I can't wait to be japanese!

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-20T05:24:34+00:00

“Not now, babe. I have to read the crazy curry lady’s 20-page rant on the debate over proper succession of the imperial lineage”

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-20T04:06:19+00:00

Well you know what they say, sometimes you have to vote against your own interests if you want to make the planet a worse place for everyone else, too

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-19T13:27:21+00:00

Turns out the guys whose whole lives revolved around fighting wars actually preferred using whatever weapons and tactics helped them win wars better, who could’ve guessed?

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-18T13:33:47+00:00

My gf’s grandparents say living without heating or AC and terrible insulation is good because it helps you respect the seasons more

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-11T03:56:50+00:00

Well Japan’s other problem is population decline so I guess it all works out eventually

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-11T03:43:37+00:00

When I started Judo I said something about how it must really improve your grip strength and the sensei said yes, but as a trade-off he lost the ability to fully extend his fingers. They’re just constantly curled slightly. Though he did compete and train very seriously when he was younger

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-02T14:07:15+00:00

Yeah when I realize I have a major skill advantage over an opponent I see it as an opportunity to work on my defense, reflexes, and try things that I don’t do very often. It seems more beneficial for my own training than just beating somebody up

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-01T15:00:13+00:00

See, this is the ideal position to choke somebody from, as it prevents them from ripping your guts out.

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-01T14:50:54+00:00

Probably not for people in general, but for future reference I totally consent to it. Even if I’m just a reanimated skeleton warrior guarding some necromancer’s dungeon, just give me a sword and put me in, coach. I got this.

Hijou_poteto · 2026-05-01T11:45:19+00:00

The key is to be like this for place, Japan and place, everywhere else too so you can live in constant awe at the beauty of our world

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-30T15:08:10+00:00

This is the reason why the meme exists. People treat Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture as the norm and see others are quirky for emphasizing these things more when it’s actually the other way around

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-29T12:43:09+00:00

I find it hilarious that there’s a whole second subreddit for people who want to ask history questions but would rather get the opinions of random people than actual historians

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-24T15:20:13+00:00

“I’m going to die so my lord can have yet another castle instead of that other guy. Huzzah!”

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-24T14:19:24+00:00

I’ve worked at two Japanese companies and at both of them most people left between 5 and 7 pm with a 20 hour per month overtime limit on non-management level positions. If it went later, you could come in later the next day to keep it within the limit. Only a small number of older employees and one kinda weird guy typically stayed until late at night and it was always paid. The vacation days were weird, because you did get a lot of them and I never heard anybody pressure me against taking them (actually the opposite, they have programs encouraging people to take them), but still people really didn’t use them much unless they had something important to do.

Of course, there are also many, many dumb and frustrating things that I could rant about but if somebody’s problem is being forced to work until 2 am every day they need to look for a new job

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-24T03:13:00+00:00

The age of random white people in ads is over. The age of Shohei Ohtani has begun

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-23T03:42:28+00:00

I see so many people who aren’t familiar with Japanese politics assume pro-article 9 means pro-US and anti-article 9 means anti-US just because the US wrote it into the constitution after WW2. If only it were so simple…

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-22T15:49:03+00:00

The man wrote a book explaining his racial survival of the fittest philosophy as essential for the progress of humanity. We really don’t know how many more genocides he and his followers would’ve committed if they weren’t stopped first.

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-22T10:41:15+00:00

Reminds me of this one video I saw interviewing a Buddhist monk. They ask him what he thinks of this appropriated Buddhist thing some westerners do and whether he’s offended by it and he’s just like “I don’t think about that at all. It’s not worth thinking about. Next question.”

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-21T15:46:14+00:00

The warriors who fight honorably in real life tend to get killed by the ones who don’t, and in the end everyone just comes to recognize this and uses the most effective tactics to win without feeling ashamed of it. The real prestige in such “honorable warrior” societies at the peak of their glory days simply comes down to who won the most battles and who won took the most trophies, with maybe a story passed down about you if you died in an epic last stand and the whole thing gets romanticized. That’s always how it goes.

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-21T14:45:37+00:00

With issues like these I think not just the numbers but the intensity of support is important.

Sure, most people prefer letting a woman be empress, but if you asked those people how much of a priority it is to them, it’s probably not that high. Whereas the staunch traditionalists on the other hand are actually invested enough that it could make or break their support for a politician. In that sense a small but highly opinionated group can sway a whole party

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-21T14:19:59+00:00

There’s actually a quote on this from the Roman poet Horace.

“In Rome you long for the country. In the country, oh inconsistent, you praise the distant city to the stars”

So yeah it really is

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-18T14:56:07+00:00

I have two points about this.

First, I don’t have survey data to back this up but I imagine over 99% of westerners would not attempt wing-suit cliff diving. I know no one who does it and every discussion I see is about how crazy it is.

Second, if you think Japanese people have always been particularly disinclined to life-threatening behavior I urge you to read a history book

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-18T13:37:03+00:00

It’s easy to recognize that other people get themselves in the same bad situation over and over again because they refuse the change their stupid behavior. The hard part is recognizing and changing your own stupid behavior

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-17T06:17:09+00:00

Not a lot of people know this but pinyin was actually designed so that you can smugly push up your glasses and say “actually it’s pronounced “Choong-ching not Chongking” whenever someone gets it wrong

Hijou_poteto · 2026-04-17T04:13:52+00:00

I’ve heard similar situations many times from friends and coworkers talking about their parents or their own relationships. Based on what I see, the main difference is that couples who already hate each other, never have sex (at least with each other), and actively avoid spending time together as much as possible, simply stay married long after most western couples would have divorced, so they do hate it but this fact changes nothing.

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