I was born in New York City and have lived here all my life. The first time I ever left this country was when I was 17. I was accepted into a foreign exchange program to go to Okinawa, Japan. You could say that I experienced culture shock, but in a good way. The fact that everything was so different just made me even more interested and observant. Japan's culture is very different from ours. One thing I noticed when I was going to the high school over there was that there was a big sense of unity among the students. For example, all the students wear school uniforms. Another thing is that they take care of the school by themselves. Students will stay after class to sweep the floors, mop, clean the bathrooms and etc. Even I had to partake in these duties some days.
There were also smaller differences that I had to learn, like general manners that were different. For example, you always see people eating on the run in New York. In Japan it is considered disrespectful to eat while walking, you should only eat while sitting down. I just had to learn these little differences over time. I enjoyed my experience in Japan, and I would like to visit other countries and learn how they differ from America too.
I agree; Asian cultures seem to generally be very unified. There is a sense of belonging -- perhaps to the nation, or to the family. Asian cultures in general seem to be very collectivist, while the American/western cultures are more individualistic.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in different South Asian countries and we had to wear uniforms for every one of the schools I attended (six schools altogether). But we were not given duties to clean the school; well they do that in boarding schools, but that is a different story. We were very unified as well and we always had strong school spirit as well as strong "house" spirit (houses are factions that students are sorted into; eg: Red House, Green house...etc.) It is interesting how cultures differ from each other so subtly even when the geographical differences are not that great.
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