Just finished up with the third day of class. Both days were very interesting but to keep in chronological order I will start with Tuesdays class.
Tuesday was all about Japanese interpersonal relations, or how Japanese people interact with each other in different situations. There are basically 3 classifications of interactions: intimate, ritual and anomic. All of these come from the cross overs between omote and ura (front and back) and uchi and soto (inside and outside). Front and back can be thought of as from the perspective of the person and whether or not the behavior is front (more public) or back (more private). Inside and outside can kind of be looked at like if its more of a private/ relaxed almost setting (inside) and outside being more like a public and more formal setting. I do not know if that makes much sense but once I explain them with the behavior types maybe that will clear things up.
Let`s start with ritual behaviors because I think its the easiest to understand (and explain). Ritual behavior is seen as soto omote or outside front. You can think of it kind of like talking to a boss or superior. You know the person, they could have a great effect in your life; so you act very formal and habitually. Some signs of ritual behavior are things like very formal speech, stiff, formal posture, physical distance, and little to no expression on the face. It has been described as the social mask. Before we go any further with ritual behavior I have to quickly explain the concept of `face`. Face can be thought of as honor or place in society. Ritual behavior can be considered a good thing because there are many strategies to maintain or even gain face. It is at least about prevention of loss of face of yourself or the other parties face. Using the example of talking with your boss, you greet them formally and ask polite questions like you do in the us (Good Morning, How are you? Nice weather right?)
Next up is intimate behaviors. Now get your minds out of the gutters because it is not like that. Intimate behaviors are thought to to be uchi ura (inside back). You can think of it as kind of a private scenario with people you are close with, like a small party with your close friends. Behavior is very relaxed. The social mask mentioned above is removed and people are in a state of social nudity. An example of this in a Japanese context is that people will often go out after work to the bar and drink together. This demonstrates one of the big requirements of intimate behavior; it must be away from ones setting of everyday work. There also must be equality or at least the illusion of equality among participants. This allows for the state of social nudity I talked about. People are allowed to be much more relaxed and let go a little bit.
Last, and kind of least, is anomic behavior. Anomic behavior is classified as soto ura (outside back). This is a bit strange because its more of a private type of behavior but its more in public. Lebra (author) described it as interaction with someone considered an outsider but not in the public eye. This one is kind of hard to wrap your mind around. I myself am still struggling with it so I wont go into much detail. Basically it`s how you treat a stranger (quick side note: sorry about the weird ` apostrophes I`m on a Japanese keyboard and they are a bit different than US keyboards and im struggling a bit). Like you don`t really have to be super polite to them but you do not necessarily treat them like a friend.
Moving onto day 3! Day three was all about Japanese health care and society. Today we started by looking at the system overall and comparing it to the concepts about culture we have learned so far and then analyzing that and making connections back to US culture. Japanese health care cannot be looked at as just biomedicine (things like hospitals and such as used in Western medicine) or just the more traditional types of medicine like kampoo or herbal remedies, because in Japan they sometimes use a combination of the both. It depends on peoples age and beliefs among other factors, but for the most part it can be looked at as more of an integrative approach. Now today we just scratched the surface so I will go into more detail tomorrow but I will throw out a few things I found interesting. The first thing I found fascinating was that because of relationship behaviors doctors are viewed as higher than patients. This puts their interactions at a ritualistic type of level so the patients feel as though they cannot really express verbally what is ailing them so doctors and nurses have to use physical and other signals to try and figure out what is wrong with them. Also, the Japanese consider telling patients about terminal conditions to be unethical, whereas in America that is an ethical duty of doctors to tell their patients. Can you imagine that being the standard?!?! It blows my mind! I could go on but I fear this post is becoming too long so I will save it for tomorrow.
As I mentioned last post, if you have any questions, comments, concerns with any of my posts; PLEASE leave a comment or email me! I would love to discuss or explain things in more detail. I also realized that I did not put my email address last time so here you go: suriano.alex@gmail.com
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