Counting the days

By coincidence someone I met at the Tilburg debating society for students Cicero is also going to Tokyo from September until December. He studies humanoid robots at Eindhoven and will be living in a dormitory more in the centre than I do called Wakeijuku. This dormitory seems rather lively, but the inhabitants only need to adhere to 3 rules for the dormitory to remain liveable. The first rule is that greeting is obliged, it explains by saying that “Greetings are the basics of life to build up human relations”. It does not specify however if you need to bow, shake hands, or a simple “Hé” or hand gesture is enough. The third rule demands participation in the social activities. Nothing extraordinary so far. But the second rule is most fascinating to me: “follow the rules of community life”. The rule is this brief and the specification does not explain much. Which means that there technically are only three rules but one of which basically says: “Oh yeah, also follow all the other rules”. I think this anecdote goes to show how inherent to human nature the Japanese believe their etiquette to be and it doubles as a precautionary tale for anyone that is about to live with them: they will fail to mention a lot of behaviour expected from you since they only know and probably only can imagine one way of doing things.

But of course I am getting very excited to discover all this personally and the more stories I read from people already at their destination the more anxious I become too leave. Even though I am writing this from my room where some furniture still has to be moved to my parents place (I am pretty sure that some of the dust balls that came from under my coach could be seen from space) and I actually still cannot leave yet, however, the to-do list is getting shorter and shorter.

Next time I will write you from Japan!