Japanese Language and Culture

This is a YouTube channel @kyotako1372 titled Kyota Ko, which may be his name. I tripped across a video about the proper way to wear a kimono and made note of it because I have an interest in clothes and language and culture.

If you watch ONE, then YouTube stalks you. So today I got notification about this clip by him with a story about a Japanese office romance.

This is humor and exaggerated for effect, which is common in fiction generally and perhaps especially so in Japanese media:

Fiction frequently exaggerates but is often based on something real. In Japanese Anime, it's common for someone excited to get a gushing nosebleed. 

Japan is mountainous. Getting a nosebleed more easily at altitude is something real. It's probably a known phenomenon in Japan that strong emotions can trigger that but it's probably depicted as a gushing nosebleed to make it visible to the audience. That's probably an exaggeration. 

His intended audience is people who are not Japanese, so he made a little skit about an office romance to illustrate the use of various Japanese honorifics and it's exaggerated because Western societies tend to lack honorifics and that ends up being problematic.

In my last post here, I talked about growing up in a bilingual household and not learning German in a proper cultural context and then coming across as rude when I was actually living in Germany.

Western societies frequently misinterpret Japanese concepts and culture, similar to what I write about in Tsundere. I've also compared Asian honorifics a bit to Southern honorifics and talked a bit about the importance of age in choosing an appropriate honorific in a culture where it's rude to ask someone's age, which is what I think drives the Japanese tendency to name their sun sign even though they typically don't believe in Western astrology.

Please don't misinterpret him as a drama queen. He's trying to illustrate things that are subtle in practice but culturally important, so if you get it wrong, it really can cause significant drama without you understanding why.

His point is that honorifics and forms of address seem unimportant to a lot of foreigners, and this is a big gaff to the Japanese. It may seem like a small detail to you whether you call someone by their first or last name and which honorific to use, but it's not to them.

You might mentally compare it to the ongoing hullabaloo concerning the trans community demanding that people respect their pronouns. People in the US get extremely offended if you misgender them and that's not limited to the trans community. 

Calling someone a girly man or saying something similar to suggest a woman is overly masculine is insulting, a la the sick burn in Aliens:

Have you ever been mistaken for a man?

No. Have you?