IKEA

I was going to IKEA last Friday to inhale Sweden for a while and enjoy the Swedish food. It was on that way I got the idea. Globalization, this week’s assignment, what could be better then referring IKEA to globalization and the other way around. The questions I wanted to get answer to in my research were how IKEA has succeeded in Japan and how the company has affected the country in both positive and negative ways. The article IKEA: The Japanese misadventure and successful re-entry writes that IKEA did several tries to open an IKEA store in Japan in the 1970 but the demand was not high enough to succeed in Japan. IKEA was not ready for Japan and the Japanese people were definitely not ready to drive it home and put it together themselves. IKEA came back to Japan in 2006 to give it a new try and according to the article IKEA’s new plan for Japan, was Japan now a much more open country for new ideas and IKEA was a much better known company in the country. I also discussed this with my speaking partner Chiaki how said that one reason why she thinks IKEA succeeded this time was because the Japanese people these days have a very good image of Sweden by associations to quality, high education and a good wealth fare system. I asked her how she thinks IKEA have affected the country and she says that by having IKEA in Japan more Japanese people can afford to buy fashionable home furnishing to good prices.

When I were at IKEA in Osaka I took the chance to talk to Kazuhiro who have been working on IKEA as a manager of the living room area for one and a half year. He said that IKEA’s positive effects of being in Japan is that more Japanese people got interested in home furnishing, especially younger people and people with less money. The negative effect is that IKEA have effected the local stores a lot. He said that he think most Japanese people would choose IKEA before other Japanese companies. A proof of this is that IKEA expended from one store in 2006 to five stores in 2009.

Japanese baseball.

Baseball have become more and more popular in Japan since it was brought into the country in 1870´s by an Amaricaborn englishteacher living in Japan. As it occures to me, baseball is not just a sport, it has a big place in the japanese culture and society. As they mention in the movie Kokoyaku, the Japanese people have taken baseball to their hearts and their homes and i read that many Japanese people says that the rising sun in the Japanese flag should be replaced with a baseball. That statement certainly define their love to the game. The love for the game is equally big when I see ten thousends of Hanshin Tigers fans at the arena as when I pass by a young Kansai Gaidai student everynight on my way home from school or when the Komatsu employees play baseball every Sunday. Baseball is a very fascinated sport to me although it dosn´t exist in Sweden. Europe in generall pays more attention to their own sports while Japan seems to be more Americanized. Of all the numbers of sports which Japan has given to the rest of the world like Judo, Karate and Sumo it is only fair that they incorporate foreign sports in return. It would be very interesting to watch both a American baseballgame and Yakyo (Japanse baseball) to see if the sport differences from country to country. According to this article the sport is similar in the basic but differs in other ways. For example how they pay attention to different thing in the sport. Baseball relies on power and physical skills while Yakyo relies on finess, speed and mental acuity. The article also describes how the audience act different at the games. I took some nice pictures while I watched the Japanese students practice at Kansai Gaidai baseball field, I will definitly spend more time there, watching this fascionated sport!

Open mic night

Me and my friends went to Tokyo for silver-weekend. We spended most of our time in the wonderful Harijuku area and while we were walking down the shoppingstreet, we found a very cozy, small, quite shabby but still very nice bar that we decided to check out the same night. The primary reason why we chose that bar was because all of us are really big music fans and the pub have livemusic every night. Besides from this night of course, when they had open mic night for comedian instead! We were quite disappointed that they didn´t play any livemusic but there were a crazy man, running around in the pub, screaming. We found that very interesting so we joined the tree japanese women who already watched the show. 

I´m not an expert in this area, I have never been to a comedian show in Sweden and neither in Japan, but still I can tell that this was something extraordinary... All of the comedian were guys accept from one who was a transvestite. They were all very loud, they often came out two at the time and laught and talked very fast to eachother. This way of comedy show match very well with the explaination of the japanese comedian style "Manzai" which involves two preformers, a straight man ( Tsukkomi) and a funny man (boke) - trading jokes at a great spead. Most of the jokes is about mutual misunderstainding, double-talk, puns and other verbal gags. Even though we didn´t understand a word, they were still very eager to make us feel like anyone else in the audience. There where only tree japanese women in the audience and us, but the show where still very serious. All of us got one paper each with the different comedian names on, the papers was for voting, quite difficult for us when everything was i japanese. The night ended up very funny although we went there for music. 

One more thing about the japanese humorscene, rumor say that if you aim at somebody in Osaka (with a fake gun a.k.a. your finger) they will pretend that they gotten shot... Can anybody comment this rumor?

My quiet neighborhood

Me and my boyfriend lives in a apartment in a area called Ogura-cho. It's a five minutes bicycleride north from Kansai Gaidais east gate. It's a very quiet neighborhood where the only noise I can hear is the sound of a barking dog at the apartment opposite mine. Don't they ever listen to music? Laughing with their friends? or scream when Hanshin Tigers win a game? In Sweden we behave a bit different. We don't show the same regard and respect for our neighbors. In some way it is accepted to make noice at daytime and it's not until the night comes that your neighbours get upset if you make a lot of noise. It's very interesting differences. I don't think a quiet neighbourhood in Japan is about that they don't live their lifes, they just have another way of respect for each other. They don't make themselves remarkeble at the same way as we do. We have a big need to express ourselves and show other people our big personality. In Japan they show it in another way, with their mood, clothes etc.

Another thing I noticed is that my neighbors always have their curtains down. I have not even once had the chance to look into their apartments. I tried to discuss this with my speakingpartner Chiaki but she tought my questions were very difficult to explain. For her it's probably just a way of everyday life and a hard thing to explain and discuss with other people. She said that one primary reason why they keep their curtains down is because it's messy inside, or that they don't want to show other people how they live and how it looks like inside. She asked me why we open up at daytime and I said that we open up to let the light into our apartments. She tells me that Japanese people very often loves their home, it's a very intimate place where you don't what people to see you in action, sleeping, eating ect. In Sweden it's the straight opposite, people love to open up their windows/apartments to show their neighbors what they are doing, that they have fun or that they can afford things.  

It's very interesting how our way of thinking and acting are so different from eachother. 

Lost without Chiaki

Lost without Chiaki

The first day at Kansai Gaidai, the first time I checked my mailbox... I saw this beautiful pink hello kitty envelope. "Dear Marie, welcome to Japan I´m so happy to be your speaking partner." I felt her excitement in the letter. I couldn´t imagine how much fun we were going to have together and how much we could learn from eachother (and this is just in two weeks). I have to tell you, I would be lost in Japan without Chiaki. This blogpost is about me in Japan for the first time, without any preconceived thoughts, without knowing the language, Im just so curious about the people, the culture and everything in between.

Birthday child.                                                              

Tall swedish man. 

The birthdayparty

Chiaki invited me and Anders to her birthdayparty at her parents house. Both me and Anders applyed for a homevisiting family but we´re still on the waitinglist so we were both very excited to see how Chiaki and her parents lived. Everyone stood in the hall and welcomed us with a big smile. Present at the party was Chiaki, her parents, her mothers friend with husband and his twin. None of them spoke a word english except from Chiakis father who new maybe ten words. Everytime he wanted to say something, he looked at me, raised his hand and said: Maliiii, question. So there we stood, almost unable to talk with eachother, but with big smiles and with Chiaki as translater the night was awsome. We had the stranges food ever ( food I never would try in Sweden, but to be polite, I had everything on the table. We talked about everything from the reasons why relations between Japan and China is how it is, to how long swedish mothers stay at home with their children. I did´nt noticed  any big diffrences from Swidish familys, they were just a ordinary family with ordinary habbits. They were so friendly, happy and very curious about whats going on outside Japan. When we left after a perfect night, the hole family followed us outside of the house, huged us, begging us to come back. My first impression of Japan is that even if we don´t speak the same language or have the same culture, one can always find nice people to like and have a really good time with!

Just inhale Japan / Marie 

Curly hair can be fun if you never seen it before.