Monday, May 20, 2013

Jennifer Vigil



Gambari:  Work hard, but not too hard.
Before coming to Japan we had a week of intense classes about the Japanese culture and how to behave in Japan. One of the things that we learned is that Japanese love to Gambare.  What do I mean by Gambare? Well Gambari is a frequently used word in Japan which means “doing someone’s best and hanging on.”  Japanese people consider Gambari to be their greatest virtue; nevertheless it is starting to have a negative impact in the Japanese society. During our classes we learned that Japanese are taking Gambari to the extreme level, for example: many people (workers) work excessive hours, without any breaks, in order to keep their jobs, because they are afraid they might get fired for not putting in their best. A lot of these people work from very early in the morning until very late at night and even on weekends making it very difficult for them to spend time with their family. There is data the shows that many of this people end up committing suicide after retirement because they do not know what to do with their lives anymore, since the only thing they have done is work. But this not only happens to adults, kids from a very early age are also expected to work hard throughout the school year. A very great example here is my host sister, she is 16 years old, and she is barely at home during the week, she leaves to school around 7:00 am and does not come back until 11:00 pm. Even though she is done with her regular classes around 3:00 pm she doesn’t come home because she has other classes in other school, club meetings or kendo practice. I personally don’t know how she does it, but every time she comes back she is always completing about how tired she is. But not only on the weekdays, also on the weekends she wears her school uniform because she has school meetings to attend. I asked my host mother why students never have free time, and she told me that is better to keep their minds busy so that they can’t ever think about bad stuff. In my opinion it kind of made sense. Now you might be asking what does that have to do with the picture up there. Well during our Japanese culture classes I didn’t really believed the whole thing about Gambari, until I actually saw it with my own eyes.  During the first week in Japan I had to take the train and travel for about thirty minutes to the Japanese Language Instutute where I was going to be taking Japanese lessons with the rest of the group and every day that I took the train people would always be sleeping. I would say about 80% of the people in my surrounding would be sleeping. Whether they were sitting down or standing up, they would always be sleeping, in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. This showed me how serious Gambari is for the Japanese people, even though sometimes it could just be too much.


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