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Crashing Japan - On the Road for Golden Week

The things I dislike about this country can be summed up in the word “salaryman,” the epitome of modern Japan. These poor buggers have sold themselves to be a small part of a large thing. This would not be so bad in itself, except that the big thing is a nasty, polluting, destructive corporate structure which treats these men no better than robots. So they slave their lives away, swallowing their pride and their frustration. As the stress, the lack of exercise, the lost sleep, the tobacco, the alcohol and the cup-noodles take their toll, these men watch themselves grow older and uglier every day. This syndrome applies not only to company workers but to many businessmen and teachers as well.

and tell their boss everything they ever hated about him. When returning to the work environment the next day, all behavior at these events is ignored at though it never happened.

The concept of the "salaryman"is very interesting. Oddly enough, sometimes I wonder about the materialism of people. Most of the time I just can't understand why they're so consumed with their McMansions and McMobiles. In my opinion, there are other things to be concerned about. Well hey, they can just go pay their way into Harvard. But that's just me going off on another tangent.

Is this the same Jonathan Tarbox who got screwed over by CMX?

GATSU wrote:

Is this the same Jonathan Tarbox who got screwed over by CMX?

That was Jake Tarbox.

...Many people think that Japan is this perfect place of cutesy characters and futuristic electronics, but in reality it has its fair share of problems...

What .Sy is saying is exactly the false impression that I thought Tarbox was giving off. Readers, keep in mind that this is the personal opinion of Tarbox and is not the absolute solid truth of all Japanese "salarymen". We do not come from Japan so we do not fully understand the work ethic there (no matter how long one has lived there, one is still not a native), and thus do not have the right to criticize another's system (by essentially saying they are "slave-drivers").

Remember... what seems to us as unusual might be quite normal to others. In this case, what seems to us as "slave-driving" might be "normal" to native Japanese.

I definitely disagree with the sentiment that one cannot disagree with a lifestyle simply because one has not experienced it. That's like saying that I can't criticize Stalin's tyrannical regime simply because I wasn't stuck in a gulag. The nice thing about being able to experience another culture is that one can take a comparitive perspective relative to one's own culture; aka, pros and cons. On a bit of a random note, that is why internet/phone/T.V. (various mediums of communications) are such wonderful technology; they stir the melting pot, and help shed light on various society's ills by pointing out that other environments may not have said baggage.

- Shaun