Japanese Culture and Music

[Growling_Behemoth]

Asia was also just that little twinge of wierd that I could never quite grasp

You mean the tentacles and school girl uniforms? Two items which are rarely mutually exclusive in the local art. I would love to go there get one of those uniforms and eat myself to death (without touching the puffer sushi).

[FaunCB]

You can buy sushi SO CHEAP in japan and china compared to here 3:

Stupid america makes it up to be some sort of wierd foreign thing when you can buy like 2 pound boxes for 15 bucks :P

[HK-47]

I heard sushi in Japanese culture is only eaten on special occasions.

I always found other cultures fascinating. Asia was also just that little twinge of wierd that I could never quite grasp. Is it that their entire writing is based off of pictoral messages?

What is weird to one culture, is completely "normal" to the other. Kanji are actually Chinese characters. Quite a few characters are indeed pictographic, but the majority of them are semantic. (They use component characters to indicate pronunciation and meaning.) So in Chinese, even if you haven't seen a character before, with enough of a vocabulary, you can have a pretty good guess at pronunciation and meaning, not sure if this translates over to Japanese, as well. The Japanese kana (hiragana and katakana) are actually derived from Chinese characters.

I was curious about the lyrics and composition so looked it up and such. I have an odd feeling that since one word can mean 70 billion things that something that is a pop song in japan could be written as an opera here only because of that...in japan there can be that meaning, or the meaning of one song could
mean completely different things because one word has seven meanings.

Japanese, like Chinese has a lot of homonyms. So yes, a word can sound the same and have many different meanings, i.e. as in English: there, they're, their. A lot of Chinese and Japanese humor is based on puns, as well as many cultural beliefs/values. I think Korean is like this too, but I know little about the Korean language and culture, so someone else will have to chime in. I do know though, that all over East Asia, the number 4 is bad luck, because it is a homonym for death, but it's more extreme than how the number 13 is feared in the West. So homonyms probably apply to Korean, as well. Japanese is even more confusing, because they have at least two different readings for the same character: on'yomi and kun'yomi. On'yomi is based off of the Chinese pronunciation, when it was introduced, and kun'yomi is the native Japanese reading.

Agreed; I openly support the idea that people should be able to enjoy whatever it is they want so long as it doesn't bring PHYSICAL harm to another person.

Life sucks enough as is; no reason to limit yourself in what makes you happy just because of some sort of stigma attached to it.

What about mental, emotional, and spiritual harm?

Some people just have too much time and too little to offer to society... and they just exclude themselves from it by trying to draw attention to themselves. I find the typical (highschool and such) anime groups to be a bunch of idiots with too much money and a emotional wrecks. Draws attention... probably... are they helpful or can I have an interesting conversation with them? Nup. And because these types of people make the most noise, well it becomes the stereotype.

If you don't want anything to do with them, don't get involved with them. Enjoy what you enjoy with the people you can talk to. Pretty much what I did.

This is exactly what I did. I went to one meeting of Sci-fi/Comic Book club and never went back. I did get to know some of the members later on, but I just couldn't take the geek overload at meetings.

But I totally get what you mean by studying other cultures being fascinating. Why do we (speaking as an American) have an almost ritual observance for light-hearted manners and politeness, but in other cultures (like in Germany or China) saying "How are you?" is more of a literal conversation starter rather than an extended way of saying hello to an acquaintance.

I only began to question this recently. In fact, I stopped using the question in this sense, as I feel it is meaningless in that context.

Sorry, I wrote most of this long ago and never finished it up. >_<

[MrFlyte]

What about mental, emotional, and spiritual harm?

Yeah, I knew someone was going to nitpick that.
Because when it comes to those things, that's when we get in the grey area and it attracts the professional victims.

Semantics aside, the point I was making that watching a TV show, or just having a hobby that doesn't harm anyone shouldn't ever be looked down upon. Do what makes you happy.

[HK-47]

I call them as I see them.