The xenophobe's guide to the Japanese [electronic resource] / Sahoko Kaji, Noriko Hama, Jonathan Rice

Individuality and selfishness are as welcome as a sumo wrestler barging the line at a buffet.I'm Japanese and I like it. Many things in this little book are frighteningly so true. Entertaining, well observed and fairly evaluated from the Western cultural perspective. It's not really a 'guide book' as such. Instead, it gives you a brilliant cultural comparison, their mentality and the physical environment that affects their world view. If you are going to stay in Japan for more than 1 month and hoping to mingle with local people, this book would give you some subtle but really important insights to the 'why' of their behaviours. Like any other value system, the Japanese culture was like an invisible & odourless gas that I was breathing without knowing it - till I read this book.' Review from a Japanese now in the UK