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From: "necoandjeff" <spam@schrepfer.com>
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Subject: Re: Japanese study...
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 17:42:16 +0900
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declan_murphy@hotmail.com wrote:
> necoandjeff wrote:
>> declan_murphy@hotmail.com wrote:
>>> necoandjeff wrote:
> <snips>
>>>> Nagoya is like an even bigger country town.
>>>
>>> In the Sydney, LA or Manchester sense yes. The urban area is only 7
>>> million or so, but when you cross the Mikawa-ben & Owari-ben border
>>> it feels like a different city, which I don't hear going from say
>>> Shinagawa down to Yokohama.
>>
>> I mean they're a bunch of hicks living in an urban setting (far more
>> hickish than Tokyo, by a long shot).
>
> I'm not sure why you like using the word "hick".

Sounds like I really hit a nerve there, Declan. The only reason I used the
word "hick" is that two others before me used that very same word to
describe people in Tokyo. They may have a fair point, since so many
Tokyoites are not edokko. But in my mind, hick is purely a state of mind.
And it has nothing to do with "pissing order" or whatever you were going on
about. (If I had any sort of issue with that kind of nonsense, do you think
I would have married a girl from a small village of ten houses in the middle
of the mountains of southern Niigata?) People in Nagoya have a bad tendency
to stare down foreigners (and otherwise treat them like complete freaks) in
a way that people in Tokyo do not. And half the time they don't even have
the decency to look away when you look back at them. They just continue
staring like they're at the zoo looking into the gorilla cage. When I go to
someplace like Itoigawa, I exect that kind of behavior, and it doesn't
bother me. When I go to the fourth largest city in the country, with a not
so insignificant population of foreigners, I don't. What makes a hick in my
mind has a lot to do with his or her bility to accept someone different than
they are and treat them with respect, whether that person lives in the most
remote corner of Louisiana or the middle of New York City.

Jeff