Cultural Other Awareness

 In this class, we talked about Cultural Other Awareness, which refers to the understanding and appreciation of the differences between our own culture and the other’s cultures.

We discussed about the differences when we’re meeting others for the first time and we found differences in many countries, for example:

- Germany: They may don’t speak to strangers at all, in scenarios like metro, elevator or street they rather wear headphones and look at their phone instead of socializing, but this context can change and in some cases they’re friendly to strangers.

- Japan: In this country, when you’re meeting strangers for the first time it could be difficult if you’re from a western culture because japanese people are so polite and formal, they don’t use humor or confident language at all, they may want to project a formal and educated image of themselves instead of a friendly and confident one, also is not common to meet people in public spaces because they’re silent and focused on their things. Although it is not impossible to meet friendly people in Japan, you can always go to specific spaces on weekends nights designed for foreigners.

- Mexico: This may be the most different country in terms of how we meet strangerts, because we tend to not care about our professional image, of course it depends on the context, but normally we don’t care at all because we just want to be funny and avoid stress, also we use a lot of humor so the other person can feel confident and rely on us, although sometimes I believe we may be overconfident at all and we can miss more deep interactions.

All these examples were seen in the video we watched during the class about Conan O’Brien when he arrived at Japan, he went to a lady’s home and she explained him all the normal things to do in Japan, for example; he wanted to hug and be close to them but for them this is weird, also if you’re visiting other’s home you should bring a gift and Conan didn’t know this.

If you want to visit Japan you should know these things in order to avoid confusion!