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This poor person is suffering from culture shock. I'm an immigrant let me explain. Culture shock is not OMG they eat X here. Culture shock develops slowly from

• intranation 17y ago
  Culture shock to me, as someone who has visited 20-ish countries and lived in 2, is more that "things are almost normal and like what you're used to, but just not enough to be comfortable", and as a result you end up perpetually on edge and perpetually adjusting just outside your comfort zone. It's jarring and difficult, a little like the room in Orwell's 1984 where the corners aren't quite straight, and things are just out of focus. I didn't get culture shock in Tokyo, because it's just so different to everywhere else I'd been that I completely stopped the usual comparisons and just gave up.
  • prawn 17y ago
    A bit like a cultural uncanny valley. Sounds plausible to me.
  • Vivtek 17y ago
    I got that from Germany, after a month in Tokyo. I was fine in Tokyo, but in Germany I could read the signs, after all. In a month I was horribly homesick. London, though - London just about killed me in one day. I was a mess when I was younger.
    • unwind 17y ago
      Uh, not to be a complete jerk or anything, but do you realize that your comment is far easier to understand if you actually mention where you're from? Now it's like reading half of a joke.
      • Vivtek 17y ago
        Indiana. I probably would have said that before I moved back, but there's something about the isolation of the American heartland that makes the rest of the world feel a little like a dream you once had. Sorry.
        • jstraszheim 17y ago
          That was a very odd and wonderful comment. Thank you :)
• itistoday 17y ago
  I wouldn't dismiss this article as simply culture shock. A university surveyed foreign students and tracked their progress as they adjusted to the new culture, they found that most people get over the culture shock after 2 semesters. [1] This guy is writing this after living 5 years in Japan. I would therefore not dismiss this as simple culture shock, it's a genuine critique of a culture after he's become accustomed to it. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPfB6GIjM9Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPfB6GIjM9Q
  • Vivtek 17y ago
    They get over the shallow culture shock. The real culture shock is knowing you're never going to fit in where you live -but because you've been there so long, you're never going to fit in anywhere else, either. You've become an ethnic group of one. Puerto Rico did this to me over the course of about five years. I can't stay on-island for more than about a year or I flip out. Up here in the States proper has done this to my (Hungarian) wife over the course of about fifteen years. Her limit is about two years. It doesn't go away.
    • pw0ncakes 17y ago
      They get over the shallow culture shock. The real culture shock is knowing you're never going to fit in where you live -but because you've been there so long, you're never going to fit in anywhere else, either. You've become an ethnic group of one. This has been my story ever since I was born. One nice thing about not fitting in is that you become friends with others who don't fit in, who tend to be the most interesting people.
      • Vivtek 17y ago
        Point. I've read about this, too - especially people who've grown up multicultural tend to glom together as a "international ethnicity". One of the real attractions of living somewhere other than "your country" is being one of the expat crowd and love/hate dissing the local culture.
        • 17y ago
• jdminhbg 17y ago
  "...Americans, who from my perspective seem to have trouble forming deep adult friendships." Uh...
  • bh23ha 17y ago
    I'm not the only one, I hear this from a lot of immigrants both from the old world and Latin America. I can't really explain it.
    • rdtsc 17y ago
      Imagine having a best friend like you had when you were 5. You could play in the tree house, play video games all day, build stuff, ride bikes all across town, stay over their house, do everything together, talk about anything, once in a while have fights and arguments but then make up. Well it's kind of like that even when you are grown up. The way the society is structured might help develop these friendships or might prevent them. For example, were I was growing up (in ex Soviet Union), the school was structured such that you could end up being in the same class with mostly the same people for 12 years. Not just the same school -- but the same class. So if you never move (more on that later), you would end up knowing the same 30 people very well. One or two of them might become your good friends. Now school is just one factor, the other is how transient people are. It used to be that people would be born, grow up and live most of their lives in one city. That means you probably will still have your fiends from since you were 5 living in the same city. In some countries, people move more, mostly because of jobs I guess. It is very hard to form deep friendships when you are moving every 4 years. Yes, you have many acquaintances but not too many friends. I thought about this quite a bit. By now I lived half of my life in the "old world" and half in US. I can still skype, chat and email back and forth with my childhood buddies, but it is just not the same. I think good friendships need real face to face contact. I am making friends at work, but there is always an apprehension and competitiveness involved. They'll never be the same kind of friends I had growing up. Or maybe I became a different kind of person (too apprehensive, too withdrawn) that nobody would want to be best friends with ...?
    • dabent 17y ago
      I've heard Americans (I'm American) complain about it, especially with their neighbors. We tend to stay holed up in our McMansions with the AC/Heat on and watch TV. Or we are the lone passenger in our car, listening to XM with the windows up. People often just don't get to know one another on a deep level. We also tend to move around a bit, which makes maintaining friendships hard. Now, that's not true for everyone, but it's been a lot of my experience.
• andrewcooke 17y ago
  i've lived in a different culture for about 10 years, and i understand what you're saying. i'm not sure the right term is culture shock, though - see other replies, that associate that with something much more immediate. for some people, living long-term in another culture is hard. i certainly find it so at times. and this is despite being completely aware of the issue, the validity of other belief / social systems, etc etc. it's a malaise at a very deep level - not something that can be addressed by conscious platitudes. i don't have a solution, apart from just continuing. [ps the way i see it, our subconscious is "programmed" at a very early stage in our development, and is much less adaptable than our conscious. what we're talking about here is the result of long-term attrition between those subconscious assumptions and an inconsistent (but, or course, completely valid) reality. in some ways, respecting the other culture makes it harder - you can't simply dismiss it (except for periods of anger - i would guess this article was written in such a time). i also sometimes wonder if those that don't suffer this are simply repressing / unconnected with their subconscious to such a degree that they are unaware... the alternative is that their subconscious somehow adapts.]
  • Vivtek 17y ago
    I think it might be likened to a long-term allergy. Small exposures won't bother you, but over time you go into anaphylaxis.
  • elblanco 17y ago
    A lot of the things you do in a host culture are things you have to memorize and "just do" rather than coming naturally from your growing up years. It's mentally exhausting to keep referring to your catalog of do's and don'ts all day, every day. It doesn't get put onto the back shelf for a great many years.
• kentosi 17y ago
  I have a Friench friend who, for years, has been critical about Australians. When i first met him he could continually rave on about how people in Paris are so much open with their emotions and how us Aussies are too closed by comparison. Or how the nightlife here sucked by comparison. Or how French music was better, the food tastier, the culture richer. The list went on... The ironic part was that he would begridgingly list all the good points about living here too. In the end, he became a tangled mess. He disliked and liked being here, and also disliked and liked the idea of returning home. Sounds kindof the the same with the dude in this article. You feel like telling him to just pack his bags and return home, but you know that he won't because he'd miss the good parts of living in Tokyo and end up complaining about the US instead. A major part of this is to do with always drawing comparisons to your original culture as a source of familiarity. The natives don't draw such comparisons. To them there is no "better" or "crappier" place. It's not Japanese work-life, it's just work-life. It's not Japanese food, it's food. Home is home, and that's just how things are. After listening to my French friend, reading this article, and reading your comment, it seems to me that romantacising aspects of your home culture whenever you're pissed off about something in your host culture (and vice-versa), though inevitable, alomost never leads to happiness.
• quant18 17y ago
  And as an European I feel that American corporate culture bleeds far too far into everyone's personal life. Huh, I had the opposite experience when I worked for a small Dutch company. The amount of enforced merry-making (not to mention all the emphasis on consensus-formation) really got on my nerves. Never saw anything like it when I was working for American companies. It did remind me of my brief career in Tokyo --- I'm not the only one to have noticed the superficial similarities between Dutch and Japanese corporate culture [1], though apparently if you dig deeper it's not as similar as it looks. Of course, this may simply be a quirk of the industry I was in at the time (options trading). It may also be a consequence of me rubbing Dutch people the wrong way (when excusing myself from company bowling/drinking/whatever trips or expressing dissenting opinions), while knowing how not to rub American people the wrong way because I'm a lot more familiar with their culture. [1] e.g. Joop Stam has done a lot of research on this: http://www.mb.utwente.nl/oohr/staff/professorate/stam/ http://www.mb.utwente.nl/oohr/staff/professorate/stam/
  • ytinas 17y ago
    You've never worked for an American company that tried to tell you what you could/couldn't do outside of work? Either you've had good luck or I've had bad because every place I worked for tried to impose their rules beyond the office parking lot. Maybe it was due to working in a "right to work" state?
    • Vivtek 17y ago
      Yeah, really. Ever had a stern talking to because the political bumper sticker on your car didn't align with the company image? That's uniquely American.
  • aerique 17y ago
    (disclaimer: I'm Dutch) My experience working both for several companies and for myself outsourcing myself to companies is that there's a pretty wide range of corporate cultures here in the Netherlands. Going from the enforced merry-making (which is an awesome description, since it makes me retch!) to much, much more easy going environments.
• stcredzero 17y ago
  EVERY JAPANESE POP SONG IS ABOUT THE SAME THING There seems to be a non-romance/love existential philosophy/angst genre of pop songs. The Japanese version seems to use a different set of pastoral imagery than the American one, and much more of it. Not sure what that means.
• rend 17y ago
  Speaking of host culture, this is an interesting blog I came across written by an American ex-pat working as a host in Osaka. http://gaijinhostsabin.justin-klein.com/the-rules-of-the-game/ http://gaijinhostsabin.justin-klein.com/the-rules-of-the-gam...
• kazuya 17y ago
  People tend to attribute problems around them to the culture, particularly when the culture isn't theirs. And everyone wants to think his/her situation is unique, as the indication of one's uniqueness. But as some comments indicate, some (or most) of the author's problems are actually not idiosyncratic to Japan. Although he has valid points, his problems will just stay there in different shapes even if he leaves Japan.
• elblanco 17y ago
  In the "Teach English in Korea" support crowd, they talk about culture shock settling in around the 90-day mark, and letting up 6-12 months in.