When I came back to Japan I took the airport bus from Kansai Airport to Umeda and from there I had to take the subway to where I live. As I carried my huge bag in one hand and my smaller bag in the other down the stairs to the subway, a girl stopped and asked if I needed help and she helped me with my smaller bag.
A man must've seen her cause he offered to take my bigger bag, and thus the two helped me get down to the subway a lot faster. While standing in line I thanked the 2 and we started talking. Turns out the girl was from china and did not speak Japanese (but her English was great!).
The guy didn't really speak any English but when he understood that she was from China he said that China was no good.
He then went on to talk about (in Japanese and VERY bad English) how in Japan people always think about others, they always care about others, but in China people only care about themselves.
He pointed to someone working at the station that helped a person in a wheelchair get on the train, and said: "This is the standard in Japan. In Japan we think about everyone." And he went on to talk about how Chinese people don't think about anyone other than themselves and so on and so forth bashing Chinese people saying they would never help like this. EVEN THOUGH THIS GIRL HAD JUST HELPED ME?
I don't know this girl and we only talked for a little bit but she seemed like the nicest person ever, also she was the first person to even offer to help me with my bags ever in Japan. I have been going up and down long flights of stairs maaaany times with those bags and no Japanese people have stopped to help me. In fact, I doubt that he would've stopped to help if he hadn't seen that girl help me first.
I didn't want to translate all the stuff the guy said to the Chinese girl, but I tried to show her I didn't agree at all with what he was saying.
This is not the first time a Japanese person has told me about their disliking of the Chinese, and how they think Japanese people are so much better than Chinese in every way. But to do this in front of a Chinese person who just showed that they are in fact an awesome human being is just too much! Where are your manners?
Anyway, I realized afterwards that the guy was probably drunk, which does not excuse what he said, but might explain why he was so pushy about it.
Not all Japanese people have this "superiority complex" but there are certainly some who do, and they are most likely to tell you when they are drunk about how Japanese people are better than others. And sure, some things they say might be true some times and make sense but you can't drag an entire people through the same comb, right?
Like the girl said to me: "No matter what country you go to there will always be people around who wanna help, and people around who don't care. It just depends on your personality" (That's extreme paraphrasing btw :))
So lets see eachothers personalities, not each others countries, ok?
Picture of friendly Japan and China :) |
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