*sings and headbangs* Communication Breakdown, Communication Breakdown

*stands upright again* OK, so that's all I know of that Led Zeppelin song. Whoo, that felt good!

Anyway, Masden-sensei [Ummm.... what SHOULD I call you on here?] seems to have taken note that a fair few of us wanted to move on from the topic of genders, as our new topic is Communication.

I think this is quite a good choice as - although less likely to be controversial than the last topic - it's still a good wide one and has plenty of scope for differences between countries to be shown.

Several of us gave examples of communication problems;

Kie mentioned that both male and female Japanese have stood her up (no, not necessarily like a date!) despite having told her 「だいじょうぶ」 i.e. indicating that they COULD meet her, which surprised and annoyed me. I was surprised because I thought that if they couldn't go, the Japanese would just say that they couldn't go and not feel a need to give a reason/excuse.
This was mentioned by Carly.

*****

One example I gave - which I was grateful to my Mum for having mentioned to me when she came to visit in April - is that sometimes, when you ask a Japanese person a question, the response you get will be completely unrelated.
_:_
 One day in mid-late April, when I was a new kid and looking for a classroom, I walked up to the nearest student I could find, showed her my time table and asked *puts on slowly, badly spoken Japanese with excessively strong English accent which will be written phonetically here for the purposes of entertainment* 「この,クラス[extra emphasis]は・どっこ・[/emphasis]です・[emphasis]か。[/emphasis]」
The response I got was "Oh, you have this teacher? [Can't remember who it was I was having now]. She is very kind".... and then she walked away! WOT.
N.B. I know that どっこ isn't how you say "where"!

My group discussed ひつよい i.e. the sort of pervy men who categorically take no for an answer [in the context we used it for]. In Japan, it'd appear to be the case that it tends to be foreigners who are like this.

At the end of Thursday's class, we all got into a circle and had to answer a question with Yes (blue card) or No (red card), although several people also used Sometimes/Maybe (yellow card).
I put forward a question about whether body lanugage in Japan was different to that in the UK and there was a lot of discussion about gestures.
 On reflection, perhaps this question was vague, so Masden-sensei came to the rescue again and asked whether people can read body language of those in their own country. I immediately put the red card on because.... well, I struggle with reading people full stop, basically!


I was surprised, but also very relieved, to note that several Japanese people also put no to people of their own country. Misa mentioned that the Japanese do tend to be fairly hard to read as they don't show emotion as much as Westerners do.

_:_:_
Before I finish off, I think I should mention the final statistics we were shown about gender pay gaps arond the world and attitudes towards women working after marriage and housewives.

See here: http://bunkaseminar.blogspot.com/2010/05/some-statistics-about-gender-equality.html
While the amount of Japanese in full-time permanent work - rather than on temporary contracts - is decreasing all around, women are often the first ones to be laid off. *DEEP BREATH* Now, I shall be mature about this.

Also, the thicker lines on the first table show that while fewer men and women want women to be housewives, there are more women who want to be housewives than men wnating women to be housewives. Unfortunately, forgotten what the dotted ones represent now.

Although things on the work front for women are generally better than they used to be; there are still some rather large hurdles ot overcome.

The third table in the above link shows the gender pay gap in Japan to be higher than [in order of lasrgest to smallest pay gap] Germany, the the US, the UK and Sweden. This taken from looking at the left column.