Blog Assignment #2: "How do Japanese see the US in 2025?"

For today’s blog assignment, I watched a Japanese street interview YouTuber, named TAKASHii. In the video, TAKASHii asked various Japanese locals “What do you think about the United States?”

Some things that interviewees said were that Americans are very friendly and that they enjoyed consuming American media, like Orange is the New Black and Red Dead Redemption. Others said that they believe that Americans have a lot of freedom of expression, especially in regard to style and individuality and joked that they were quite envious of that freedom. One interviewee used the expression that in Japan, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered.” In early adulthood, he decided to leave Japan for several years because he was very much his own individual and did not want to conform to traditional norms. I would agree that Americans enjoy a great degree of freedom of expression, but at times, I feel like this individuality can be too overemphasized; sometimes hyper-individualism privileges personal success over relationships and can lead to greater feelings of loneliness compared to collectivist cultures. One perception that several interviewees shared is that America is very politically chaotic and, at times, violent; one interviewee mentioned that some of his friends would never visit America because guns are just too scary. It was very interesting to hear these perspectives on the U.S. from a Japanese perspective!