Opinion Misconceptions By Caroline Pover	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
聞くと見るとは大違い 他国の文化に対する誤まった理解は 学校での教育やマスコミの報道に起因する。 来日して初めてそれに気付く外国人のなんと多いことか。

People have interesting ideas about other cultures and countries, and in many cases it seems that these ideas are quite wrong. I asked some of my friends about their ideas of Japan before arriving, and they came up with some interesting replies:

My friend from New Zealand actually learned a lot about Japan in high school. As the countries are so close, Japan featured quite prominently on the school curriculum. She was taught that Japan was a technologically advanced country, where everything was computerized, and all of Japan looked like Odaiba! She was very surprised when she started her first job in Japan in a company that didn't have any computers in its offices. She was also taught that Japanese people spoke fluent English because they learned it in school from a very early age. So of course she was surprised to find out that, while many people can write in English, a much smaller number of people can actually speak fluently.

A Swedish designer friend first went to Kyoto, and expected Tokyo to look exactly the same. She expected Tokyo to be architecturally beautiful so she was surprised to see how gray and sprawling a lot of Tokyo is. Personally I'ｖe always found Tokyo to be a beautiful city, and I find a certain kind of beauty in the concrete landscape.

My half-Japanese friend grew up in Japan until she was 10 years old, and then went to the States to live. She returned to Japan when she was 21, and was surprised to see how much women had changed. Her memories of Japan were based on a time when far less women worked than they do now, and women were pressured to put their domestic responsibilities as a priority in their lives. She was happy to see how much the options for Japanese women had changed in 10 years.

My Russian friend also knew a lot about Japan before she came here, and often used Japanese products. She really wanted to study Japanese before she came to Japan, because she thought that all Japanese people were very polite and friendly, and she wanted to communicate with them. Unfortunately she had a very negative experience in her first job, where she worked in a very traditional Japanese company. She found herself to be left out of many things and felt discriminated against because she was a foreigner. This led to her losing her motivation for learning Japanese, and changing her opinion of Japanese people to a more negative one.

Most people have preconceptions about other cultures, and those ideas usually come from school or the media. In my case, I was educated in the U.K. during the '80s, where learning about any other culture was not very common, especially learning about a country that was so far away from my own. In some respects it was a blessing. I came to Japan with very few preconceptions, and have enjoyed absorbing all the new ideas and experiences I have gained while living here. I bet if you told me about your education about British culture, I could probably surprise you with a few realities too! (525 words)