During this different class I take, the other day we discussed how some daily life events that may seem 'normal' at first are actually questioning and odd.
One of the girls in my group was from somewhere far from tokyo(i forgot which prefecture it was) and said it was weird to see people in the morning try to get on a crowded train, like literally squeeze themselves in there when another same train is going to arrive in 3 minutes.
I actually had never given this any thought till she pointed it out but from a person who's lived around the Kanto-area for over 10 years, I guess one of the reasons is because we just see crowded trains so much and we know how wide the capacity is in these trains that we never even think to not get on THAT ONE TRAIN. it's like we can only think to get on that train, kind of like waiting 3 minutes for the next train isnt even an option.
The one thing i thought was weird or 'against the norm' was whenever there is some kind of accident in tourist locations, the media alwaysalways says 'there are no signs of japanese tourists related to the incident.' I guess since it's a japanese news production, that is necessary information but still they make it seem like everything is okay just because japanese tourists were not involved when there actually are people who were injured. BUTTT, I guess i had never given this some thought before because we had always been living in a country where everything revolved around japanese citizens and a country where it is ' normal' for the government to do something when a citizen is in trouble.
This got me thinking. The way we were brought up, creates 'normality' in ourselves subconsciously. Our daily lives are our daily lives so they become so normal and ordinary to us that we never think to doubt them. So if there are 7 billion people in the world right now, that makes 7 billion different types of 'normality' which were created throughout their lives. Isn't that amazing and terrifying at the same time? I guess as long as there are people, we're all going to have to judge people based on the information we have. However, we all need to understand that 'our normal' isnt necessarily the same as 'his normal.' Acceptance is definitely the first step.
I don't think there is such thing as "normal" cause the closest thing to normal we have is the average of experiences we had over our life and we use that average to rate our daily lives. Normality is something we just make up in order to make our own little world to make our lives easier to live, where our own up is up and where our down is down.
ReplyDeleteI don't know I guess I am babbling, lovely blog!!!
thats interesting how you bring this up. i might be straying away from the main issue here but if I read it a certain way, it looks like youre talking about Nationalism. Like how the media only reports the Japanese tourists who got injured, they only newscast foreign sport teams with Japanese players.
ReplyDeleteWe think its obvious that we should be supporting people of our own race. Who made that rule up? We've been living with it forever. It's really strange what the government and media can do to you (haha)
Hi Shiho,
ReplyDeleteThese are both good posts, but be sure to provide one that shows a clear connection to our text.
Thanks,
Ken