Quality of Life

Photo of the interior of a bar called Sturgis in the happening Katamachi neighborhood of Kanazawa. The place is a rock and roll paradise, a bit of an otaku sanctum in the best sense of the word that's a mellow museum when it isn't a party. The walls are covered with memorabilia and musical instruments are everywhere. People from all over the world write on the walls about how they will never forget Kanazawa and Sturgis and its proprietor, and musicians come and play and leave their mark. Much of it is American music memorabilia, but the place is truly international.



Russia and Japan are two nations that have some of the most notoriously high suicide statistics in the world. Why is this?

«Японцие живут слишком хорошо,
а русские слишком плохо.»
"Japanese live too well; Russians too poorly."
- A relation of my weekly Russian tutor

Though I am in Japan, I'm still studying Russian on the side. Every Monday I meet with a graduate student from Russia and we discuss in Russian some issues of life and culture and literature. At our last meeting, I asked the above question and we discussed the idea of quality of life, a phrase that seems to be thrown around quite often. But what does it mean?

In Russia there's a bit of a joke that I have mentioned on this blog before concerning the idea of the Russian Soul. But is it so different from an American? What is culture, anyhow?

I believe that culture consists of the life experiences that make a person. Perhaps in psychological terminology, this might be known colloquially as "nature versus nurture." Americans seem to love categorizing and qualifying, quantifying and defining things; I'm coming to realize that religion is a large component of identity in American culture. Students at most colleges must declare a major in a specific field by their third year of studies. From my current studies, I'm beginning to see what appears to be an international trend towards regionalism. Anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown wrote in 1939:
“Concrescence...into larger and larger social structures by political, economic, religious, or other organizations is the outstanding feature of human history”

Perhaps, but maybe we're moving beyond the "global village" phase with a bit of a return to regionalism. People love to emphasize their regions: people want to find culture, the unique bits of flavor in a place. Japanese sake brewers are returning to regional flavors. Southern Californians are proud of the Southern California dialect and traditionally love to hate certain phraseology used by Northern California residents; similarly, Russians from Saint-Petersburg make fun of slurred Moscow Dialect. In Japan, one of the most distinct and recognizable dialects is Kansai-ben, the speech of people from the Kyoto region, though from what I have seen it is both a point of pride for Kansai natives and a liked and appreciated bit of culture by other Japanese, sort of like the way that everyone likes New York pizza but only New Yorkers really know and understand it, and they're proud that it comes from their home.