Posted on 11/29/2014 7:27:20 PM PST by rjbemsha
If you are an American, then odds are you are spending some significant chunk of today [Black Friday] fighting your way through unpleasant, stressful, and chaotic shopping lines.
There's a better kind of line. And it's in Japan.
Watch this time-lapse video of patrons lining up at Comiket, a regular comic book festival in Tokyo, and just marvel at the order of it all. (They're lining up to enter the festival, one chunk of people at a time.) The experience looks easy, even downright pleasant, and most amazing of all appears entirely self-organized. I challenge you to find a single person cutting, lagging behind, or otherwise disrupting the — frankly beautiful — order of it all. [The video starts at night; skip to 1:26 for daybreak and to 2:10 to really see the line in action. ....
... in Japan, it's actually not difficult to find possible roots of this unusual predilection for formal and orderly lines: disaster preparedness education. Japanese students are drilled, and drilled heavily, from a very young age on how to prepare for earthquakes and tsunamis, which are common there. That preparedness necessarily includes a lot of being taught to form quick and orderly lines. And maybe that helps explain why, if you travel to Tokyo, you'll find lines to be generally much more on the efficient end of the spectrum.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
Just because the japanese have been trained to be little automatons does not mean that Americans should, though I find it funny that some of the rudest people I have run into at amusement parks came from...............Japan.
That’s funny. As a QA guy for a fansub group, we mostly know comiket’ popularity due to the hentai’ (Japanese porn comics).
Perhaps American manners knock them off kilter.
because they spend so much time in lines all of their lives they act like sheep anytime a line forms
Actually old ladies in Japan are sometimes a problem:
Discard all manners beyond some mysterious age.
“Kusai baba” or “Oubatarian” are what these people are called.
I guess sometimes it’s men, too, but for some reason probably in 90% of cases it’s a woman.
I don’t know why.
But yes, manners are a huuuuuuuuge deal, there.
A huge deal.
That would surprise me hugely.
Are you sure they weren't from China?
No I think they just rebel against being polite at home and figure what the heck, kind of like the friends I had that still went to parochial school. Any that's my experience, your mileage may vary.
Very
That said, I avoid Amusement Parks like the plague - so maybe the behaviour rules are different in that environment.
Nah... Japanese politeness is a mutual thing. When in a place that the mutuality does not reflect, that disorients. (Pun intended.)
There was no looting in Iowa during a flood a few years back. Iowa schools must have lots of disaster drills, too...
To be fair, the video is from a Japanese comic convention. There (just as in the US) comics nerds tend to also be math geeks so both the sellers and the buyers here can accurately calculate the prices in their heads as quick as they look at the products.
Not an apples to apples comparison with black Friday.
Are you sure they weren't from China?”
It wouldn't surprise at all. Case in point 9/11.
I used to work for a large IT company that handled trans-pacific data traffic and repair. Of all the countries that we dealt with that day Japan was hands down the most obnoxious,officious group of automatons we dealt with that day. We even handled traffic out out of India which was usually regarded as sort of a ongoing joke in the data transmission world. They were understanding and sympathetic as were the Australians.
The Japanese not so much. Their main complaint was that their Cantor Fitzgerald customers couldn't reach the WTC. By that time the towers had collapsed and one of the planes had initially plowed directly into the Cantor F. offices killing everyone. They demanded an answer and immediate escalation. I informed them they would have to tell their customers what had happened and we were effectively under attack and a national emergency was in progress. That wasn't good enough for them. They wanted to know who the situation was escalated to and when we expected resolution.
I told them to put down the escalation was to GW Bush and gave them the WH telephone #. Then they wanted to speak to higher management. So yes it doesn't surprise me they can act rude and also outright racist in their demeanor in business dealings but that's another story. Don't take this as a broad brush lambasting of Japanese mannerisms in general. Google Hideaki Akaiwa the hero of Ishinomaki in the Tokai quake who refused to conform and rose to the occasion.
The anti-American undercurrent in the headline and article is just what would be expected from vox.com.
Yeah, for a year or two I worried my wife might become an obatarian but she mellowed out.
I live within easy walking distance of one of the famous department stores. I used to take first-time visitors to Japan to the morning opening of the store, when all the staff were lined up, bowing to the customers, making us feel like nobility. Good intro to Japan.
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