Won't Miss #452 - not being fully literate

OK, I'm pretty sure I can read these boxes. 

Some people are going to react with incredulity that I spent such a long time in Japan and never became fully literate. Well, judge away, my friends, if that is what you need to do to elevate your estimation of yourself above your estimation of someone who writes a little blog on the internet. Before you bang your little gavel and pronounce me a lazy dumb ass (I won't argue with you if you do), keep in mind that I've had conversations with a great many Japanese people who have also told me they can't understand every character when they read a newspaper. They just guess based on context or just skip it, though few people even read newspapers anymore, especially among the younger set. With over 10,000 kanji on top of the phonetic alphabets of hiragana and katakana (both of which I know fully), does it surprise anyone that many natives can't read every character?

The truth is that the very fact that there are so many characters made me pretty much give up on ever becoming fully literate in Japan and I won't miss the fact that there was always going to be something that I couldn't read.

Won't Miss #253 - Japanese slapped over English

Before I whine about this particular thing, I would ask my gentle readers to keep in mind that I get to complain about things which are decidedly reasonable and fair ways for things to happen because they just so happen to inconvenience me personally. It is absolutely proper for the Japanese importers to plaster Japanese product information over the English on imported products, but it still bugs me to have to translate to get the information I need when it's right there in English hiding under a sticker. If you spent all your days wading through a foreign language, you might find it annoying as well to find that the easy answers are just out of reach. Oh, yes, and there's also the fact that the Japanese nutrition information is very often greatly less complete than the original English. In the British-made jam jars shown above, in terms of information I want, the Japanese only includes ingredients and the covered-up British information has calories and other nutrition data which I'd really like to have. Peeling off the sticker, by the way, rarely works as it'll take the back label off with the front one.

I won't miss having the original English covered up by Japanese stickers.

Will Miss #231 - tachiyomi

One of the most fascinating things I witnessed early in my stay in Japan was large groups of people, particularly men, who stood in book shops and convenience stores and just read the magazines or books. The shop owners never sweated this, despite the fact that many people read entire magazines, books, or comic books (manga) and didn't make a purchase. The publications would sometimes become thumbed through enough that they could not be sold. Sometimes a "sample" was put in front to accommodate people who stood and read (called "tachiyomi" in Japanese). This type of acceptance and patience with the status quo is one of those distinctly Japanese things that is unlikely to be found back home.

I will miss this unprofitable tolerance on the part of shopkeepers, which I assume they do in order to build goodwill with customers.

Won't Miss #176 - Japanese book stores

I used to love going into book stores back home and perusing the shelves for something of interest, but the experience just isn't the same in Japan. I'm not a fluent reader of Japanese, and even if I were better at it, I wouldn't be reading Japanese books for pleasure as I don't need an added dose of linguistic challenge with my reading time. Reading is something that I do when I have precious free time, and I don't want it to feel like language study. I want it to effortlessly inform or entertain me.

Book stores in Japan are probably one of the biggest reminders that this isn't a culture that is oriented toward the likes of me, and I won't miss going into them.