What is Japan Psychology?

Hello and welcome to Japan Psychology, where we consider the psychology of Japan.

My name is Jake and I am a psychology undergraduate from Great Britain. I have loved Japan for almost as long as I remember. From my grandfather showing me trinkets brought back from his naval leave in the Japanese port city of Kobe during the Korean War, to growing up watching Pokémon and playing Pac-Man World on the PlayStation 1, Japan has been there, inspiring me and contributing to who I am today. The freedom to write about a country that means so much to me, and the sheer broadness of scope when it comes to psychology is exciting. I hope to not only entertain, but to inspire others who love Japan to learn more about psychology.

How I Started to Actually Learn Japanese for Real

As a Brit I was never given a legitimate opportunity to learn a second language. Back in Highschool we did do Spanish and briefly French, but my year 8 teacher was retiring and she no longer cared for the profession so we found ourselves in the library computer room almost every class. Spending our time reading Uncyclopedia might have made us experts in memes, but certainly didn’t teach us any Spanish. But alas, even my friend who did GCSE Spanish cannot remember any and he even did a Spanish performance of Nightmare Before Christmas once. I remember saying in that year 8 Spanish class “why can’t we learn other languages like Japanese?” to which the response from the teaching assistant was “what would be the point?”. Depressingly I have found that to be a very common attitude across the British education system as a whole, never mind our schools approach to language learning. With this attitude it does make it difficult to even comprehend the idea of ever learning a second language; it is an uphill battle to even know where to begin.