Yeah, my big thing isn’t to be negative or positive, but to show how they’re flip sides of the same coin. Like Japanese people do it too, right? They’re all, “I love America because it’s so free,” but then like, “America is scary because of all the guns.” Well, guess what? They’re the same thing. The two things are related, perhaps not directly, but rather as part of a large, circular system. They impact each other.

Same thing in Japan. Like nobody likes the stress, but everybody enjoys how clean and efficient things are. Hey, you can’t have one without the other. Everybody wants to be the customer, but not the worker. Somehow things have a way of balancing themselves out. Life’s weird like that.

But what I really like best is when you tell a Japanese person that you like Japan, and they say “Thank you.” That always kills me for some reason.

In interviews, it feels more like “don’t be yourself” more like “give them the answer they are eagerly waiting for” which is way 1 and 2. Another way I like to think of interviewers is like a date. You get on well with the person, you get the job

Nice post, keep up the interesting posts;)

But the better my Japanese became, the more I realized the Japanese people around me were expressing their opinions, and sometimes strongly too. Contrary to what I’d read about Japan, after a while, the people here didn’t seem any more polite or deferential than anyone else. They just expressed things differently. And so, since I live here too, I figured I might as well say what I gotta to say. Okay, so maybe an interview wasn’t the place to say it. But they asked! Jeez, I’m an idiot. I knew I shouldn’t have had giant cup of Starbucks right before I went in there.