a terribly large amount of these kinds of people, thankfully. But is irritating when you come across one.

Women's treatment. Being an American, I'm very used to seeing working, educated, perfectly-fine-on-their-own women. So it's very strange to see large amounts of women who don't work, who depend very much on their husbands, and who are used to sexism. I would shoot myself in the foot before having to become so dependent on a husband, and I would hate not being at least somewhat self-sufficient. When I see something sexist, I have to fight very strongly against my instincts which scream that it's horribly wrong, because while I may see it as despicable, in here it's accepted for the most part. Not to say that I let people be sexist towards me- I would shoot both of my feet before someone would get away with that- but it happens all around me. One of my teachers at school said that part of it stems from the fact that when the USA rewrote the Japanese constitution, they added a clause for equality for women, hence the women never really had to fight for it. So there's not the same sense of pride and empowerment that (especially) American women feel about their rights. That's how it is. For now.

Lastly: Japanese English classes. There is no effort to teach students correct pronunciation, and in fact they teach students to speak in a Japanese accent, so there have been many, many occasions where someone says something to me in English and I actually think they're speaking Japanese. It either takes a while to understand them, or I just ask them to say it in Japanese. And there's a heavy focus on grammar, not normalcy. So while the students can form all of these complex sentences, they're so outdated and unnatural that I can barely understand them. I want to rip my English grammar book to shreds and teach people how to say things the normal way, not the correct way. The normal way is often 10x shorter and easier, anyways, so why not? GAH.

Alrightly then. Morg, thanks for asking a question :) I'll get back to you later on it, maybe on skype, no?

Jaa ne!