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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