Arashi’s Amateurish Guide to Japanese Life and Culture and How it Applies to Fanfiction

[Arashi_Leonhart]

I don't recall the book in question, because that was like five years ago, but it was not a Japanese-written source, it was a (German, I think?) anthropological study. That could've been sourcing very patriotic Japanese material, which wouldn't surprise me.

It's not really important, it was just a kind of aside that he brought up when talking about some of the insights in the book that always stuck with me.

[mewarmo990]

Yeah it's no big deal. The section in question is about how Buddhism is deeply ingrained into various parts of contemporary culture, which is true.

I should probably go read the rest before I keep talking. But maybe also add something about the religiosity of Japanese people. As in, not very. Misleading statistics get thrown around a lot, like ">90% of Japanese are Shinto or Buddhist". But in reality it's more like people have a typical level of superstitions, observe the big national holidays, etc. but it's not on the same level of observance as going to church/temple/whatever weekly, praying 5 times a day, saying grace before meals, etc.

It's like how the average person growing up in America might be non-Christian but would still have all those Judeo-Christian influences in their holidays, social conventions, language (profanity!), etc.

[Arashi_Leonhart]

I thought I had kinda alluded to how they're just superstitious and not actually active practitioners for the most part. I guess not?

[Dullahan]

The etymology of individual kanji can be really interesting at times. My (very amateur) interest is more connected to Man'yougana and their use in writing ancient Japanese, but taking things all the way back to their ideographic roots in China can often produce some neat stuff. According to this database, we get to 時 like so:

Deletion remnant 时(時). From sun or day 日 use a sundial (日晷) to measure (measurement 寸) the moving 土止 of the sun. Meaning time.

Worth mentioning, I thought.