i want to know who spoon these answers to the survey respondents, because this smells like a survey designed to bolster pre-conceived notions that people have of japan. do they provide open surveys or just force people to choose from a list of choices they don’t agree with? was there a write in section? or a “i find this whole exercise incredibly offensive and lacking in options of characteristics i actually admire about this nation?”

but just in case this survey is on the up and up, my thoughts if it were true:

you know your country must be lame when polls indicate that the majority of the population says their ability to detect changes in temperature and whether deciduous trees are growing green leaves or dropping them as their nation’s best characteristic.

i mean seriously, what else are you proud of at that point?
“look, i can count to ten on my fingers”
“most of us can wipe our asses without assistance”
“last night when i fell asleep, my heart kept beating, and was still doing so this morning”
“our people can procreate through mating”
“when i’m hungry and there’s food around, i generally eat before i starve to death”
congratulations, the majority of you aren’t mentally disabled paraplegics!

but maybe it is a differentiation that the japanese notice seasonal changes more than those from other countries. i mean, who (that isn’t japanese) can honestly say that they haven’t gone out in july dressed in a winter coat, ski pants, gloves, boots, and a beanie over full body wool underwear with a snow shovel to clear our driveway? wait a minute, except for those stationed in antarctica, i suspect the answer is no one.

insect and birds of doing the same.

i know the country holds itself in high esteem, but what delusion are they operating under? do they think their country isn’t on planet earth? or are they under the impression that functioning central nervous systems and cerebrums are just a part of the japanese dna?

to summarize i shall paraphrase a quote from penn:

“why do people do polls anyway? why should you gave a f*ck what other people think? the only things that matter are right, wrong, and the reasoning you use to determine your answers.”

Notice that there is no mention of freedom anywhere on this list.

“but maybe it is a differentiation that the japanese notice seasonal changes more than those from other countries. i mean, who (that isn’t japanese) can honestly say that they haven’t gone out in july dressed in a winter coat, ski pants, gloves, boots, and a beanie over full body wool underwear with a snow shovel to clear our driveway?”

Actually, the rest of the world probably has Japan beat on this. The Japanese are the ones who like to start wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants when Fall officially starts, even though it’s usually still scorching hot outside. Somehow they fail to notice that in most of Japan it might as well be summer for six months out of the year.

There’s no mention of freedom because the Japanese aren’t spoon-fed the notion of freedom as Americans are. But that’s probably a good thing to point out. People respond to these sorts of questions with the generalities they have been taught.

I hope you don’t mean that not actually citing “freedom” means that they have less of it – any more than citing it would mean that they have more of it.

Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China were filled with slogans that touted the opposite of what the people really had.

I wish more people would ask themselves what freedom means. For example, people in China today are in some respects (obviously not all), more free than Americans.

I wouldn’t be able to say who is more free between the Japanese and the Americans. Depends on the definition. Certainly they are more free to do what they want without being sued into poverty, or arrested for insensitivity, or hounded to death by the tax bureau. Just those three off the top of my head.

“When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all…

“Mama don’t take my brontosaur,
“Mama don’t take my brontosaur,
“Mama don’t take my brontosaur away…

Instant Rammen never made the list. Oh, yeah that guy was Chinese that discovered instant rammen. Or was he Chinese?

“We do Compact” never made the list too.

I actually agree with #9. Yeah, i have met stubborn nationalistic Japanese people, but I will use history as my base for my argument. The best examples are Japan throwing away samurai cultures, adopting british political system, and of course opening up ports for foreign goods relatively a lot earlier than most other asian nations.

Yes, I’m Japanese so I am biased, but I’m not trying to say that Japan is better than other asian nations. I have a lot of criticism against Japan, with politics obviously being one of them. Anyways, currently since citizens of Japan are becoming more and more retarded (women don’t want to become housewives, children not taking education seriously, and men becoming more absorbed to sex industry more than ever), so Japan’s relying on foreign immigrants for future developments. The irony is that Japan’s stubborness(strictness?) to the immigration system.

Regardless, I still believe what makes Japan Japan is indeed the ability to accept other cultures a lot further than into their pop culture.