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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2025

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  • Methinks you are romanticizing a culture you don’t live in by only seeing the positives you like.

    That’s kind of an insulting assumption as I’m Japanese and live in Japan. So while I may have a biased opinion, I wouldn’t say it’s romantisizing.

    In fact, I’d say you’re the one that seems to be making assumptions based on snippets of our culture that you see on the internet. The weird vending machines that sell letters from your pretend grandma to used panties aren’t found everywhere you go — they’re in specific locations for the novelty.

    Also having regular vending machines for drinks and food doesn’t exactly contradict my point. The vending machines are more for the customers’ convenience. They’re not installed specifically for removing human contact. Yes, we lose human contact as a result, but it’s a tradeoff to better serve customers whereas most companies that deploy AI support agents probably do so to save a buck.

    Sorry about the rant.


  • I’ve heard\read there are many racist, paternalist, hierarchical and collectivist traits,

    We definitely have all that!

    Also, I found it interesting that someone mentioned how you used “collectivist” as a negative feature of Japanese culture. While it certainly could be, it’s actually nice to see when people are genuinely wanting to help each other. The problem is our hierarchical culture where some shitbag on top takes advantage of our collectivist mindset for their own gains.

    *Everyone else is working unpaid overtime, why can’t you?! *Almost nobody being worked overtime is going to say that. Workers will take it for the good of the imaginary “team” because some manager convinced them it’s the right thing to do. Luckily, probably thanks to my Canadian upbringing, I’ve always been able to say no to ridiculous shit like this. That, and I work for myself, so the only ones who boss me around are my wife and kids.

    Edit: Whoops, maybe collectivism isn’t the right word for what I found to be positive after reading your other comment. Sorry, but I hope you got my point.




  • k0e3@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldWelp
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    6 days ago

    Here in Japan, I used to use it to follow up and coming Japanese illustrators and webcomic artists, most of who tweeted fun, non-political, wholesome things. I got live updates whenever we had typhoons and earthquakes.

    Obviously there’s toxicity if you look for it, but I didn’t really see it. Which is why I honestly didn’t understand why so many people shit in Twitter especially on “tech/bologicallysocially-aware” circles like Reddit calling it toxic. The reason why I stopped was because Musk bought it, not because of the content I was seeing. Maybe I was just lucky.

    Note: This is just a single old man’s anecdote, so please take it with a huge grain of salt.