5 ms·

Independence as in independent physically from their parents who may be far away, but not as in independent psychologically to make responsible, self-governing

by unabst 10y ago

Independence as in independent physically from their parents who may be far away, but not as in independent psychologically to make responsible, self-governing decisions based on their own free will. The former is not that surprising considering how safe Japan is. The latter however is a known social issue. Oyabanare (leaving the parents) is the term for independence, and many have a hard time. Physical independence is a step every toddler takes when they learn to cope with not having their parents around during day care and such, and in Japan it simply extends to the commute. Traditionally, the Japanese would not even lock their doors. The entire community is an extension of their living space, with lines drawn with respect, not fences or locked doors. So just as you wouldn't call a child independent for being able to go to the bedroom and back, going to school and back is the same but farther, with the community acting as a safety net to ensure these children commute safely. Kobans also help (community police manning one man police stations that patrol on bicycles). Psychological independence unfortunately does not extend naturally from the above. With many young adults being too dependent on their parents and on instruction, they suffer from the inability to think or act or speak for themselves. They can commute fine alone. They can be hikikomori fine alone. They are fine alone. They just are not independent in the western sense. They are afraid to act on behalf of themselves or enact their identity. So they also resort to 2chan and anonymous free speech which does not help them gain a voice. Westerners are almost too comfortable acting on behalf of themselves. It is almost a given. And that is also why parents are less inclined to "let them loose" because "loose" is what they are. They are free thinking and free acting, hence a long solitary commute only sounds dangerous. But it is this perception that instills that very quality in their children. The perception of being on an infinite leash yields physical freedom and distance, but to confuse this with psychological independence is an egregious mistake.

77pt77 10y ago
> Westerners are almost too comfortable acting on behalf of themselves. It is almost a given. And that is also why parents are less inclined to "let them loose" because "loose" is what they are. They are free thinking and free acting A bit of a fiction. All you have to do is have a look the tribalism in campus culture to falsify this. In fact, the current campus hysteria is in part motivated by a lack of independence, self-reliance and accountability for one's actions.
- unabst 10y ago
  Western tribalism is the emergence of a common voice among those who exercise their voice. At least those who take part take part on their terms and by enacting their will. These tribes are, for better or worse, movements. There is no tribalism in Japan. There are clubs and extracurricular activities, and an emergence of groups who find comfort in interdependence. Independent actors have common interests too. That isn't to be confused with interdependent actors simply getting together to avoid confrontation with society.
  - Waterluvian 10y ago
    Aren't clubs and extracurricular activities perceived rather differently in Japan as well? Being part of clubs, from my very limited vantage point, seems to be incredibly culturally important.
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      I have to admit that I have no idea what the parent posts are talking about wrt to tribalism, etc. I'm not trying to be dismissive, I literally don't understand. But I can talk about clubs in Japan :-) I worked in a Japanese high school for 5 years. Students are required to be part of a club. It is part of high school. Most clubs run 6 days a week and students are a member of a club starting from junior high school. Even when people go to university, they invariably join clubs. I don't know if it is required, but after 6 years it is already ingrained. A club in Japan is very different than a club in North America (I'm Canadian). When you are in school in Canada (at least), you can join many clubs. Most students have many, many hobbies. You are encouraged to try many, many different things. In Japan you have 1 club and that's your hobby. You have exactly 1 chance to change your club -- when you graduate junior high school and join high school (well... you can change again if you go to university). Because you are forced to practice 1 and only 1 thing, you tend to get quite good at it. Japanese students are very, very good at their hobby (note the lack of plural). This is virtually without exception. Most students (in my experience) absolutely love club. They live for club. It's where their friends are. It's the place where they are accepted. It's the place where they are good at what they do. In the middle of winter, with the wind blowing, and the rain coming down, the only way we could get the tennis boys to go home was to turn off the lights at 8 pm every day. They would show up on Sunday (presumably their day off) and keep at it. That's Japanese club. Of course some students don't want to go to club. Some students have no interest in a hobby. In my school we had a kind of rotating "club" for students who hated club. One year it was track and field. When we got a student from junior high school who was very serious about track and field, we had to move the non-club club to cooking. Then some students got interested in cooking, so it moved to the English club. Every couple of years it moves somewhere else (and all the teachers flock to volunteer to supervise it because supervising a serious club is a huge amount of work). It's interesting, though. My school had about 400 students and the non-club club never had more than 60 students in it. Students generally love club. What's more, when a student is in the non-club, you know they have some serious problems. There is not a single happy student in non-club. Like many things in Japan, the whole concept of a single club that takes up all of your child's free time would not work in other places. Japanese culture is instilled in students at school. Teachers raise the children at least as much as parents do. If teachers think that a parent is doing a poor job, they can and will march over to the parent's house and lecture them for hours on end. I once followed a teacher on his "rounds" visiting parents, and I didn't remove my jaw from the ground for at least a day afterwards. When you say "being part of a club seems to be incredibly culturally important" you are right. It's the way you live. Even now, my neighbour dragged me off to the karate dojo because he was worried about me. Too much free time is not good for you :-). I have no choice now (even at nearly 50 years old)!
nihonde 10y ago
This doesn't square with my experience as someone who lives in Japan. I know quite a few young, single mothers who are unbelievably self-sufficient. I also know a lot of people who are the breadwinners and caretakers of their aging parents. This whole notion of hikikomori is novel and feeds into the image of Japan as dystopia, but it's not a good basis for any sweeping statements about independence in Japan. A much more interesting point is the dynamic between the primacy of personal liberty and the group's long-term well being. The West can learn a lot about how to keep their society viable over millennia if they'd stop drawing half-baked conclusions like yours and experience the confounding and delicate balance of paradoxes that has developed over a long time here.
- cushychicken 10y ago
  I think a lot of people (myself included) boggle at a way to life that is so caught up in a "confounding and delicate balance of paradoxes".
  - nihonde 10y ago
    Like a color or a taste, some things need to be experienced and fiercly resist explanation or codification. The urge to turn everything into a set of rules or a narrative can be a kind of sickness, or at least less productive than methodically testing what works and building on it over time without too much concern about some grand unifying theory. It's not easy but there is such a precious example of a society that does an OK job at it. Too many people leap at the negatives while ignoring what's working.
    - cushychicken 10y ago
      >The urge to turn everything into a set of rules or a narrative can be a kind of sickness I agree with this, and I think that's the root of many of the social malaises Japan has that the OP was getting at: lack of intellectual independence and hikikomori, for example. Many of the Japanese folks I've met through work are very attentive to protocols and rules, and supremely uncomfortable without well defined sets of rules. That's a kind of sickness, isn't it?
jernfrost 10y ago
Don't think you can speak of the west in general here. In Norway kids are physically loose much earlier than in the US. And I could see when studying in the US that American college students are a lot less mature than northern European ones e.g. They were not used to being away from home or managing their own life in any way. But if you come from say Scandinavia or the Netherlands which I know best you would have biked of taken the bus to downtown a lot yourself and roamed around the neighborhoods to friends from early age. American kids are driven by their parents to all sorts of activities. Everything is organized. One clear contrast I can see is e.g. American elementary schools have clear fences. Norwegian schools are usually adjacent to a forrest. There are no fences anywhere. Kids can roam quite far into the woods. But kids are taught the imaginary fences they should respect. American upbringing seems saturated with organized activity to the point that while Americans might have their own strong opinions about everything they have a very low reflection level because they are not used to being alone with their own thoughts, the way you are when you venture into the woods on exploration without your parents.
- cesarbs 10y ago
  > Everything is organized. My wife and I are immigrants from Brazil and this is one of the few culture shocks we've suffered here in America. We moved here when our daughter was 4 (she's 8 now) and comparing her ongoing upbringing to ours back home can be interesting. Birthday parties in America have an exact start time and an end time. Not only that, those parties are almost always organized around planned activities which also have a start and an end time (e.g. first 45 minutes they'll play in the playground, next 45 minutes they'll play some game, final 45 minutes they'll have pizza and cake). This is the case even when parties are at home. But the party stuff is fine. It's just how it is. What bothers me somewhat is how my daughter's day-to-day activities are a bit too organized. Both at school and at her after-school care place, every minute of her day has some kind of label attached to it (e.g. "Power Hour" in after-school is homework time). Everything they do at school has a quirky label attached to it to too, instead of just being called what it is. Every activity has a name and a time and a specific method to how it's supposed to be carried out. If they're going to learn values such as respect, focus, etc., there has to be a label attached to it (e.g. "Reflections" or "Values Initiative" or whatever) instead of those things just being taught for what they are. Her teacher sends us weekly emails to keep us up to date with what's been going on in class, and I feel overwhelmed trying to learn all the labels and names and whatnot. Of course my daughter gets super upset when I don't remember what one of them is about. It doesn't help that some have similar names, like they have both Reading Club and Reading Partners for reading, and I'm supposed to remember the difference :) While there's a good side to everything being neat and organized, I've seen this lead to some level of anxiety. My daughter sometimes expects the same kind of organization at home, like there should be a specific time and label for everything she does. She gets upset if we eat a meal outside its normal time (e.g. late lunch on a weekend) because she then she says can't call that meal by its name because it wasn't at the right time. This leaves me a little apprehensive that she will grow up to be a schedule-follower, with such schedules always being defined by other people. That's basically the opposite of how my wife and I are.

by unabst 10y ago

77pt77 10y ago

> Westerners are almost too comfortable acting on behalf of themselves. It is almost a given. And that is also why parents are less inclined to "let them loose" because "loose" is what they are. They are free thinking and free acting A bit of a fiction. All you have to do is have a look the tribalism in campus culture to falsify this. In fact, the current campus hysteria is in part motivated by a lack of independence, self-reliance and accountability for one's actions.

unabst 10y ago
Western tribalism is the emergence of a common voice among those who exercise their voice. At least those who take part take part on their terms and by enacting their will. These tribes are, for better or worse, movements. There is no tribalism in Japan. There are clubs and extracurricular activities, and an emergence of groups who find comfort in interdependence. Independent actors have common interests too. That isn't to be confused with interdependent actors simply getting together to avoid confrontation with society.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  Aren't clubs and extracurricular activities perceived rather differently in Japan as well? Being part of clubs, from my very limited vantage point, seems to be incredibly culturally important.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    I have to admit that I have no idea what the parent posts are talking about wrt to tribalism, etc. I'm not trying to be dismissive, I literally don't understand. But I can talk about clubs in Japan :-) I worked in a Japanese high school for 5 years. Students are required to be part of a club. It is part of high school. Most clubs run 6 days a week and students are a member of a club starting from junior high school. Even when people go to university, they invariably join clubs. I don't know if it is required, but after 6 years it is already ingrained. A club in Japan is very different than a club in North America (I'm Canadian). When you are in school in Canada (at least), you can join many clubs. Most students have many, many hobbies. You are encouraged to try many, many different things. In Japan you have 1 club and that's your hobby. You have exactly 1 chance to change your club -- when you graduate junior high school and join high school (well... you can change again if you go to university). Because you are forced to practice 1 and only 1 thing, you tend to get quite good at it. Japanese students are very, very good at their hobby (note the lack of plural). This is virtually without exception. Most students (in my experience) absolutely love club. They live for club. It's where their friends are. It's the place where they are accepted. It's the place where they are good at what they do. In the middle of winter, with the wind blowing, and the rain coming down, the only way we could get the tennis boys to go home was to turn off the lights at 8 pm every day. They would show up on Sunday (presumably their day off) and keep at it. That's Japanese club. Of course some students don't want to go to club. Some students have no interest in a hobby. In my school we had a kind of rotating "club" for students who hated club. One year it was track and field. When we got a student from junior high school who was very serious about track and field, we had to move the non-club club to cooking. Then some students got interested in cooking, so it moved to the English club. Every couple of years it moves somewhere else (and all the teachers flock to volunteer to supervise it because supervising a serious club is a huge amount of work). It's interesting, though. My school had about 400 students and the non-club club never had more than 60 students in it. Students generally love club. What's more, when a student is in the non-club, you know they have some serious problems. There is not a single happy student in non-club. Like many things in Japan, the whole concept of a single club that takes up all of your child's free time would not work in other places. Japanese culture is instilled in students at school. Teachers raise the children at least as much as parents do. If teachers think that a parent is doing a poor job, they can and will march over to the parent's house and lecture them for hours on end. I once followed a teacher on his "rounds" visiting parents, and I didn't remove my jaw from the ground for at least a day afterwards. When you say "being part of a club seems to be incredibly culturally important" you are right. It's the way you live. Even now, my neighbour dragged me off to the karate dojo because he was worried about me. Too much free time is not good for you :-). I have no choice now (even at nearly 50 years old)!

nihonde 10y ago

This doesn't square with my experience as someone who lives in Japan. I know quite a few young, single mothers who are unbelievably self-sufficient. I also know a lot of people who are the breadwinners and caretakers of their aging parents. This whole notion of hikikomori is novel and feeds into the image of Japan as dystopia, but it's not a good basis for any sweeping statements about independence in Japan. A much more interesting point is the dynamic between the primacy of personal liberty and the group's long-term well being. The West can learn a lot about how to keep their society viable over millennia if they'd stop drawing half-baked conclusions like yours and experience the confounding and delicate balance of paradoxes that has developed over a long time here.

cushychicken 10y ago
I think a lot of people (myself included) boggle at a way to life that is so caught up in a "confounding and delicate balance of paradoxes".
- nihonde 10y ago
  Like a color or a taste, some things need to be experienced and fiercly resist explanation or codification. The urge to turn everything into a set of rules or a narrative can be a kind of sickness, or at least less productive than methodically testing what works and building on it over time without too much concern about some grand unifying theory. It's not easy but there is such a precious example of a society that does an OK job at it. Too many people leap at the negatives while ignoring what's working.
  - cushychicken 10y ago
    >The urge to turn everything into a set of rules or a narrative can be a kind of sickness I agree with this, and I think that's the root of many of the social malaises Japan has that the OP was getting at: lack of intellectual independence and hikikomori, for example. Many of the Japanese folks I've met through work are very attentive to protocols and rules, and supremely uncomfortable without well defined sets of rules. That's a kind of sickness, isn't it?

jernfrost 10y ago

Don't think you can speak of the west in general here. In Norway kids are physically loose much earlier than in the US. And I could see when studying in the US that American college students are a lot less mature than northern European ones e.g. They were not used to being away from home or managing their own life in any way. But if you come from say Scandinavia or the Netherlands which I know best you would have biked of taken the bus to downtown a lot yourself and roamed around the neighborhoods to friends from early age. American kids are driven by their parents to all sorts of activities. Everything is organized. One clear contrast I can see is e.g. American elementary schools have clear fences. Norwegian schools are usually adjacent to a forrest. There are no fences anywhere. Kids can roam quite far into the woods. But kids are taught the imaginary fences they should respect. American upbringing seems saturated with organized activity to the point that while Americans might have their own strong opinions about everything they have a very low reflection level because they are not used to being alone with their own thoughts, the way you are when you venture into the woods on exploration without your parents.

cesarbs 10y ago
> Everything is organized. My wife and I are immigrants from Brazil and this is one of the few culture shocks we've suffered here in America. We moved here when our daughter was 4 (she's 8 now) and comparing her ongoing upbringing to ours back home can be interesting. Birthday parties in America have an exact start time and an end time. Not only that, those parties are almost always organized around planned activities which also have a start and an end time (e.g. first 45 minutes they'll play in the playground, next 45 minutes they'll play some game, final 45 minutes they'll have pizza and cake). This is the case even when parties are at home. But the party stuff is fine. It's just how it is. What bothers me somewhat is how my daughter's day-to-day activities are a bit too organized. Both at school and at her after-school care place, every minute of her day has some kind of label attached to it (e.g. "Power Hour" in after-school is homework time). Everything they do at school has a quirky label attached to it to too, instead of just being called what it is. Every activity has a name and a time and a specific method to how it's supposed to be carried out. If they're going to learn values such as respect, focus, etc., there has to be a label attached to it (e.g. "Reflections" or "Values Initiative" or whatever) instead of those things just being taught for what they are. Her teacher sends us weekly emails to keep us up to date with what's been going on in class, and I feel overwhelmed trying to learn all the labels and names and whatnot. Of course my daughter gets super upset when I don't remember what one of them is about. It doesn't help that some have similar names, like they have both Reading Club and Reading Partners for reading, and I'm supposed to remember the difference :) While there's a good side to everything being neat and organized, I've seen this lead to some level of anxiety. My daughter sometimes expects the same kind of organization at home, like there should be a specific time and label for everything she does. She gets upset if we eat a meal outside its normal time (e.g. late lunch on a weekend) because she then she says can't call that meal by its name because it wasn't at the right time. This leaves me a little apprehensive that she will grow up to be a schedule-follower, with such schedules always being defined by other people. That's basically the opposite of how my wife and I are.