The reading this week is about the uncertainty of countries. I especially focus on the description in the reading “Anxious culture tend to be expressive culture. They are the places where people talk with their hands and where it is socially acceptable to raise one’s voice, to show one’s emotions, and to pound the table. Japan seem to be an exception in this respect. The Japanese generally behave unemotionally in Western eyes.”As noted above, while we have high-stress mind, we tend to hide these emotions in our mind. It seem peculiar in the world view, however, I think this is logical when considering the Japanese background.
First, the reason why Japan is high uncertainty is its disaster-prone geography. SInce ancient times, Japanese archipelago experienced numerous disaster, and we have serious unexpected damage each disaster. Just one disaster cause the established infrastructure to be ruined at one moment. Therefore, Japanese people get to be fearful about uncertainty. We feel how uncertainty cause serious damage to our life in the DNA level.
Second, Japan is an island country and also homogeneous nation. In many times in history, we exclude the foreign cultural exchange partly because we have difficulty in having access to foreign countries physically. Although we have developed our distinct culture and nationality of which we can be proud before the whole world, the fact remains that we have a sense of inferiority or rejection against foreign culture especially Western country that is totally opposite from Japan in a cultural sense. Therefore, we have an awareness that we will be hard to deal with different things or change and we seem to be nervous or hide emotions in Western eye.
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