I would describe Japan as a pretty polite culture. I would probably give them precedence if one of their mannerisms directly contradicted one from where I grew up. Where I grew up, it's not polite to make noise while eating. In Japan, it's pretty much rude not to. Here, you pick up the dishes off the table and shovel stuff into your mouth. You're encouraged to eat things with your hands. You can pick stuff off of plates in the middle of the table using the same chopsticks you eat with. Its like the local Miss Manners turned her conscience the right way up.

And then, there's Rice. I swear, the Shinto religeon must worship a rice demon for a god or something. Rice is served with everything. The words for "dinner" and "rice" are the same, "Gohan". You can stick your chopsticks into anything else on the table like a fork, but a pair of chopsticks stuck in rice is a symbol for death. You don't put stuff on your rice, except for a few specific things (Nori, Sesame, and Umeboshi).

Japan would probably have a collective heart attack if they saw what I usually do to my rice in the US.



July 11th

Had a verbal interview test today. I'm not sure how well I did, the teacher kept using words I didn't know. Oh well.

During lunch, poor Danielle got herself into a conversation with Alex about religion. I managed to stay out of it for the most part, but some of the evolution stuff going across was too absurd to avoid. Catholic vs Philosopher vs Atheist, with some Hindu and Mormon thrown in for good measure. Everyone is still friends, I think.

Went to Labo party tonight. Nana wasn't there but there was this other really cool guy named Takeru. He didn't know a whole lot of english, but for some reason his pronunciation of the english he did know was really good. Usually I get to make do with people swapping Ls and Rs or Vs and Bs, but... yeah. He showed me how to make an origami peacock, but I think I already forgot.

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