Japan is a country for introverts? Can it be true that a country is a state of mind? I watched the video of Susan Cain on TED. In her presentation, she claimed that introverted people are misunderst

Megumi@Ibaraki

Japan is a country for introverts? Can it be true that a country is a state of mind? I watched the video of Susan Cain on TED. In her presentation, she claimed that introverted people are misunderstood and disadvantaged due to extrovert-oriented American culture with social styles and working environments preferred for them. She also mentioned that the Far Eastern countries in Asia are introverted societies because those cultures are more group-oriented, and reserved people are often seen as wise. In Japan, opinionated people are more likely to be shunned because they are seen to rock the boat easily. Additionally, it's a risk-averse culture with being its household saving rate very high in the world. Geography also helps our insularism which didn't cause us to have frontier spirits. A friend of mine once told me that Japan attracts different kinds of people although he couldn't put his finger on how they are. I understand my country looks attractive to tech-savvy people, anime/manga fans and Zen fanatics abroad. (although there are people who came here for pure economic/educational/occupational reasons.) What they seem to have in common is those passions and interests are often cultivated by "looking in." So, I think you could say it's a introvert friendly country. Yet, this is just my observation and does not prove Japan is a good fit for introverts.

Apr 9, 2013 1:16 PM

Corrections · 5

Thanks guys for your comments. Japan's fear of rocking the boat doesn't work well in crisis. "The nail that sticks out gets banged down." is the saying to describe the sheep mentality in society. I think that's one of the reasons why the militaristic government had so much power over the people during the war. However, the positive side of the group mentality showed when the big earthquake on 3/11 happened. Since nobody didn't want to stand out looking like a selfish person (which would cause the person to be ostracized in society), most victims behaved respectfully despite their tough conditions.

April 12, 2013

Actually this whole article/essay thing pretty much applies to me. I lose out on a lot of opportunities here for being introverted, people interpret my reservation as me being confused, I get distracted and work slower when everyone around me is talking really loud and making jokes the entire shift, and people not only are not interested in anything I think about, but are actually offended by anything I bring up in a general or abstract sense even if I'm about to relate it to something humorous or sarcastic or whatever that they can relate to. It's like everyone's been either evolutionarily or culturally programmed to stamp out, undermine, and ultimately kill people like me, simply because I was never allowed to leave the house as a kid and read books and thought about stuff instead of running around making fun of people and pulling people's pants down when they're not looking or whatever it is real kids do in school.

April 9, 2013

@lena: I agree that a bad byproduct of a culture accustomed to introversion can be people being afraid to speak up about things that are actually wrong, and that's one thing I like about American culture is that it's hard to put out bad information when everyone taking it is validating it rather than just automatically accepting it. One bad byproduct of extroverted culture I've noticed though is that people tend to assume you're either stupid, antisocial, or weird if you're not really loud all the time, and it's actually hard to have a good conversation with people (my age at least) because they're too ADD and impatient to stay on one topic long enough to let it develop into something interesting, and I personally get a lot of misunderstandings from starting a topic and then not having enough time to say a few words relating it or getting to a punchline or anything before someone takes it as an offense and changes the topic because they think I'm trying to prove I'm smarter than them or something.

April 9, 2013

Last Sunday I was at the English conversation club and we were discussing the topic of Crisis Management on the different examples. And one of them was the Toyota Company which had to recall more than 8mln vehicles due to problem with accelerator caused multiple death. My teacher from the US could not understand the behavior of Japanese Management who kept silence and didnt keep customers informed. We decided that it is because of other mentality and hierarchy system in the management. But either way it could bring a lot of harm, i mean this natural moderateness of Japanese in dealing business.

April 9, 2013

Japan is a country for introverts?

Can it be true that a country is a state of mind?
I watched the video of Susan Cain on TED. In her presentation, she claimed that introverted people are misunderstood and disadvantaged due to extrovert-oriented American culture with social styles and working environments preferred for them.
She also mentioned that the Far Eastern countries in Asia are introverted societies because those cultures are more group-oriented, and reserved people are often seen as wise.

In Japan, opinionated people are more likely to be shunned because they are seen to rock the boat easily. Additionally, it's a risk-averse culture with being its household saving rate very high in the world. Geography also helps our insularism which didn't cause us to have frontier spirits.

A friend of mine once told me that Japan attracts particular kinds of people although he couldn't put his finger on how they are. I understand my country looks attractive to tech-savvy people, anime/manga fans and Zen fanatics abroad. (although there are people who came here for pure economic/educational/occupational reasons.) What they seem to have in common is those passions and interests are often cultivated by "looking in." So, I think you could say it's a introvert friendly country. Yet, this is just my observation and does not prove Japan is a good fit for introverts.

April 9, 2013

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