Yeah, this kinda shit is fucking hilarious but people don’t realize it. There’s this corporate training BS called Kaizen where they take a lot of normal Japanese words like 無理 (muri) and associate weird Eastern mystic significance to them.
Literally just means “impossible” and is frequently used in slang to be like “no no no I couldn’t possibly [talk to that hot guy]”. Having it put up on a slide and presented by some white dudes in suits who were nodding solely and talking about the secret Japanese knowledge was just too much to bear.
I mean, that’s what people do with models and methodologies right? In my language English terms are used when using an English methodology.
Kaizen comes from Japan, was developed in Japan, and it was quite successful there. It’s not that strange to copy it word for word.
The idea behind it is quite different from what tends to happen in traditional Western companies. Since companies want to be better than their competitors and organizational change is hard, it makes sense to look for ready-made tools, rather than try to reinvent the wheel.
Of course, since (organizational) change makes many employees nervous, depending on how the organization goes about it Kaizen could get a bad name.
You say that probably because many components in it look like common sense.
“Duh, of course the response to a problem should be to rectify it” (simplifying slightly)
Lots of companies don’t though. Or they jump to a conclusion about the best solution. Or some middle manager decides he knows what’s best and then proceeds to break things.
It’s quite useful to have a philosophy that gives authority to non-traditional but logical steps.
I fucking hate Kaizen. I had to go through it as part of a job placement program and was convinced it was a cult. Like no, I am not going to call “Leaving a reminder for myself” a Gemba. I’m calling it a note because the japanese didn’t fucking invent the idea of writing things down for later.
Manga are a kind of comic, they’re just pretty specific about their format and choices. Anime is a kind of animated cartoon, it’s just specific about its choices. Even “coming from Japan” isn’t a requirement as long as it follows those traditionally(-ish) Japanese choices.
Eh, there’s different schools of thought. Artists like Junji Ito or Kabi Nagata make stuff very different from the usual manga, but they’re still called “manga”. In the same way, Radiant isn’t considered a manga by many even though it’s so close to the actual ones it even got an anime.
I mean yeah. Most people define genres or categories using association, and they can become a gooey mess at worst. I’ve been arguing for structured definitions for years, but it’s a lost cause. I still believe I am the only person who has a completely sane definition for “role-playing game”. But I digress, fam. ^^
Personally my first thought hearing “RPG” is the classic game with various characters, skills, level system and tons of enemies, but there’s a lot of games that don’t fit this definition that are still RPGs
I’m not sure if I want to go into the full thing because people tend to get defensive about their preconceived notions and make a big, heated argument about it. But I will say this: game genres are defined by gameplay— not by content, by visuals, by storytelling style, or by similarities with other games people assume to be in that genre.
As simply as I can put it— and hopefully not opening up a huge can of worms— I define a role-playing game as a game in which your character(s) play one of several roles, meaning “classes”— each with their own stats and abilities that play differently and support the character(s) differently. You can have a single-character game where the character can choose one or more classes, or you can have multiple characters that each have their own classes, or you can have multiple characters that can choose between their classes. That makes D&D, Pokémon, Kingdom Hearts, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy XIII, and honestly a bunch of multiplayer shooters, etc., RPGs. That does not make Zelda or the first Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior RPGs.
So the biggest problem with humans and categorizations is that humans are highly assumptive, seeing surface-level features and defining items by those, and defining items by outward similarities with other items that they already assume to be of that category. Because of this, what a lot of people do is confuse the adventure genre— games that use exploration, puzzle-solving, and key items in order to progress— and role-playing games, which almost always are adventure games as well. D&D? Both RPG and adventure. Final Fantasy XIII? RPG but not adventure. Zelda? Adventure but not RPG. But in most cases, RPGs are also adventures; so a lot of people through association mistakenly think games with common adventure elements are simply RPGs.
I know a lot of what I’m saying is going to fly over many peoples’ heads, and they’ll go crazy in the comments. Let’s see how long I can ignore them for the sake of my own sanity…
I can imagine not considering the first Dragon Quest an RPG would create a lot of discussion, I can’t really speak for that since I haven’t played it but I guess some of the “canons” must’ve been missing since it used a password system.
Would Dark Souls count as an RPG in your definition? There’s no definite classes but you’re definitely shaping up your character to be a Warrior, Mage, and so on.
I added Dark Souls into the list before I saw this comment; because usually when I talk about this subject, I list it. I try to use variety in my examples, but I just forgot for a moment about listing Dark Souls ^^
Wikipedia is written by humans, a.k.a. non-objective people, which is why they call it “duodecimal counting” instead of “dozenal counting” and used to have Talk wars on that page about it. The irrational side won.
If a game has classes like I said before, then it’s a class-playing game, a.k.a. RPG. Something can be a roguelike but not an RPG. Also “roguelike” is a pretty dumb name for a genre and itself causes a lot of problems, but I digress.
It’s just one of many genres/subgenres that has one groundbreaking game/saga as origin and all the games that took inspiration from it, like Metroidvania or Soulslike. Just creating a new term for each of them would make initial discussions much weirder, although it would probably be clearer later on (nowadays most people that know what a Roguelike is don’t even know “Rogue” is an actual game)
This dude has really drank the kool aid. Imagine being tricked into thinking that you need an imaginary black belt to do root cause analysis and participate in a project
I love Japanese architecture and Japanese food. And I’ve watched my fair share of anime and read my fair share of manga.
Anyone who doesn’t know how terrible Japanese culture is to outsiders needs to educate themselves, there’s a reason they sided with Hitler. That culture never really went away like it did for Germany. Talk to an actual Japanese person, who went to school in Japan and see how much they know about their war crimes, and then talk to a German.
I don’t think it’s that worse than other countries tbh. It’s amplified by the fact that it’s an island so foreigners are scarce and a lot of them are there for weeb tourism and may not be the best to interact with, but racism is a constant in most countries all around the world.
They do need to acknowledge their war crimes though, sure. I agree Nationalism is definitely a bigger issue in Japan than in most other countries.
It’s amplified by the fact that it’s an island so foreigners are scarce
First off, in these times, being an island doesn’t mean anything, so that is not an excuse actually. Second, I have heard that their own policy regarding taking non-Japanese in made them a bit more isolated.
In modern times it might not matter (or rather, it matters less, refugees still have to move to the closest country and distance by sea does matter), but it mattered in the past and they grew up as a very isolated society (which in turn had them spawn those laws you’re talking about).
So, I knew a girl who went to a Japanese international school in my South East Asian home country where the Japanese did some utterly horrendous things during WWII. She told me the school took them to a war museum kinda place on a field trip and basically shouted at them like “LOOK AT WHAT YOUR PEOPLE DID!” until the whole room of grade school kids were crying about how sorry they were. So at least outside of Japan there seems to be some (perhaps over the top) education about the atrocities committed by the Japanese government to Japanese students, but I agree, most of the Japan educated Japanese people I’ve spoken to are just vaguely aware that they did some bad stuff before they got nuked.
Centuries? I knew their bad period started roughly around the Meiji Era and stopped after WWII, in regards to killing people, but that hardly constitutes centuries
Yes, but I wouldn’t call it genocide. I don’t know, I’m not defending them for their crimes in the past century, but the original comment is a little hyperbolic.
The modern (yamato) Japanese people replaced the previous inhabitants of Japan. I don’t think it was a deliberate genocide, but at the end of the day the Emishi / Jomon cultures were wiped out.
Edit: Also, I was talking about violence in general, not genocide.
No, I don’t think modern Italians have time machines to go back in time and train the Romans. Also, the Romans were actually competent, so it is unlikely that they were trained by the Italians.
That’s what they and the Western governments legitimizing hyper-nationalist holocaust-deniers like Abe for geopolitical reasons want you to think, but in reality there’s still a lot of fuckery going on, to use the technical term.
Can you point to something I can read on this? I don’t want this to sound like “I doubt what you’re saying”, I just know little about Japan after WWII and didn’t think full scale genocides were going on. Of course, even after the wars, Japan does not have the best record regarding, uh, being nice to other ethnic groups.
Not the op, but since you seem serious, I think a better way of wording it would be, “spent centuries at war and attempted to genocide a few cultures”. So, aside from the fact that most of the history of Japan is just waring states and almost never ending infighting, you can look into the Imjin War for Japan’s first attempt at conquering the mainland in the 1500s. It would also be worth looking into their conquest and/or eradication of the Ainu, Emishi, Ryūkyū Kingdom.
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