Interesting cultural differences, as pointed out by my JTE

Ito Sensei and I started off today’s class with a semi-scripted conversation about my weekend. Afterwards she gave a long talk in Japanese to the students that I thought was really interesting. She was saying how gaijin like to have fun/party/play, whatever, and that they work in order to have enough money to have fun on weekends. Japanese people’s main purpose, on the other hand, is work, and weekends are meant for rest from their overwhelming jobs, not for having fun in the gaijin-sense of the word. She then said that if they want to branch out of this cultural idea of what life should be like, they should study abroad or marry a foreigner, etc. It is kind of depressing that one would have to go so far in order to have fun and not work a million hours a week, but it’s interesting that she pointed it out, and proof that society is changing here, albeit slowly. While people still work a ton here, there is a lot more passive-aggressive anger about it than there used to be. It’s interesting to watch things change, even in the five years since I first came here.

I don’t think I organized the above thoughts very well, but wanted to share it with someone.