Holy crap! You mean things aren’t perfect here in Japan? I guess that means I have to hate the country and go back to my wonderful country where nothing is ever annoying or broken.

Earlier this month someone (Tim Rogers) put up a long and arduous article about his Japanese dislikes. It’s extremely long, but since I’m only going to address certain points within this article you don’t need to read it if you don’t feel like it. (By the same token, if you don’t want to read what I have to say about what he wrote and just want to get to the details on the syndrome go down to the bolded area.)

There is a syndrome that goes around and affects many foreigners that live in Japan for at least a year. Symptoms include, negativity, crankiness, irrational hatred towards most/all things Japanese, and whininess. Why does this happen? Is this a sign that Japan sucks? What’s the cure? Let’s try and find out.

While I don’t want to come off as fanboy-ish it’s slightly hard to not sound that way when you talk differently or argue with someone who does something like what Tim did; while there are some good points somewhere in the muck and mire they’re almost lost because of all of the nitpicking and cherry picking. He starts off his complaint list with Anime. He only wrote one paragraph about why it sucks, but it’s hard to take it seriously since he gives one (and a half) example(s) in his favor and then mentions Dragon Ball Z as a show that was “graphically iconic, with a story more coherent than it probably needed to be”. Akira Toriyama has his own iconic style, but I would not pick DBZ as an example of good anime (the updated DBZ Kai is much better though).

He goes on to complain about people smoking and the lack of vegetarian dishes. These things are true, many people smoke and it’s not always possible to get a vegetarian meal in a restaurant. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t non-smoking train cars on the express trains (can’t smoke at all on regular trains), non-smoking areas (usually bigger than smoking), smoking rooms that stop others from having to deal with the smoke, and supermarkets. However, besides asking at restaurants for them to take out meat you’ll have to make your own dishes or go be a monk. It’s unfortunate for those that have made a decision to not eat meat, but should you really be pissy about it when other people don’t cater to your personal decision? Yes, they’re not making it easier for you but you have no right to force them to have to serve dishes you like; this also doesn’t take into consideration those restaurants that actually do have vegetarian food (few, but they’re there).

PETA, annoying everywhere

After some things that I can’t comment on he spends most of the rest of the post talking about small things. As with relationships, sometimes it’s all the little things that cause the breakup to occur. For Tim his are yelling to get customers, language quirks, hostess clubs, niches, Japanese comedy, Japanese music, Japanese movies (and how they copy manga), cost, drink tickets at bars/clubs/concerts, putting tape on purchases at convenience stores, stereotyping, pachinko, and some other things that I didn’t mention. Some of these things are definitely things that he just doesn’t like but aren’t/shouldn’t be deal-breakers by themselves. However some of them (comedy, music, movies) are, while true on the surface, not what he makes them up to be. For these few I guess that he’s exaggerating to make a point, but I really can’t be sure since I don’t know him.

One thing I found that was hugely exaggerated was the cost argument. While he makes many true points about things that are actually more expensive he then goes and brings up game prices. He says

“games tend to pretty much always cost $100 on their release dates here. It’s getting fairly ridiculous. Game rental generally doesn’t happen. So most people who buy new games race through them lovelessly so they can sell them back to the local used shop before the buyback price drops. I’m sure the publishers have crunched the numbers a thousand times, and come up with some reason to justify not lowering the initial price of a typical game.”

Although some games are more expensive than others when they come out (e.g. FF13) the usual price is around 7,000円. Is this more expensive than a normal game at time of launch? Yes, but this doesn’t even take into consideration other factors in the game market that exist here but are either stifled or missing in some other countries, supply and demand; I recently picked up a used copy of FF13 for 2800円 and a new copy of Halo 3: ODST for 2000円, it’s still at least $40 new in the US. Also, when a game is extremely popular, Persona 3/4 or Smash Brothers (Both old and still 5000円), the price stays high until interest wanes. I could go on about each of his points, but I’ve already gone on longer than I expected.

Doesn’t it suck to wait a month or two for games to drop in price? Why can’t I buy all my games at Gamestop?!?

Mr. Tim has spent at least five years in Japan. He obviously didn’t feel the way he does now for all five of those years, what happened?

Japanese society, being the way it is in its current form, can be grating. There are many, many people in other countries who spend some of their time listening and watching exported Japanese culture (i.e. Jpop and anime). A lot of these people say that they want to live in Japan and some of them actually get off their ass and go do it. They definitely have an incorrect assumption of what Japan is like, but they still like many Japanese things. Nonetheless, it can be a tough experience that ends up with them going back to where they came from and settling on enjoying what they like about Japan without having to deal with Japanese society. I’m not saying that Tim is an otaku, I’m just saying that many people would think that someone who seemingly loves Japan (or what little they know from anime) would acclimate themselves to the society quicker than someone with less knowledge of Japan.

For everyone, (again, like a relationship) when they get to Japan they have their rose-tinted glasses. These glasses seem to stay on longer than they would if Japan was your boy/girlfriend but they wear off nonetheless; what you (probably didn’t) read was not that. Many foreigners in Japan seem to go straight from rose-tinted glasses to shit-tinted glasses (or maybe concrete-tinted?). It could be because expectations were too high, they can’t take all the concrete, have trouble with the language and/or the way people act with complaints and problems, or even the little annoyances that have finally got to them. Whatever it’s caused from it affects not only the infected individual but also those he associates with. Given the side-effects, this syndrome can be quite annoying.

Luckily there are remedies, even if they don’t work permanently on everyone. Some of the most prominent cures are fun, going to the countryside, changing locales within Japan, and leaving. Each works in their own way, but they generally get the job done, even if some are much more expensive than others. For an unlucky few, the syndrome comes in monthly or yearly cycles; a cure is not known for these individuals. What is known is that the best way to protect yourself from (re)catching this sickness is to stay away from message boards that expats seem to spent time on. If you know an individual who is going on one of these message boards, take them away from their computer and make them go have fun, there are a bunch of places where this can be accomplished, even if the affected might be a pain in the ass for a while.