Crosseyed Japanese

[silverfall]

I don't know if it's just me, but I seem to be noticing that a lot of Japanese Young children are a little cross eyed. I was sitting in the food court of the local department store and a little boy at the table next to me was staring at me. i think. Either that or the end of his nose. I also have a friend whose son's eyes are a little bit crossed. Anyone else seen this? Just curious. Maybe it's just the town I live in. Something in the water perhaps.

[Taro Toporific]

I don't know if it's just me, but I seem to be noticing that a lot of Japanese Young children are a little cross eyed..

It's a Push - Pull situation

Push: Bad vision is a genetic trait in Japanese commonly thought" to be caused by shallow eye sockets.

Pull: Japanese do not bother to correct is problem because: they think it's cute, Japan medicine ignores it, correcting deformities has poor culture acceptence, Japanese Buddhism frowns on "cutting" the body, Japanese people have high interia to changing anything....


* "Common sense" is commonly wrong....gee, come to think of it, I've never seen proof of this eye socket shallowness causing vision problems. Just former teachers and antho professors repeating what is "commonly thought". Hmmm.

[Charles]

* "Common sense" is commonly wrong....gee, come to think of it, I've never seen proof of this eye socket shallowness causing vision problems. Just former teachers and antho professors repeating what is "commonly thought". Hmmm.

I believe that the word you're groping for is "nihonjinron." But you know this, right Taro? You know everything.

For the noobs: nihonjinron is loosely translated as "theories of specific Japanese uniqueness," it generally refers to balderdash theories that "everyone knows," but are easily disproven. Like for example, a typical nihonjinron is that Japanese peoples' intestines are longer than those of any other race, which makes a diet of rice more suitable than meat. Of course this has long been disproven, their intestines are the same length as any other humans.

[cstaylor]

I never understood why some Japanese confuse genetics with culture. If they aspire to cultural exceptionalism, then there are some arguable merits, but confusing it with genetics is just plain silly.

[Charles]

I never understood why some Japanese confuse genetics with culture. If they aspire to cultural exceptionalism, then there are some arguable merits, but confusing it with genetics is just plain silly.

Well, if it was cultural and not genetic, then anyone who grew up in Japan would be a nihonjin. That's not exclusionary enough.

Yamada Haru's book "Different Games/Different Rules" has some interesting remarks on this subject. She's a linguist so she focuses on language. She says that America, being a melting pot, unites every diverse immigrant group with English. All you have to do is immigrate, and learn English, and you're an American, if you don't learn English, you're still a foreigner. But the Japanese use their language to divide themselves from other countries, it is "well known" (that is, a nihonjinron) that nobody but the Japanese can ever learn the Japanese language. Japan has kept its own separate language despite the fact that most of it is borrowed from other Asian languages, they created a unique local language specifically to keep it uniquely different from the rest of Asia.

[cstaylor]

that nobody but the Japanese can ever learn the Japanese language.

Doesn't seem like a very useful skill to have anyways, unless you live here.

[Crambo]

that nobody but the Japanese can ever learn the Japanese language.

Doesn't seem like a very useful skill to have anyways, unless you live here.

Or unless you intend to travel overseas and band together with fellow Japanese, stay in Japanese-owned accommodation, eat and do all things Japanese and then return home to tell of your entirely insular holiday.

[dingosatemybaby]

I never understood why some Japanese confuse genetics with culture. If they aspire to cultural exceptionalism, then there are some arguable merits, but confusing it with genetics is just plain silly.

Call dingo cynical, but it could be that cultural exceptionalism just isn't enough when it comes to Japan's Tokugawa-mentality trade barriers. Worried about fancy-shmancy import drugs swamping your third-rate pharmaceutical industry? Insist that, in the name of genetic exceptionalism, all drugs (with the exception of Viagra) go through clinical trials on Japanese subjects.

[kotatsuneko]

there have been attempts at changing the language tho, eh? not sure of the dates or the name of the organisation, but wasnt there a pre 60s call to romanise nihongo? am sure i read about that in a history book about a decade or so ago (probably why the details are vague) and a year or two ago i stumbled across a current pressure group's site pushing for the same thing, i have it in my faves somewhere, tho as i can't recal the name of the site, or even if it was in english or japanese, its a bit too much hassle to dig it up.

wasn't there a famous english book, which really layed into the most popular nihonjinrom theories that apparently has been seen thrown against the door in some japanese lectures?

btw charles, i would think that noobs or not, everyone here is all too familiar with nihonjinron

[kotatsuneko]

oh Dingoes, i`ll try and scan some ads tonight if i get time

in the 2 most popular free japanese weeklys in london, a medical testing company has been *heavily* (like 3-4 ads per issue, including a full page) advertising paid trials for japanese people living abroad for the past 4-5 months.

thought it may be of interest, they are rather, disturnbing ads. maybe they used the same agencies as those sub-human cashing
"companies"

[silverfall]

Does anyone know if being crosseyed affects vision. The people I have met seem to see okay and seem to function well. Even though it makes my eyes water looking at them. If I cross my eyes I see triplicate. Maybe your brain adjusts over time and they don't even notice a problem. Must shorten periferal vision though.

[Charles]

there have been attempts at changing the language tho, eh? not sure of the dates or the name of the organisation, but wasnt there a pre 60s call to romanise nihongo? am sure i read about that in a history book about a decade or so ago (probably why the details are vague) and a year or two ago i stumbled across a current pressure group's site pushing for the same thing, i have it in my faves somewhere, tho as i can't recal the name of the site, or even if it was in english or japanese, its a bit too much hassle to dig it up.

wasn't there a famous english book, which really layed into the most popular nihonjinrom theories that apparently has been seen thrown against the door in some japanese lectures?

btw charles, i would think that noobs or not, everyone here is all too familiar with nihonjinron

Yeah, there was a big movement to banish kanji/kana and convert Japanese to romaji way back in the Meiji era, there was even a movement to banish Japanese entirely and convert Japan to English.
One of the notable literary efforts of that era was "Romaji Diary" by Ishikawa Takuboku, he wrote a "shishosetsu" novel entirely in romaji, the books pretext was that he used romaji to prevent his wife from reading it, if she ever happened to find the diary. But he used romaji for artistic effect, supposedly he thought that using romaji expressed his thoughts entirely differently than if he'd used kanji. I read some of it, and I thought, "what's the damn point of doing this?" Maybe that's what he wanted people to think.
But anyway, I wasn't aware of any modern movement to use romaji. I did see one amusing article that asserted that China had petitioned the UN to prevent the Japanese unauthorized use of their cultural property, and wanted to force Japan to drop kanji. I read the whole article, and it took me a long time before I noticed the article's publication date: April 1.
I haven't heard any book of collected nihonjinron, if you know about one, let me know its title, I'd be interested in reading it. I'm just an amateur collector. I don't know how familiar this term is, I used to discuss nihonjinron with other students and most of them had never heard the term before, although most were familiar with the general concept and had heard a few of them.

[fatslug]

yeah cross eyed and also cross foot ! No japanese chick can walk straight with their feet parallel.

[Buraku]

http://www.telecomskorea.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2002&Itemid=2

Cell Phone Measures Your Eyesight

much debate about the causes of myopia, but it is certainly common in children in fornt of Pokemon bideo gameu-s, squinting at badly wrtiiten Kanji and gawking at galring Neon signs. and It has reached epidemic proportions in Far Eastern countries where 90 per cent of young people are short-sighted, compared with 15 to 30 per cent in Europe and the US.


http://webwasou.ld.infoseek.co.jp/sou/ukiyoe/portrait/portrait-g/68-05s.jpg

http://optometry.berkeley.edu/~fiorillo/pics/ukiyoe/kuniyoshi_itami.jpg

http://www.adamsjapaneseprints.com/imagesLG/1363.jpg

http://www.printsofjapan.com/Head_of_Koshiro_V.jpg

[fatslug]

http://www.fuckedgaijin.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10938

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