How to eat Sushi

[The Morg]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIb6ZSqal64

Trufax:
Many protected species can be enjoyed without guilt at a sushi restaurant.
Sushi is served on geta, which Japanese wear on their feet. This is why their feet smell like vinegar.
When pouring someone's drink, calmly say "Maa, maa, maa, maa." When he pours your drink, carefully hold the cup and nervously say "Ottottotto--!"

[Talon87]

We watched this last year in JPNS 301 or 302. Our sensei brought it in partly because she wanted to happily educate us and partly because she was beginning to get worn down by how often we assumed that "because [she was] Japanese, [she] must know everything about Japan!"

The first inaccurate sentence comes in at 0:16 ("most Japanese eat at one every day"), but myself and many of the others in the class didn't recognize that the video was a work of satire until 1:50 when the men awkwardly place their hands on the countertop and rotate them inwards in perfect synchrony. (Yeah, yeah, yeah. :P Call me ??? all you want. :P) There was one boy in the class who was wondering 3-4 minutes into the video what all the laughing and chit-chatting amongst the students was about. That was when the sensei stopped the video, fast-forwarded to the end, and explained to him and the rest of us how, indeed, this was a well-crafted satire that was made to poke fun at gaijin. (Which made us all feel a little uncomfortable.)

Then she brought it all together when she said, "Now you understand -- 99% of Japanese do not really do what is shown in this video even though many Westerners who see this video have no trouble believing it. So too do most Japanese not know very much about Oda Nobunaga; nor have they ever seen a Noh play in person; nor do they watch anime." She made a good point, because even though we 300-level students all knew by then how it was a bad idea to try and engage a sensei in conversation over anime and J-drama, we were still making assumptions that the senseis knew all about Buddhism, Japanese military history, etc. It was humbling to be made to realize that assuming my sensei knew what year Oda Nobunaga came to power was about as stupid as assuming that my nextdoor neighbor here in the US knows what year President Washington was inaugurated into office.

Good video, Morg. I quit at 2 minutes, but it's a good video all the same for reminder it brings us: the reminder that it's easy to assume stereotypes about a culture when one is uninformed and is relying on what looks like a serious, official documentary.

EDIT: I watched it to the end, and lol @ ???'s fake translation.

[Talon87]

XFD, we also watched this video in class. Have you seen this one Morg? It was one of the links on the rotation queue at the end of your video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFVoLz88hiU&NR=1 IIRC we watched it without subs.

[The Morg]

???????

I see that guy has a bright future in subtitling: "I couldn't be arsed to subtitle this part." xd

As for the toilet training video, it actually doesn't surprise me so much now that I have seen similar products and training videos for American children. Raising kids is such a different experience now than it was for us, and this is what blows my mind sometimes, even if it's exactly what we should expect.