Japanese culture × ALT life vol.1

Today, I will share my personal background. I lived in Canada for 8 years and I recently came back to Japan. There are parts of Japan that I feel a bit strange or unique to me after living abroad for such a long time.

I have three parts in total that we are going to look into for the next three Mondays.

The first part is ‘’cleanliness.”

I genuinely believe, Japan is one of the cleanest countries in the world. For example, public washrooms are exceptionally clean and functional that makes me feel secured. On the other hand, in other countries, doors of each stall have big gap that I can almost see out of, or someone can see in! Also, the gap at the bottom of the doors is so wide, it makes me extremely uncomfortable. Toilet seats are always cold which wakes me up, and the smell is not so good; overall they are very unsanitary.

Another example is that Japan do not have public dust boxes in the cities whereas there are dust boxes everywhere overseas, but for reasons unknown, there is trash everywhere!

This is completely my opinion, but the differences come from learning cleaning time in schools. All students must participate in cleaning the school in Japan. There are no janitors. Overseas kids don’t clean their schools, but we do in Japan. From elementary schools to high schools, we learn how to clean and how to use cleaning tools. It does not matter if you are a student or a teacher! Teachers may not directly ask you to do it, but why not take the initiative of helping and enjoying the cleaning with students?

Cleaning is not just cleaning, but actually, makes you see the value in taking care of the school with pride. This feeling continues as we get older and carry over to our everyday life in Japan. Maybe you can take this same feeling back to your home country as well.