Irritation… cultural irritation?
I have noticed myself being irritated at a few things recently. Some of them are possible justified, others are long standing dislikes of mine, but some are new! And some really aren’t consistent, swinging with my moods, energy levels and so on, which is pretty normal, to be honest. But as I thought I realised some are culture stress, as things don’t work out the way I want or expect, sometimes because of new culture, sometimes because of misunderstandings, and sometimes simply because I have relatively recently moved from one culture to another.
Let’s start with something unique (for me) to Japan, and relatively inconsistent! I have been getting annoyed when school kids, specifically middle school or high school kids, shout “Harrowww!!” at me in the street. Some days I don’t mind at all and will even reply with a friendly “Hello!” of my own. But on other days I see a group of kids and deliberatly cross the street and speed up my pedalling to avoid it, and when it comes stare ernestly forward as thought I had no idea that a kid I have never met is trying to engage me in a conversation that won’t progress further than bauldering a common salutation across the street…
Don’t get me wrong, I am usually fine with having a chat with someone who is interested in finding out where I am from that extends beyond an interjection, and I am ware that my failure to interact might inadvertently discourage these kids from trying to engage a foreigner in such a conversation in the future… But being treated this way was fun for a little while, but it’s worn a bit thin and I’d kind of like to be treated a bit more like I was a permanent feature in the locality than a temporary exhibit… But still I am a foreigner and not the normal face!
A long standing irritant for me is taxes and finances. Recently I’ve been doing a bit of all that. But now I am a bit more settled things might become more regular and once I have learned how to do stuff it might remain a bit more consistent!
A smaller one is a result of moving to Japan from UK. Movies in Japan take a while longer to come out, bigger movies take shorter time, smaller movies take a bit longer. Recently I have rented a few movies that looked pretty good and recently released just to get home and find it is a movie I saw last year, or even in one case a few years ago! It’s particularly irritating when the movie wasn’t that great anyways!
One irritation that swings big time for me is racism in Japan and reactions to it. On one aspect I am surrounded by people who really are quite at home with foreigners most of the time and so maybe I don’t experience so much of it.Sometimes the racism is ignorance, and harmless, easy to ignore and when people make a fuss it irritates me . Sometimes it is pretty serious, like when kids are being bullied at school or by peers for being different.
But occasionally I will hear of something or even see something first hand that is downright racist and would be stamped down on big time in the UK. When this happens I find myself swinging between feelings of annoyance that it has happened, is happening or even can happen and feelings of irritation that someone is making a big deal out of something that really isn’t that directly damaging to anyone. One such example of this is a recent blog post about a McDonalds campaign here in Japan.
Anyways maybe the summer ending, winter looming on the horizon is making me more irritable?
