What is everyday life like in japan?

What is life like in Japan? What is the culture and everyday life like?

• Answer:

  Before I give an answer, I'd like to point out an important fact:  the distance from extreme northeast to extreme southwest Japan is roughly the same as from Toronto to Havana.  Just as you'd get very different answers about everyday life in these two cities, what I have to say about life in Japan's Great White North will not be the same as what someone else will say about Okinawa, or even about closer parts of Japan. My Japanese home, my chosen home is in west central Hokkaido.  I live 5 blocks from the oldest jr high in town but right across the street from a small buckwheat field.  There are rice paddies only 2 minutes' walk from my front door and drop-dead gorgeous mountains 4 km up the street in the opposite direction.  A brown bear was spotted at about the dead end point of this street in those mountains about 3 weeks ago.  The city ski lift is within easy walking distance of this place, so there will be bear trackers hard at work after the first snows, making sure that skiers won't need to run an ursine obstacle course come mid-November. These mountains hold some of Japan's finest anthracite (hard, relatively clean burning) coal, but the national government ordered these very productive (lucrative!) mines closed in 1973.  It was part of Japan's diplomatic offensive to convince OPEC that Japan would always be a dependable customer, meaning there was no reason to embargo Japan ever again.  Predictably, we're experiencing the same shrinking pains of any city whose major industry closes overnight. In the same way, we're also bleeding a slow death because of changes in the farming lifestyle.  Mechanization means fewer farmers needed, and because rice is less popular today than even 10 years ago, the remaining farmers are scrambling to find ways to continue to grow profitable crops.  Rice fields 20 years ago now produce all sorts of fruits and vegetables, and the public schools pride themselves on serving school lunches with foods that are nearly entirely locally grown. Skiing is big business all over Hokkaido,  of course.  Another way my town is making the best use of abundant snow is by running a local research center on the effects of using snow as a natural coolant.  Root vegetables actually have a higher sugar content, I'm told, after being stored cold, using snow as a refrigerating agent.  There are at least 7 apartment buildings in town that have natural air conditioning, because they store huge amounts of snow underground and use the cooling potential of the snow all summer.  Their research also gives standards of how much snow, piled in what shape to what height, using what protective covering, can provide cooling for other residential, agricultural and industrial needs. When I started teaching in public jr highs here 18 years ago, there were 8 grade schools that "fed" into 6 jr highs and 3 high schools.  Three grade schools, 2 jr highs and 2 high schools have closed due to declining enrollment.  Their students have been consolidated into the remaing schools.  Even so, these remaining schools now have excess capacity, and I'm considering asking them to put unused classrooms into service as English and international resource centers. Students are taught world map skills, but many students finish 9th grade (the end of jr high here) with only a vague idea about the difference between, say, Brazil and Nigeria.  Japanese education is superb at teaching one question/one answer academic skills.  Students can list off countries and their capitals with no problem, but ask them what possible problems Argentina and Uruguay might share, or where Pakistan and India have trouble communicating, and you'll get the Japanese version of Alfred E. Newman's "what me worry" grin.  Conic sections in geometry?  No sweat.  Statistical inference from consumer trends?  Cold sweat. I lived in Sapporo before moving here, and many of my Sapporo friends have no clue why I would choose to live over 90 minutes' drive from the Big City Lights.  Our choices for entertainment are surely limited here, and there must be problems finding what we need in local stores, they repeat.  But we're less than 40 minutes by train from the heart of Sapporo, and during my 6 years there, I never once felt any real need to buy a car.  So thanks to the railroads and other public transportation, it's actually more convenient to go to a pro sporting event (baseball, basketball, soccer, occasional exhibition matches in other sports) or a world-class symphony concert from here than it was from some places inside Sapporo itself. My daughter takes the train to the next town south of here (16 km, 18 min.) to attend high school.  There are still two high schools here in town, but the public HS is much too low for her academic level.  The private HS is vocationally oriented, and offers LPN and Midwife certification on graduation- not my daughter's plans, so she never applied. In small towns, promotion to 7th grade (jr high) is pretty much automatic at the end of grade school.  Promotion to 10th grade (HS) is not.  Even with a badly falling birth rate, there is still competition to get into the top high schools, either public or private.  My daughter passed the entrance test into the academically best rated HS in the county, and I couldn't be more pleased.  But even her school is feeling the pinch.  They placed 280 students in 7 home rooms (40 students per class) last April, but they're planning to cut back to 240 students in 6 home rooms next April.  This makes the school harder to get into, and in this way they protect their top reputation. All students are expected to take part in one extracurricular activity in both jr high and HS, but this means a difficult choice between sports, music, art, photography, and other more vocationally focused groups.  A (very) small number opt out of after schools groups, too.  My daughter was in the jr high computer club and is now in her HS's biology club.  They have one or two field trips per year to animal-related sites: zoos, hatcheries, shelters, etc.  They also care for and observe several dozen types of fish, reptiles and mammals. After biology club, my daughter attends another 2 or 3 hours of classes on Wed. nights and Sat. afternoons.  These supplement her HS classes (Japanese, English, science, social studies and math), but also provide valuable feedback in her academic progress by monthly testing.  Test taking strategies are also part of these "cram school" (juku) classes.  She's aiming for the best university in Hokkaido, and so far, she's on par to pass that entrance test during the final 2 months of her senior year in HS. Other than the dizzying choices in seafood at the local supermarkets, there's precious little that I could claim as "exotic" about my life here.  The local Shinto shrine has a festival in the summer, but that's mostly a chance for kids to buy hot dogs and crepes after school, while grandparents spend the evenings in outdoor karaoke, amplified just beyond the aural comfort zone.  We have city festivals with fireworks in summer and snowmobiling in winter.  Otherwise we have all the trappings of small town life in most every industrialized country:  grocery stores, post offices, beauty salons, convenience stores, clothiers, and specialty shops.  I do hope that's not a disappointment for the curious readers!