Another "Japanese people don't..." post
This one I simply have no idea what to categorize it as.
A text I was using today had a trivia tidbit. The unit's grammar was about dates and numbers, and the trivia was that August is the most popular month (in the US, I assume) for birthdays.
So I asked the students if anyone was born in August. A few of them shook their heads and chuckled. They had strange looks on their face. Then one woman, who is usually the de facto leader of the skeptics in that class, enlightened me:
"Japanese people aren't born in August," she said, as if I had asked an absurd question.
I hear that sort of stuff all the time. It is common here to make those kind of strange, big generalizations.
posted by Kirk Dunkirk @ 9:40 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Classic. Like the month of November is the traditional month of Abstinence. WTF?
Abstinence month.
Never heard that one.
The August lady even repeated it a few times, so it wasn't just a slip. She and her friends even waved their hands around a bit in that "no, no, no" way and made faces like I farted.
Yoko says: Maybe they were reacting to the idea of August being the most popular month for birthdays. In Kochi, especially, Japanese women hate the idea of giving birth in August simply because it's sooo hot and humid. It's something that Kochi women often say when they hear that a woman is having a baby in August.
Somehow that became: "Japanese people don't have babies in August." More like, they really meant, "Japanese people don't want to have babies in August."
That's the only explanation I can think of; anything else sounds pretty crazy.
Hmm, could be.
It was kind of funny after that: we had a raise of hands for when people were born and sure enough, out of a class of 16, no one was born in August!
So I guess she was right.
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