Tokyo Nugget #8: Everything is the opposite in Japan
19 Feb
Sometimes this amuses me, or it irritates me, but ultimately, I wonder, “Why?”
For those of you who are living here or have lived here, you will know that almost everything in daily life goes the opposite way to what you are used to:
+ You have to turn your key left in the keyhole to lock and turn right to unlock.
+ You are allowed to smoke indoors, not outdoors.
+ University students are not expected to study at all (because they are preparing for a life of office imprisonment).
+ Traffic lights turn blue, not green.**
+ ATMs ask you how much you want to withdraw before requesting your pin number.
+ Photocopying machines are laid out “landscape” and not “portrait”.*
*Personal experience: I photocopied 50 pieces of what I wanted portrait-wise and got half of what I wanted cut off from the pages. I had to re-do the lot. Perfect.
**Many moons ago, I asked a couple of my beginner students what colour traffic lights were, and they both replied, red, yellow, and blue. They did not have poor English. They really meant blue.
Photo: iandoubleyou
No related posts.
My Japanese wife, who’s lived in America for five years, still slips from time to time and says the traffic lights are blue. I don’t get it…
LOL!
ao used to mean green historically, it’s still used that way in some cases, like botany (ie. aojiru)
Ah so desu ne… That’s interesting…