Felicia's 2025 Blog

When it comes to the topic of individualism and collectivism I would say it differs depending on the environment and not solely based on the country someone grew up in. In an environment where everyone is doing their own thing such as the hustle culture in the United States, it would be hard to try and act as a collective and make it a group hustle. On the opposite end, when everyone is acting as a group and working together it would be harder to try and be a total individual without feeling somewhat ostracized in a way.  In the United States everyone is expected to fend for themselves(unless you’re super rich and have wealth handed down to you) and be able to do everything without a community.  On the other hand, Japan does things by the group. Roger J. Davies notes in his book The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture , that the Japanese follow the concept of Honne To Tatemae where they have a public stance and private stance. The public stance is the pa...

  After learning about the Japanese educational structure , I’ve realized that Americans just don’t care as much for school. While discussing in class with another Japanese student, I realized that there are similarities between both schooling systems. But the only differences that I found was that Americans don't really care for extracurricular activities in high school.They mainly see it as something to help you get into university, but you can still get into university without it. There's also no exam that you have to take to get into high school.  One similarity that I found was the college preparation usually in the United States to prepare for college. Some students start from their second year of high school and some start from their first year of high school(that's if they want to get into an advanced college or a private university). The students who want to get into the ivy league schools, which are the hardest to get into, usually start training for that from mi...

       The distance between power in the workplace is fundamentally different based on culture. I noticed that in the west, japanese workplaces are depicted as super strict and cutthroat, or even militaristic and because of this I thought it was a culture that was exclusive only to Japan. I realized, while reading the supplementary text and thinking back to a discussion I had with a japanese student in a different class, I realized that the high power distance in Japan depends on the company. From the conversation I noted that the newer companies have a lower power distance and the older/family owned companies have a higher power distance with the majority being a higher power distance. From one of the discussions in one of my other classes, I realized that a possible reason why the power distance in Japan is wide is due to the fact that the past eras of japan had strict power structures, and although the shogun eras have passed, the strong hierarchy in the workplace...

Even though a good percentage of people in this world have a job, the cultures are different. Some place a lot of importance on their jobs and company, whereas some societies value working less and family more. That’s the difference that I noticed between Japan, the United States and Ghana.  In Ghana work is import but mainly as a means to provide for your family, in the United States, work is just as important as family and they value a work life balance, and in Japan, they value their work sometimes over their families.  Based on my experience in the States I noticed that people don’t really carry any loyalty to the companies that they work for and often change jobs when their job just doesn’t work for them anymore, Ghanaians in a sense are similar when it comes to work. On the other hand as we discussed in class, Japanese workers are usually more loyal to their company and place importance on their jobs and rarely change jobs.  I find it interesting that even though th...