If you were invited to a casual get-together party at your friends’ house in your home country at 6 p.m., what time would you show up to their place? If the party was in Japan, the Japanese people would probably show up at 6 p.m. on the dot, or even earlier. This is how the Japanese keep their “promises”.

Promises

Once you make a plan with a Japanese friend, most of the time, it will become a promise. They will mark their calendar and won’t change their plans unless it’s necessary. If they are not sure if they schedule a day or time, they most likely won’t make a plan – instead, they would just say “I don’t know”. Once you make a “promise”, and if you want to keep a good relationship with your Japanese friend, my advice is that you should keep your promise and show up on time.

In the Japanese education system, especially in the elementary school time, all Japanese are trained to be on time. Many teachers ask to their students to be ready for the next activities 5 minutes before, so that they can start their activities on time. If some one is late, she or he is considered as a slacker. Japanese are in general forgiving and nice, so if you show up late a couple of times, they would say it’s ok. But in their mind, they are not 100% happy with you being late. If you showed up late every single time, they eventually might not ask you out anymore.

Japanese like being ahead of time. Especially after finishing university, their day-offs from work are very limited. So when they want to meet up with their friends, sometimes even with their boyfriends/girlfriends, they like to make “promises” way ahead of time. Some of my Japanese friends asked me many times when is a good time to meet up for a dinner a month in advance, and when we know what day is good for the both of us, we mark our calendars. Many times, one of us will decide the restaurant to go and make a reservation (予約) in advance.

In case you are late!

Well, nobody is perfect. What should we do when we are late? The key is “in advance”. If you are meeting your Japanese friends at 5 p.m., and you are running late, give them a heads-up before 5 p.m. so that they can expect how long they have to wait for. Make sure to give them a call or text BEFORE the meeting time.

Japanese are in general very nice to their foreign friends and they try to understand cultural differences. They would probably forgive you even you are very late. Although, if you want to do it in the Japanese way, be on time or early! This way you can keep your friendships with your Japanese friends smooth and happy. That’s one of the first steps to act like the Japanese – respecting time and “promises”.

Ask any Japanese person about his religion and you’re likely to be told ‘無宗教’ (mushuukyou), or ‘none.’ Now, to anyone who has made a pilgrimage to this nation of islands (the creation story of which is saturated with Shinto practices) to delight in its temple walks, god-worshipping festivals, spiritual rituals—and succeeded, no less—this statement may seem utterly fallacious.

Japan is a country that served as a linchpin of major world religions, a country of temple and shrine-dotted maps—how could it be that its citizens are atheists?

Put simply: Japan is an areligious religious nation.

Put logically: Religion in Japan is so deeply embedded that practitioners, which account for nearly 100% of the population, rarely see themselves as practitioners at all. That is not to say they do not believe; the popularity of Shinto festivals (祭り- matsuri), adherence to Buddhist rites at funerals (葬式 – soushiki) and in the yearly, days-long custom of ancestor worship (お盆 – Obon), in addition to the loyalty of the masses gathered to pray at shrines and temples on New Year’s (お正月 – Oshougatsu) are all clear indicators that that is not the case. Rather, in Japan, religion and culture are bound to each other. Not only that, but so are religions tied to other religions.

As you may have guessed, Buddhism and Shintoism (仏教 – bukkyou and 神道 – shintou) are two of Japan’s most widely practiced religions. Providing exact numbers of who is what would prove tricky, however, as the majority adheres to both, depending on the occasion. This is not entirely unlike the once-favored Shinbutsu Konkou/Shuugou (神仏混交/習合), a mixture of Shinto and Buddhism that was banned during the Meiji period. Although it is less common nowadays to find temples and shrines sitting on the same property as it was then, it is still entirely normal to find both dogmas within one person.

Perhaps a cursory glance at the three phases of life will help explain this balance.

Birth: Following a longstanding tradition, many families are registered with a local temple or shrine, thus assigning a person to the denomination of Buddhism or Shintoism at birth. Newborns are taken to a local place of worship (usually a shrine, but sometimes a temple) on the seventh day after birth (お七夜 – Oshichiya) to make offerings to guardian deities in return for protection.

Marriage: Shinto priests are often solicited for wedding ceremonies to be held at a shrine—or more recently, hotels or wedding halls—though this tradition is falling out of favor to the Christian (or) secular white-dress, rings and cake wedding of Western societies.

Death: Funeral rituals most commonly abide by Buddhist procedures, particularly Pure Land (浄土 – jodo), by which the deceased spirit is carried to a sort of Buddhist Heaven.

Beyond death: The spirits of ancestors visit during the Buddhist Obon season and are greeted with lanterns, flowers and a feast. For other days of the year, many families have Buddhist altars or Shinto shrines in their homes where they chant scriptures (if Buddhist, as Shinto is scripture-less) and offer gifts.

This Shin-butsu blend can also claim a number of offshoots under the broad category of Shinshuukyou (新宗教 – New Religions); among its best-known are Soka-Gakkai and Aum Shinrikyo (also Aleph), the latter of which dwells on apocalyptic fears and may better be termed a cult.

In addition to these, there are also strands of Taoism (道教 – doukyou) and Confucianism (儒教 – jukyou) that have been present in Japan for centuries on a similarly secular level. The first is at the root of many beliefs held today about astrology, fortune-telling and demonology/spiritism, while the latter, less a religion than a philosophy, greatly reformed the structure of government, education and society in Tokugawa Japan (when samurai occupied the top rung of the populace).

Finally, as the Japanese constitution contracts ‘freedom of religion,’ a number of imported minority religions have found niches in Japan. The most established of these is Christianity (キリスト教 – kirisuto-kyou), which is not only visible in wedding ceremonies or holiday decorations, but exists in practice, with followers in the low millions. Its success over other less indigenous religions is much in thanks to the arrival of missionaries to Western Japan who came bearing Roman Catholicism in the 16th century.

Other present religions include Islam (イスラム教 – isuramu-kyou), Hinduism (ヒンズー教 – hinzu-kyou), Judaism (ユダヤ教 – yudaya-kyou), Sikhism (シーク教 – shiiku-kyo), and Bahá’í (バハーイ教 – bahaai-kyou).

Katakana is a big part of the Japanese language. It is a alphabet-like set of characters that are used to represent foreign words as well as certain slang expressions, sounds in written form and also words with very difficult kanji. When you are studying Japanese you are bound to run into it all the time but since it isn’t quite as common as hiragana it will take a bit longer to get comfortable with. Once you do become comfortable with katakana, it doesn’t mean you will be comfortable with all of it’s usage.

マンツーマン　Let’s learn English bro
The English language is a commodity in Japan. Japanese people spend some of the most money in the world on learning English. Since English learning in Japanese schools is completely disconnected from actual practical English speaking, many people rely on English conversation tutoring, or Eikaiwa (英会話). Many advertise their service, not as one-on-one English lessons but as “man to man” conversation… Now, the last time I had a man to man talk, my father was talking about how important using protection was. Before you start to imagine students and teachers drinking beer and talking about sports, cars and women, remember there are a lot of these mistaken nuances.

テンションがたかい　How tense are you?
Do you have high tension? In Japan, having high tension has nothing to do with stress or electricity. It means you are energetic and have an energetic personality. On the other hand, having low tension means you are feeling a bit down, perhaps depressed, maybe just tired, or maybe you have a dull and boring character. When asked what kind of people they want to date, some people may say they want someone with high tension. Imagine saying that in an English speaking country….what were they thinking?

マンション　Delusions of Grandeur
This is one of the first bastardized loanwords that most people learn when they study Japanese. Your friend tells you he lives in a mansion, you think “What the hell is he talking about?”, you go to his mansion; a 10 story apartment building and think “Wait, what…this is all yours?” and he walks you up to his tiny one room apartment. “Where is the mansion?”. Your friend isn’t completely delusional. In Japanese a mansion basically refers to an apartment room.

ホーム　Going home to ride the train
How many times do you have to say “platform” quickly before it starts to sound like home? I’ve tried it about 100 but unless you transcribe it to katakana, it just doesn’t work. This almost makes sense in Katakana which is why most of the time a train platform is referred to as the “home”. It took me a few weeks to figure this out, I couldn’t imagine why I was being told that a train was approaching my home but it made me feel uneasy.

ライブハウス　　Live at the Live House
Someone must have messed up and thought that the “live” in “live music” was a noun. Small concerts in Japan are called “Lives” and concert halls are called “live houses”. Try to go to 3 lives without picking this up and using it yourself when speaking English.

Japanese is a case inflecting language. What is exactly is “case inflection,” you might ask; case inflection refers to a system by which a language inflects nouns—using either morphological affixes, or particles—to designate them with grammatical roles within a sentence, the end result typically being sentences in which word order is generally loose. (Interestingly enough, English—an Indo-European language of the West Germanic variety—was once case inflecting). In Japanese, this inflectional morphology is accomplished with the help of particles, little lexically-bound morphemes (semantic units) that follow the nouns they modify, such as: は、が、で、に、を、と、etc.

The mastery of particles for a second-language learner of Japanese is admirable; particles can be nasty little suckers for the unprepared learner. Over the next several weeks, I will be writing short guides with the intent of helping learners differentiate between basic particles. As a natural continuation of last week’s entry, I’d like to set aside some time to give some attention to が.

が might be looked upon as somewhat of a sister particle to は. If は is used to refer to the “topic” of a sentence in terms of how it applies to the conversation as a whole, が can be said to mark the specific subject of discussion. What primarily differentiates subject and topic in Japanese is specificity; が is a topic favored by nouns in questions and answers to questions in which specific information is requested:

今度のパーティに誰が来るか知っていますか。
“Do you know who will come to the next party?”

This question requests specific information: 誰, and so the correct particle to use here is clearly が. One might respond to this question with something like:

今回だって木村さんと岩川さんが来るでしょう。
“I do believe that Kimura and Ishikawa are coming this time around.”
Be sure to pay close attention to the fact that specific information was requested using が, and must then be provided in the answer, also using が.

Another example:
お金以外に理想な仕事のうえで、何が一番大切だと思いますか。
“Money aside, what to you suppose is the most important feature of a great job?”
An answer:
やっぱり楽しさや面白さなどが一番ですね。
“Naturally, enjoyability and interest(ingness) are the most (important features), right?”

Another big difference between は and が is that が is largely used to draw focus to given subject, whereas は is typically used to draw contrast. If we use the adjective 好き to illustrate this difference:　

私はりんごが好きだ。
“I like apples.” (As the subject concerns me, apples are likeable.)

りんごが好きだ
“(I) like apples.” (It is the apples that are liked.)

りんごは好きだ。
“(I) like apples.” (As the subject concerns apples, I like them. I don’t really like melons or oranges, though.)

が always illustrates a direct agent (performer of an action) relationship with a verb, or a patient (subject of a state or description) relationship with a adjective phrase. It is nearly 100% consistent with the role of “subject” in an English sentence. A problem that many English speakers, however, seem to encounter with this particle is knowing when exactly to differentiate between は and が.

For example:

奈津子ちゃんはめっちゃ可愛いんじゃないかって思わない。
“Don’t you think that Natsuko is totally adorable?”
奈津子ちゃんがめっちゃ可愛いんじゃないかって思わない。
“Don’t you think that it’s Natsuko that is totally adorable?”

The first sentence works well as a blatant statement shared between two guys at a bar; however, as a casual comment, the second sentence is lousy and lacks context. Whereas は is the preferred particle for changing the subject or introducing a new topic of conversation, が is a particle largely reserved for strong emphasis, context dependent specification, and focus. Therefore, the second sentence really only makes sense in the context of a conversation that looks something like:

恵美ちゃんは今夜凄くきれいだったな。
“Emi looked really beautiful tonight, huh?”

そっか。でも、奈津子ちゃんがめっちゃ可愛いんじゃないかって思わない。
“Oh Yeah? But don’t you think that it’s Natsuko that’s the totally cute one?”

で、付き合ってみるべきじゃん。
“Well, you should trying going out with her!”

嫌、結婚してるそうなので、無理かも。
“Nah, I hear she’s married; it might be impossible.”

It’s also important to note here that が is almost always the particle used to designate a subject appearing within a relative clause:
私は、Gが引くギターを聴くことが本当に好きだ。
“I really like listening to the guitar (parts) that G plays.”
が is actually used twice in the above sentence: once as the subject modifier of a relative clause, and once as a described subject of the adjective, 好き。

Due to the fact that Japanese is a noun-drop language (a language that doesn’t actually require any nouns in a sentence, and therefore tends to reduce its sentences to a single verb whenever possible), nouns are often dropped from sentences during normal conversation. This, naturally, occurs when the subject of conversation is clearly understood by all parties; because subject nouns are easily dropped in Japanese, が is really only ever used in conversation when specific information is required.