In a July 2 letter, " Give the students some slack," a reader replying to my June 25 letter, "Japanese is just a language," assumed that the students to which I made reference "are young" and said that "most adults in the world don't know much about what is and isn't unique to their country, let alone young people."
To clarify, the students I was referring to range in age from 30 to 60, and they are all supposedly well-educated. I'm actually surprised that someone would assume that they were young, since ideas such as "Japan has a unique culture" have gone out of fashion. I find it surprising to still be hearing ideas based on Nihonjiron — "theories of the Japanese" — which I heard when I first came to Japan in the late 1980s.
I would like to add that Keio University professor Eiji Oguma has written an excellent book that deals with the history and underlying causes of Nihonjinron called "A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-Images," which I highly recommend.
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