Surely you've heard this one: the Chinese word for "crisis" (危機, weiji in Chinese, kiki in Japanese) is composed of the two characters for "danger" and "opportunity". This reveals the wise Oriental insight that a crisis is an oportunity for progress, an impressive outlook we'd all do well to emulate. Or so we've been told for decades by management gurus, New Age philosphers, generic pundits, and even world leaders.  read more »

Like zillions of people, I'm a big fan of Pharyngula. It's a blog by scientist and outspoken atheist P.Z. Myers, straddling both science and (ir)rationality as its topics.

What do witty, learned discussions of science and religion have to do with Home Japan, a lowly blog about cultural matters? The big item in common: critical thinking. Skepticism and rationality, if you will – the best tools we have for clearing away preconceptions and errors and what not, and getting at the reality. I'm simply trying to take those same approaches and tools into cultural comparison, a field I feel they've had little contact with.  read more »

The smart way to learn about the world is this: Start with no conclusions. Draw in data. Form a tentative conclusion from those. Revise conclusion as new data require.

The common "culturology" way to do it: Start with a conclusion. Welcome all data that fit. Label data that don't fit as "exceptions" or "a paradox".

The mistake is called confirmation bias. Here's a really trivial example – meaningless by any measure, but worth pointing out because, hey, nice pizza ad!   read more »

In discussions of culture, why do so many people favor extreme, polarized claims over reality?

It's a common happening, though here I write after coming across a very minor example. I happened across a report on a designer's stunning blend of traditional kimono and African fabrics – the Wafrica kimono. The results are beautiful, and I can appreciate the creator's thought (unless I'm misreading) that the end result is its own object, not a subcategory of arbitrarily-labeled cultures:  read more »

So I was watching an old recorded show about participants in the most recent (?) Tchaikovsky piano competition held in (I assume) Russia. I wasn't watching too closely, or I could tell you more about the program and event; sorry, I only caught a few moments here and there.  read more »

If you haven't read Debunked: Japan's "Special Relationship with Robots", please do. All humility aside, that article is a good example of a culturology meme that persists despite overwhelming evidence contrary to its claim (and really no evidence supporting its claim).  read more »

I'll dip again into my bag of old newspaper clippings. This one is from the October 10, 1994 issue of The Japan Times, in the Nihongo and I column: "Language change inevitable", a discussion with Professor Kikuo Nomoto, former director of the National Language Research Institute.  read more »

Follwing up on the last post, I ran across yet another online stab at "the world's most difficult language".

http://allphilosophy.com/topic/show/1483

The writer ends with a neutral "every language has something difficult", though he does menton Japanese in passing:  read more »

What's the most difficult language to learn?

It's a good question, and an extremely difficult one to field.

What's the most uninformed response you could give to the above question?

That one's not so difficult; I've got the answer right here!  read more »

The latest JIN Newsletter discusses the high-tech toilets made by Japanese companies like TOTO. All fine and good, except for one comment stumbling into culturology:

It is ironic that Japan, that imported the very concept of sit-down toilets from the West, is now at the center of cutting edge lavatory technology.  read more »