Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
One thing I noticed in Tokyo was the rarity of sunglasses. Despite the dazzling combination of a high sun, white concrete and reflective glass you will very rarely see Japanese people wearing them. I was curious and took to the internet to ascertain why, and after digging through several "yakuza wear sunglasses" and "white people have weaker eyes" style answers which I found wholly unconvincing, I found "A Study on Emoticon Recommendation System Considering the Content of Text Messages" by Yuuki Urabe et al of Hokkaido University. Here Dr Yuuki outlines her study into the differing interpretations of emoticons between Japanese and Western (American) participants, asking participants to classify emoticons into "positive" or "negative" categories. A basic outline of the results are as follows:
| Emoticon | Japanese Response | Western Response |
|---|---|---|
| ^_^ | Positive | Positive |
| ◦︵◦ | Negative | Negative |
| ^︵^ | Positive | Negative |
| ◦‿◦ | Positive | Positive |
| ᴗ_ᴗ | Negative | Negative |
| ᴗ‿ᴗ | Negative | Positive |
The results tell us that while both cultures perceive upturned eyes and mouths as "positive" and downturned eyes and mouths as "negative", the Japanese participants put greater emphasis on the state of the eyes while Western participants put greater emphasis on the state of the mouth in cases where the two features didn't match up. There is in fact a Japanese phrase that says as much: 「目は口ほどに物を言う」 meaning "eyes speak as much as mouths".
This can be seen in the parallel development of emoticon in the West and East, with the standard Japanese emoticon being of the horizontal style (like above), which gives greater range in eye depiction, while the West adopted the vertical style like :), :P or XD which gives better range for the mouth (on a default keyboard). There is of course a much larger range in general within the Japanese format, which probably stems from the West's relatively simple alphabet where we need not stray from the 50 or so default keys of the QWERTY keypad, whereas the Japanese language by default requires innovations such as predictive text and special character insertion.
To me this explains the aversion to sunglasses, if Japanese communication relies more heavily on the eyes, sunglasses would seem dodgy and suspicious. Its not like we don't have a similar idea over here: talking to others while keeping your sunglasses on is rude (at least in England), although wearing them around town is totally normal. However there is also the inverse effect, seen widely during the pandemic: facemasks. If sunglasses were exceedingly rare in Tokyo, facemasks were exceedingly common. Where I live facemasks have entirely disappeared from daily life since the pandemic, being relegated to hospitals and weirdos (where they belong). Its very off-putting to converse with someone with a mask on to me: muffling their speech, hiding their lip movements, and most of all, hiding their expressions. Whereas in Japan, where if Dr Yuuki's study is to be believed mouth expressions are of less importance, covering up your mouth is totally fine and not rude in the slightest.
Another manifestation of this is in cartoons. The standard "anime face" has massively exaggerated and expressive eyes with a nearly non-existent mouth. Meanwhile Western cartoons generally exhibit simple eyes and a large, expressive mouth.
^Wallace from Wallace & Gromit (Britain) and Maria from Hayate no Gotoku (Japan)
Manga has introduced many new forms of cartoonish expression into the Western vocabulary in recent years, such as >_<, ^_^ or =_=; but its important to note that almost all of them are instantly understandable by a Western audience, and I understand such mutual understanding to be reciprocal with Western mouth-based emotions. There are a few standard Japanese-faces that are confusing to a Western audience, but most of these are derived from other cultural features such as のもの. There really are only a handful of expressions not-instantly understandable to a Western audience, such as 3_3 for despectacled people or weirdly one of the few indigenous mouth-expressions: ◦x◦ which is used to convey cuteness and I think is a representation of the split mouths of some animals like cats or rabbits.
