Category: JapaneseCulture

The peace sign – The V sign

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date September 14, 2007
31 Comments on The peace sign – The V sign

Why do Japanese do the “peace sign” when photographed? After asking many people like for example Dannychoo(Who talks today about the same thing), and reading many stuff; these are the “peace sign” reasons/origins from my point of view:

After the Second World War they copied the sign from the USA soldiers maybe because they thought it was cool. The soldiers were using it as a “V”ictory sign, but the Japanese were using it as a “peace sign”.
During the seventies it started being used when photographed because an American figure skater fell during the Sapporo Olympic games and was photographed/featured on different Japanese media where she was always doing the V sign. Japanese liked it and started imitating her.
During the last decade music groups like Morning Musume and other similar ones used the V sign a lot and started changing/morphing it in different ways, and people copied that too. Nowadays there are many V style signs, you can do it vertical, horizontal, near your eyes, near you mouth… Usually the same person makes his own V sign style and uses it always when he has to pose for a picture.
“Making your own V sign” is a trend that is extending to China and Korea

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Osaka

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This is the Mourning Musume group, notice how each girl has her own V sign style. Some of them are not even V.

JapaneseCulture

Japanese Sleeping

Japanese have an special ability to fall asleep anywhere at anytime. Since I came to Japan I’m keeping a collection pictures showing Japanese people sleeping. Look at the first picture where four people in a row are sleeping! When I took this picture, almost everyone in my wagon was enjoying a siesta.

dormido

Durmiendo

Hikikomori

Hikikomori (ひきこもり – 引き篭り) is a Japanese term used to refer to the social isolation that many young Japanese suffer because they are afraid to start living by themselves in the real world. The ones who suffer this syndrome stay at home and spend their time sleeping, watching TV, playing video games and surfing the Internet. Usually they are adolescents who are worried about the high adult competitiveness in Japanese society, they refuse to become adults, stop studying and “decide” to isolate themselves at home.

This phenomenon was first identified in Japan, but it’s spreading to other societies where high competitiveness rules the system like Korea. Korea is a country where everyone “fights” in order to be accepted in the best universities, and once you enter in a good university your life is solved because you will be hired by a “good” company when you graduate. Psychologists studying the “hikikomori” phenomenon blame “super-capitalism” and a extreme meritocratic education system as the root of the problem. But why there are not “hikikomori” in the USA? Maybe because there is an excess of amae in Japan, would a family in the USA pamper their children to stay at home 24 hours a day during months? I don’t think so.

I’ve met Japanese and also not Japanese 😉 who really like to be at home, are not very social, spend 90% of their weekends at home and don’t do anything but watching movies during holidays. But that’s not ‘hikikomori’, that’s just being antisocial; to be considered as ‘hikikomori’ syndrome it has to be ALL THE time at home during months and even years. Having a ‘hikikomori’ in your family is not well seen, is like having some kind of curse and neighbors usually talk about it.

Better than my “blahblahblah” if you are really interested in ‘hikikomori’ you should watch Tamago, is a movie about a hikikomori’s life and his parents shame. If you are a Densha Otoko fan one of the protagonists friends is a hikikomori, and in Ikebukuro West Gate Park one of the protagonist’s brother is recovering from a hikikomori problem. By the way, if you have never seen Ikebukuro West Gate Park you should, is not about hikikomori 😉

Hikikomoris problem is real, but is VERY EXAGGERATED by the media. A psychologist called Tamaki Saito said that there are more than one million hikikomoris in Japan (Everyone was alarmed when this number was made public and it became world news). But Tamaki Saito confessed afterwards that he just made the number to call everyone’s attention about the problem, there are ‘only’ thousands of hikikomoris in Japan.