Short Japanese Culture Questions

So like, there is a new topic for the POLL thread now, no? :stuck_out_tongue:

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I took the thread heading as the rail (sorry for being so naïve :joy_cat:). None of the attributes „Short“, „Japanese Culture“ or „Questions“ were present :woman_shrugging:

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More the merrier
Am the queen of several questions

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In any work environment, romantic relationships are clearly conflicts of interest and many businesses are going to have policies about it.

Because it affects not only the parties involved, but everyone else in the business.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen or that it’s anything shameful, but all parties have to be upfront about the potential issues and clear about how those issues are going to be handled.

On the other hand, if you’re sorta, kinda seeing someone but you have no idea whether it’s going to pan out or not, the above seems like a lot of extra stress that you don’t want to deal with.

So you hide it. :wink:

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I guess it’s a bit different if you’re married. :thinking: And obviously, becoming parents and so forth, adding a layer to the complications.

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Can I add a Japanese culture question here? I’ve posted this question in another thread, but the thread was more about a cultural workshop someone organised. So here’s the question:

Is sharing bath water within a family still a thing in Japan? Or is it slowly dwindling in practice? Would love to know the history behind it and how Japanese people think of this nowadays. Especially opinions from the last family member to use the bath water.

And interestingly @dribblybob replied:

On that topic I noticed my washing machine came with a connection to suck the bath water into the machine and use it again there. Wild stuff

Looking forward to hear any insight from others regarding this topic. Thanks in advance!

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Reminds me of this episode of Life Where I’m From

Not sure how representative this is, but here they’re talking about sharing bath water as a natural thing to do + reusing the bath water for your laundry. :slight_smile:

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Another short question I’ve been wondering about: baito.

In anime, getting a part-time work seems the norm for many students. This is very much not the case for people in the ages shown in my country, but would typically just happen later (at university).

I might have misunderstood things though and wonder at what age and IF it really is common? and if it is common for Japanese students to get a part-time job outside of school hours?

It also begs the question when they do their homework, and how they manage to get anything done! O_O And how about those after-hours study-lessons students also attend?!

Too much stuff all at once. Doesn’t Japanese student’s have hobbies? (being my last in this string of questions ^^;)

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Yes baito is common and no, there is very little time for hobbies… my sister-in-law is a university student and her life is basically, school, baito, study until midnight. When I met my wife she was still in uni and doing baito, planning a date was pretty tough…

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That’s much too little time to be just a…“human”…imo.

Thanks for the answer! But that sounds so rough considering how much I’ve gotten out of my musical hobbies, especially growing up. ^^‘’

I think it’s important to note that this might only be for college students. Many high schools have rules against baito, although my ALT friends have said that they’ve seen some students working at their family’s businesses.

I often see students going home as late as 9pm on weekdays.

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Super common in university according to my friend who’s studying in Japan. In anime, it happens among high-school students too, but I don’t know if that’s true in real life.

I have no idea as far as schoolchildren are concerned, but in the case of uni students, just getting things done and doing well enough to pass is more or less sufficient provided you’re in a well-known university, so people don’t bother too much. And I don’t know how much homework students get in Japan, but in Singapore, people go for lots of tuition outside school and they still get their homework done. They spend most of their time studying though.

If it’s anything like Singapore, the answer is that the amount of time they have left for hobbies depends on how much pressure there is to do well and how much their parents push them. Just FYI,

this happens in Singapore too. I used to go for evening classes too because the teacher wasn’t available at other times. I was usually quite free at weekends though. However, I wasn’t given any pressure to do well, so maybe I’m an exception. Well, I guess that’s why you try to pick a club whose activities you enjoy.

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The strange part for me is why these are made into mutually exclusive tings. I had music as my main hobby that took up a huge chunk of my time at home and after school, but I also did really well in school, getting my homework done etc.

But, if you also have to work outside of school…yeah, I don’t see a hobby like music being possible since you need to practice a lot. :thinking:

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Hobby culture in Japan is really big. You stick to maybe 1-2 things and you learn them inside and outside. As far as I can see with club stuff though, all the adults I’ve asked about it never continued their club activities after college. People who want to be artists after high school might specifically go to an arts focused high school though.

Students absolutely have music club though. I often pass by a high school on my way home from work and the music club is playing bits of ghibli, pop, etc music

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Again, I don’t know about Japan, but in Singapore, almost everyone has done some piano at some point for personal development/their résumé. It’s work too. :joy:

I don’t mean to sound snooty, but it depends on your/your society’s definition of ‘doing well in school’ and how hard the syllabus is. At the pre-university level, 70% was enough for an A, but as a primary school student in the ‘gifted education programme’ applying for special admission to the best schools, anything below 80% overall made such applications shaky and meant that you’d have to take an ability test for the school to consider your application. Scoring anything under 80% in secondary school also meant I wouldn’t have a perfect GPA (and so I didn’t for several subjects). If you’re in a society where only the very best get certain opportunities, then sacrifices have to be made.

Like I said though, there are club activities, and in Singapore’s case, not being in a ‘co-curricular activity’ looked very bad on your portfolio, so it was a very good idea to join a club, and absolutely great if it was something you liked. Then you could do it at least once every week.

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Meanwhile, I participated in 2 orchestras with weekly practice times each, outside of having singing, conducting and piano lessons. So, yeah, a lot of my outside of school time was defo about music. Not to mention practice at home. I have no idea how I still managed to stay on top of my studies. :joy: It sounds like madness now that I think about it. But, I really love music, so yeah.

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That’s amazing! I wish I had had more time for music. The thing is though, in Singapore, musical education is very exam-oriented. We really just focus on getting the next ABRSM certificate. At some point, I stopped practising because I got lazy, and because playing the piano just wasn’t fun anymore. Why do I have to play certain passages a certain way? How do I know that my piano teacher’s interpretation is right? I was just following instructions at that point, not learning about music. The irony of it all is that I was the one who asked my mum to sign me up for lessons that would get me through those exams, but I had no idea how teachers would conduct classes. That aside, music lessons are really expensive in Singapore, so they’re more of a portfolio investment than anything else: if you don’t progress rapidly, you’re wasting your parents’ money, and you probably can’t pick up another instrument (or learn to sing) without paying a ton. Maybe it’s the same in Japan?

I currently still play the piano from time to time (when there’s one available) and I’ve taught myself to sing, but what I do now is learning how to reproduce what I hear and like to hear, which I never learnt. Understanding music and learning the art of producing it really never mattered in my formal musical education, now that I think about it, and I didn’t learn how to improvise or play by ear either (which is kinda ironic because I realised only 10 years after starting music that I have a form of absolute pitch, probably because my teachers never developed my ear outside of exam training, so they never noticed).

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I doubt anyone would mention playing music on their CV here. Could be wrong though. :thinking:

In any case, while not being free music lessons at music school are subsidized here in Sweden. So, playing music if pretty common for kids.

But, at “peak music”, I was in a special program aimed at getting you into musical high school (i.e. studying to become a professional musician or a music teacher). Otherwise, there’s a limit on number of lessons and time alotted to you (for example I had both singing and piano lessons, usually you only get one of them), not to mention being able to take lessons in music theory and conducting as well. Being in an orchestra…is more akin to an extracurricular activity.

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Of all the high school students I teach, I can only think of one who has a part time job. (I mean, someone could have a job and just not have told me, of course.) A lot of recently graduated high school students like to talk about getting their first part time job, so that sounds like when a lot of people start. A lot of them really sound like there isn’t time for it anyway.

A fairly typical schedule I hear about from my kids of various ages is something like:
8:00 School starts
3/4:00 School ends
~4:00 Club activities start
5/6:00 Club activities finish
6:30/7 Cram school starts
9:00 Cram school ends, go home
Homework/free time until bed time.

Of course, it depends on the day, some days with no club activities or no cram school will be English school (hello, it’s me, your teacher!), or swimming school or piano school.
A lot of schools will also day half days on Saturdays, or will have 4-hr mandatory club activities. As it gets nearer to entrance exam time, many students will drop their clubs and extra classes (Music, English, etc.) for more cram school time to prepare for them.

Homework seems to get done partially at cram school, partially in the lobby of English school (and presumably other special schools), sometimes during English class and the rest at home before bed.

The most common hobby I hear from high school students is “sleeping”, and I do not blame them. Next is probably…hmm, reading and watching TV and chatting with friends. One of them has said drawing, so that was a nice different topic to be able to bring up. The kids are very overworked. The amount of gray 13-year olds is intense.

Of course, my sample size is exclusively “kids who are signed up for English school” so I can’t say this is representative of all students, and there are definitely some kids who don’t go through this rigmarole, but they also tend to stop showing up to English school pretty quickly.

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I got another Japanese culture question. :high_touch: I’ve been watching this YT channel with Japanese old-school diners, food stalls including one’s where you have to stand to eat.

For example:

One reflection though, there’s hardly any women buying food from what I can tell. :eyes: Is this representative for how standing-and-eating food stalls in general are? = places that men frequent, but not women? Also, the old Showa-style diners on this channel seems to have mostly male guests, though it’s harder to tell. I also wonder why this would be the case (if it really is)?

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