hello it's your friend Anming here i'm an
american who's been living in china and japan since 2012 and in this
long time span i've had the chance to see quite a few countries in asia
and i have to say japan being an economic powerhouse
and a country with a substantial population of foreigners
you might think that speaking japanese probably wouldn't turn a lot of heads
here especially foreigners speaking japanese
in tokyo but despite how big and international
this city is every once in a while yo
u might turn a
couple heads so i'm going that way i'll see you next
time now although those kinds of situations
are pretty rare the further you go outside of the big city the more likely
it's going to happen even in the suburbs of the city i've seen that head turn reaction quite
a few times here in japan although admittedly it's much more common in
china well with all the reaction videos out
there on the internet about languages i've gotten constant requests for
japanese reaction videos however
i think that how people really react in japan is
going to be a little bit different from this is especially true for how people
think elderly japanese will react so let's take a look at a couple
conversations that i think are good examples and see if it lines up with how
you think it would were you surprised that she didn't go OH!
they speak japanese well that was a pretty standard city
reaction and in the center of the city and in many stores throughout japan
they're taught just to assume that
you know japanese until you prove that you
can't unlike in china where the reaction is a little bit more like more like that but it's also
possible that japanese people are indeed surprised by foreigners speaking
japanese but they just don't verbalize it because they don't want to embarrass
you or to cause a scene both are possible
but it's certainly true that as you go out of the center of the city and
into the suburbs and even into the countryside that the reaction changes a
lot but that could
also be because people
tend to be more friendly as you get out of tokyo and they're just
curious to see you walking around the neighborhood they might even want to say
hi to you going outside of tokyo to an area like
this can be pretty fun if you know how to get there and you know what to see
now of course when you come out here you're gonna have to rely on yourself a
lot more because you won't find a lot of english
speakers or english signs but it's really worth it to get out
where it's a litt
le quieter and you get a better more realistic
view of what living in japan is actually like because tokyo is kind of a special place one of the best things about leaving
tokyo and going out to the suburbs is that it's so quiet here aside from the
bugs those are just cicadas but you don't
have that constant traffic going through
and people constantly walking around at all
hours of the night now i do like how quiet it is here and how peaceful it
is here i like this
architecture but i do like toky
o a lot a lot of people like to badmouth tokyo
to each their own because i'm not such a big fan of
quiet suburbia people choose to live in the suburbs
either the north or south maybe east or west of tokyo simply because
it's cheaper you could rent an apartment much cheaper out here
in the suburbs rather than downtown and if you don't mind the commute then
that's a good choice
Comments