Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and the Japanese Wife

May 20, 2010

The Japanese wife’s two young children died and she survived thanks to one of the men fishing on the pier who jumped in and pulled her out. She was going to be tried in a US court.

However, the Japanese government requested that she be returned to her country explaining that what she did was cultural.

Japanese Geishas

Later it was revealed in the press that her Japanese husband had cheated on her and was keeping a mistress. The wife saw this as her fault and loss of face and the only way to erase that shame was the take her life and the lives of her children—at least that’s what the US media said. The US agreed and sent her home to be dealt with in Japan.  In fact, in 2009, there were more than thirty thousand Japanese suicides.

I never did find out what the Japanese did to the wife who killed her children.

Discover what Honor means to most Chinese

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Cultural Differences and the Ignorant American

May 20, 2010

Unlike the citizens of Europe or Asia, most Americans seldom rub shoulders with other cultures or spend time outside of the United States aside from Latinos from south of the border who washes the cars, mows lawns or washes the dishes Americans eat from when going out to eat in a restaurant.

Don’t mistake having a foreign friend as rubbing shoulders with another culture. To know a culture you have to live there or discover that culture through study.  Even then, nothing compares to living in another country as an expatriate like Tom Carter, who taught English in China before he went on the road to shoot “China: Portrait of a People.”

Recently I posted another response to Timothy V at Left of the Right. I used examples to show differences between cultures. Those examples appear in this seven part series.

It starts with the wife of a Japanese corporate executive working in the US, who tried to kill herself and her children by jumping into the ocean off the Santa Monica pier. She took her two children with her. (to be continued in the next post)

Learn about The First of all Virtues

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

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The Tea Horse Road

May 19, 2010

Most of us have heard of or read about the Silk Road from China to Europe. I’m sure that few have heard of the Ancient Tea Horse Road, which I first read about this morning in the May issue of National Geographic.

Legend says that tea from China arrived in Tibet as early as the Tang Dynasty (618- 906 A.D.). After that, the Chinese traded tea for horses, as many as 25,000 horses annually.

But that isn’t what struck me the most about the piece. It’s the example that demonstrated why the peasants loved and possibly worshiped Mao Tse-Tung.

From May 2010 National Geographic, page 103

For more than a thousand years, men fed their families by carrying hundreds of pounds of tea on their backs across the rugged mountains into Lhasa. Some froze to death in blizzards. Others fell to their deaths from the narrow switchbacks that climbed into the clouds.

This all ended in 1949 when Mao had a road built to Tibet and farmland was redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. “It was the happiest day of my life,” said Luo Yong Fu, a 92-year-old dressed in a black beret and a blue Mao jacket, whom the author of the National Geographic piece met in the village of Changheba.

To learn more about Tibet, visit Tibet – Inside China (part one of five)

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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The Gu Zheng

May 19, 2010

While at the 6th  Annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration in San Francisco on Saturday, May 15, I saw my first Gu Zheng. No one was playing it. The band was playing with other instruments, but this stringed instrument was silent as if it had been abandoned.

The modern-day Gu Zheng has movable bridges and may have 15 to 26 strings. In ancient times, the strings were made of twisted silk, but by the 20th Century most players use metal strings (generally steel for the high strings and copper-wound steel for the bass strings).

The Guzhen has been around since The Warring Kingdoms (402-221 B.C.). I invite you to join me and listen to Bei Bei playing Under the White Wind. 

If you enjoyed Bei Bei’s performance, discover the Jing-Hu.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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The Collective Will

May 19, 2010

In “China’s Private Party” by Richard McGregor, The Wall Street Journal, quickly sketches how those that hold power in China keep it. He mentions the Red Machine—an encrypted communication system—that stitches the few hundred who rule China together for making quick decisions.

Where McGregor gets it wrong is when he says that China’s government may not look like Communists any more, but once you strip away the wrapping, they still are. The truth is that Communism as the world knew it during the Cold War is gone and what replaced it in China hasn’t been defined yet.

Confucius

Confucius said when the men (who rule) are there, good government will flourish, but when the men are gone, good government decays and becomes extinct. With the Red Telephone, China insures this government will always be ready to act. Confucius called for the people to show respect to the high ministers of state and the leaders of today’s China expect nothing less as long as the government continues to improve life in China.

These leaders are not Marxists, Leninists, Socialists or Communists. They are Chinese, who plan to stay in power. In a democracy like America, every few years the political climate changes like a stormy wind and these Chinese do not like uncertainties. They plan, set goals and want to be there to insure that what was set in motion is completed. It’s all about the collective harmony. Taoism plays a roll  too. It’s why the Chinese may say one thing and do something else.

The reason China is studying Singapore may clarify what I mean.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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