The non-guide to passing the JLPT N1

I finally passed the JLPT N1. I got the notice in the mail in early September soggy and wet from typhoon #15 that rolled by over the weekend. For those of you who don’t study Japanese, the JLPT is the benchmark, for better or for worse, of how good someone is at Japanese. It has 5 levels, from N5 (beginner) all the way to N1 (black belt), and tests vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, and listening. 

With an N1 certification, I can:

• Go to university in Japan
• Work at most Japanese companies
• And the list ends here, I couldn’t find anything else

Anyway, the test is somewhat controversial among Japanese language learners. Primarily because it doesn’t have a speaking or writing component. You’ll find many countless Japanese language learners criticizing people who passed N1 with comments like “All the N1s I know are Chinese kids who already know kanji and can barely speak any Japanese! It doesn’t prove anything about your Japanese!” And you’ll also find some certification flexers who are like “N1 means that you are basically fluent cause you understand like 99% of all Japanese.” The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. 

Despite what my Chinese parents say, I’m pretty convinced that knowing Chinese does not make learning Japanese a cakewalk, and Chinese kids who passed N1 probably worked their ass off studying in other areas such as listening and grammar. However, it is totally possible that you can’t hold a normal conversation with people because the JLPT just doesn’t test that. Just like how the SAT doesn’t actually test how well you’ll do in college, the JLPT is only an approximation of functional Japanese language skills.

Anyway, I’m pretty stoked to have finally reached the holy grail of Japanese language learning. While I can still remember the details, I want to take a stroll down memory lane of How. Much. Ass. I. Busted.

Year 0: The Prologue

Me and my parents with their lab at Awaodori festival.

I was born in China, but spent the first 4 years of my life living in Japan. So Japanese might have been my first language. Ya know. 

But before we get too carried away… let me remind you that toddlers are not very articulate. I probably knew a handful of words like “Mommy”, “Daddy”, and “Poop.”

I basically don’t remember anything from this part of my life, cause when I hit the ripe age of 4 we moved to America and you know Americans; “You’re in aMeriCa, SPeaK ENGLish.” But growing up, my mom still liked to use some Japanese words here and there, specifically the words for carrot (にんじん) and strawberry (いちご). Don't ask me why, idk.

Family photo with rental kimonos during Hina Matsuri.

Anyway back to the point. I remembered basically nothing. In middle school I loved watching anime, but it probably improved my ability to read subtitles more than it did my ability to understand Japanese. 

However, it’s not to say that these first few years were for naught. I subscribe to the idea that if you learn a language while you’re young, you’re blessed with the muscle memory of how to move your mouth. So when you try to pronounce words, it comes easier because you can manipulate your tongue in a similar way to how a native speaker would. 

Year 1: The Carefree Days

すみません。マクドナルドはどこですか？

Excuse me. Where is the McDonalds?

-Genki 1

Our Japanese 101 class photo (missing our sensei though)

So I started learning Japanese like how most non-Japanese people learn Japanese, in a college 101 class. Our school was too small to have a language department, so me and my friend would hop on our bikes every morning, 5 days a week, at 7:30am to take Japanese 101 at Wellesley college. It’s not easy to convince a college student to wake up at 7am.

Our textbook was “Genki 1”, and we’d switch every other day between lecture and drills. I’d ace the quizzes and breeze through the skits. Out of all the years I’ve been studying Japanese, this was probably when I was the most confident (read: full of it).

But I think that’s how introductory courses should be. They should convince you that you’re a genius and trick you into paying lots of money to go study abroad. 

Year 2: I’m in Japan Bitches!

And trick me they did. During my junior year of college I decided to go study abroad in Sendai, Japan. The program, G3 exchange @ Tohoku University, was an engineering program where all the classes were entirely in English. It sounds too easy right? Well it was. Mainly because I was a native english speaker, but there were also students from all over the world who had to study engineering in their non-native language.

Imoni party (a staple of northern Japanese life) with my friends

Despite being cocooned in a English bubble, Japan still managed to give me a good kick in the behind. I remember not being able to read any of the signs walking down the street, being flustered when the cashier at the convenience store asked me if I wanted chopsticks, spinning in circles inside of the train station trying to find the right platform until an old man felt sorry for me and told me where to go. 

During my exchange I was taking intermediate Japanese classes at the University twice a week. This time the teacher did the thing where they only speak Japanese, and we were moving double the speed as the class I had in America. The textbook we were using here was “Minna no Nihongo 2”.

My favorite part of my exchange though had nothing to do with the University. It was this conversational Japanese class called 日本語のもり that happened two times a week at the city’s international center. You would walk in, they would pair you with a volunteer who were usually these really sweet retired people, and you would just sit and talk for two hours. 

Here’s the flyer that they put up that convinced me to go

I say sit and “talk,” but for the first half of my exchange I could barely put together a sentence. The first lesson I had was with this chic old man who wore a scarf indoors. He spent the entire time pointing at different food in a picture book, and I would tell him if I liked to eat that food or not .「はい、すしすきです。」I’m not very picky when it comes to food, so you can imagine that this grandpa was very patient as we attempted to have an interesting conversation. 

My exchange at Tohoku University was pretty short, only four months long, but at the end of my time there I had improved leaps and bounds. For my last day at the conversational Japanese class I wrote a letter to all the teachers there and gave a speech at the end. Everyone applauded. Though they might have just been trying to be polite.

When I finished my study abroad, I could introduce myself, make chit chat, and if I concentrated I could even understand what the other person was saying sometimes. At this point in time I would’ve probably called my Japanese conversational… that notion would be completely destroyed when I come back in year 4.

※If you are for some reason interested in reading more about my study abroad, I, like every worldly exchange student, kept a blog during this time and if you just flip back a few pages, you can find more posts from when I “discover myself.”

Year 3 Part 1: Climbing the Kanji Mountain

Part of this story actually happens in year 2, but for the purposes of good storytelling, year 3 is when I start getting serious about learning Japanese. 

So by the time I came back to America I had just experienced a period of rapid growth in my Japanese language ability and gosh darn it if I let all my hard work go to waste! I’ve made it halfway through this arduous journey, and I’m not about to give up now. 

Though realistically I was probably slightly worse off than a Japanese elementary schooler. 

When I came back to start my Junior year in college I wanted to take more Japanese classes, but they were just not going to fit into my schedule. So instead I went the self-study route. Which can be a great idea if you’re disciplined. And a terrible idea if you’re like most people. 

Luckily I was introduced to this very prescribed method of learning Japanese, specifically kanji, by a fellow exchange student called Wanikani.com. Wanikani is an SRS or spaced repetition software. How it works is that it introduces a flash card, and as you correctly identify it, it shows up in your review pile with less and less frequency. The idea is that you need more frequent encounters when the vocabulary is still new to you, but after a few times it becomes more ingrained in your memory and you won’t need to review it as much.

They teach you different radicals, kanji, and vocabulary 5 at a time

I love Wanikani. I paid for a year subscription for $150 with a coupon. And I got every single penny back and more. Using their service I learned 2000+ kanji in a span of about two years. That’s 6x faster than a Japanese student would learn in their 12 years of education. It shortcutted everything when it came to learning the hardest thing for most Japanese language learners… those darned Chinese characters.

But it wasn’t like it was easy or anything, it just made it easier than it would’ve been. Anyone trying to sell you “Fluency in only 6 months!!” Is a snake’s oil salesman. 

Wanikani meant that for these two years everyday when I woke up, I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and then spent one hour pounding through flashcards. And every night I would change into my pajamas and spend another hour chugging through the rest. You couldn’t really take a break either, or the delicate equilibrium of flashcards in your review pile would exponentially soar burying you under a deep layer of hopelessness. But I guess that’s the business model.

But after getting through the program, again I saw this huge jump in what I was able to do. Now I could finally read real Japanese. I could dust off the manga that I told myself I would one day be able to read. Though, disclaimer: it still took me a few hours to go through a single volume of “Polarbear Cafe” which you probably can tell by the name, is not very advanced stuff.

Year 3 Part 2: Ukulele Dreams

笑ってくれる支えてくれる　励ましてくれる大事な人へ

To the people who’ve laughed with me, supported me, and encouraged me.

-感謝 by RSP

At first I was super excited that I’m onto year 4, and then I realized that this is actually still a part of year 3. So here we go... *backspace backspace backspace* *Y-e-a-r- 3 P-a-r-t 2…*

So around the same time I started learning Japanese, I had also picked up this other thing called a ukulele. I was drawn to it because it would finally let me sing outside of the shower, but also because it was a lot easier than learning the guitar.

The aforementioned ukulele...very good investment for only $50 on Amazon

During my last year of college I convinced my college to let me do an independent study on translating Japanese music. In reality I just wanted an excuse to futz around on my ukulele, borrow the schools expensive audio recording equipment, and get a chance to update my very on hiatus blog. 

I would pick a song, translate the lyrics to Japanese, record myself playing the song, and then write a blogpost about interesting grammar or vocabulary things I found throughout the process.

At the end of the project I had ranked my initial learning goals from 1 (most effective at) to 7 (not so effective at), and this was the final list:

1. Improve my familiarity with the language
2. Learn how to shoot and edit simple music videos
3. Get better at singing (at least on camera)
4. Improve my reading speed
5. Learn new vocabulary through songs
6. Learn new kanji from songs
7. Learn new grammar points

So you probably notice that anything related to “learn Japanese” ranked kinda low on what I felt like I had accomplished. Because I only ended up translating six songs total, it was hard to get the amount of exposure needed to remember new vocabulary. However, I would occasionally hear them watching anime or see them reading manga, and go “huh, that sounds familiar.”

So what did I learn from this project? 

I think what I learned was how to sing Japanese songs on the ukulele. I learned where to get Japanese Ukulele tabs (U-fret.com). I learned about words that appear frequently in song lyrics but not so frequently in conversation like:

巡り会う  to meet fortuitously

寄り添う  to snuggle up to

よみがえる to be revitalized

I learned how to read faster so that I could keep pace with the music. So yeah. I learned an obvious lesson. I learned that you get good at the things you practice.

Year 4 part 1: Back in Japan

Wow! Are we finally at year 4? Year 3 was a struggle to finish writing. 

The summer after graduating college I got an internship at a Japanese company. I didn’t really know what to expect and I was excited to see how much I had improved since my last time in Japan a year ago.

Me and the other interns doing some... “cultural exchange”

First day I walk into work and my boss greets me in English. I then meet my mentor, and he introduces himself in English too, this time with a full on American accent. And I was like woah, wtf. Is this normal?

Turns out the answer is no, and I just happened to luck out. Other interns I knew had to play telephone with their supervisors on google translate. 

Outside of my direct supervisors there were many other opportunities to practice speaking Japanese so you’d think I’d be like COWABUNGA! But what I had failed to remember was that it’s heart wrenchingly embarrassing to try speaking a language your not good at.

So remember that point in Year 2 when I thought I was conversational in Japanese? Well after introducing myself and exchanging pleasantries I realized that I could not hold a real conversation with people. Once I was outside the comfort of what I had practiced in college, pushing a sentence out was like trying to clear a chunk of food after it gets lodged in your esophagus. Slow, awkward, and uncomfortable. But at least it wasn’t just me. Other people were also doing their best trying to communicate in English. 

Year 4 part 2: Back home

My internship was only 2 months long, so eventually I came back home, unemployed and out of college. During this time I did several things to continue studying Japanese. 

1. I went back to hitting the books, specifically my third textbook “Tobira” which I would place around probably JLPT N3 level. Nothing super interesting here. I would just go chapter by chapter, read through the texts, and do the worksheets.
2. I set out to challenge my first light novel, the first volume of “No. 6” by Asano Atsuko. It’s a short book but it took me a whole month, taking around an hour everyday to read a few pages, copying all the words I didn’t know down into a notebook.
3. I wrote a journal entry everyday in Japanese on this site called italki.com where native Japanese speakers would then correct my entries. I just took a look back at the stuff I wrote and started sweating from how cringy it was…content wise and language wise.
4. I made a language exchange friend through the same site and we would talk every week for an hour, the first half in Japanese and the latter half in English. We kept this up for a whole year (throughout my move to Japan), and she told me that there was a huge improvement from when we first met.  

Here’s one of the many journal entries that I wrote...

Year 5: Shoot for the Moon (and if you miss at least try passing N1)

This year marks a period of extreme growth in my Japanese. In a single year I went from being unable to hold up my end of a conversation, to being able to sit in meetings held entirely in Japanese while also contributing my own thoughts and ideas.

After a few months at home, I got an email from the same company I did my internship at and they offered me a full time job. So I packed my bags and headed back to Japan at the beginning of the year.

What was different this time was that I wasn’t working on my own intern project anymore, so I was expected to collaborate with other people at my office, people from other offices, and clients that we had. This meant that while English was acceptable before, if I really wanted to contribute in a meaningful way at my job I needed to use Japanese.

This year wasn’t so much about studying, it was much more about learning on the fly and experiencing. Which-, hurray. No more textbooks. But because this was the real world and not a Japanese language learning sandbox, when I messed up the consequences weren’t just a bad test score. And I mess up real often.

It would be hard to write about every single thing that I did this year that has helped me improve my Japanese, but let's try to make a list. 

• I work at an office where I speak Japanese daily
• I design, create presentations, write emails, and do paperwork in Japanese
• Shopping, eating out, going to the dentist, going to the hair salon, signing up for the gym, taking surfing and go classes, all in Japanese
• Weekly 1 hour Japanese lesson with my Japanese teacher
• Anime on Netflix in Japan doesn’t have English subtitles
• Reading manga, playing games, and learning more songs on the ukulele
• Studying for N1, I used Kanzen Master, Nihongo so-matome, and this N1 drill book (I should also mention that I failed N1 once before passing the 2nd time)

There’s probably so much more I’m forgetting but the point is, when you live in Japan, almost anything you do can improve your language skills. Though I would say out of everything in my list, the thing that has really improved my Japanese the most is work. 

Being able to communicate my ideas, being able to discuss things with my coworkers, to be creative, and show people that I have something to contribute - this all required me to get better in Japanese. Sure I could do all of those in English, but then I’d be relying on someone else to have the English skills to interpret what I was saying. In order to communicate with a variety of people, getting good at Japanese fast was the obvious choice.

This year has been a lot of highs and a lot of lows. Choosing to study Japanese has given me this incredible opportunity to live this life outside of the U.S. I never thought I’d have. But even now I find myself stumbling with words, getting lost in conversations, anxious and scared about speaking. For every moment where I nailed it, there are so many more where I’m beating myself up for screwing up. 

But that’s the thing right? The moment you stop feeling stupid, is the moment you’ve stopped learning. And luckily, I never seem to run out of ways to feel stupid when I’m in Japan.

---

Here are some photos from the past year that I just wanted to share:

Went to Hawaii for the first time in my life

Climbed Mount Fuji

Went to Disney Sea

Met many awesome people

I’ve met a lot of people throughout this journey, so many who aren’t pictured. Thank you to each and everyone of you guys. I’m glad that the world brought us together. 

Japanese herp derp

Hello, it's been a while. Welcome back into my life. I could talk about the special type of angst that comes with early adulthood in a foreign country, but that feeling comes and goes in waves, so let's talk about something stupid instead.

Japanese has a lot of filler words you use in conversation to tell the other person you're listening. Not unlike nodding your head and saying "oh that's cool," while actually meaning "I'm not actually listening." One that they teach you in beginners Japanese is そうですね (Right, I totally agree), sometimes romanized into English as "Soo desu nee?" which if you didn't know how to pronounce it correctly you might assume that it sounds something like "Sue desu knee." This particular example I saw in Pachinko -- which is a great read 10/10 would recommend, but the little bit of Japanese interspersed throughout the book was very cringe.

Anyway, I'm getting derailed. What I wanted to say was that I change my mind. I change my mind about へぇwhich sounds something like "helicopter" if you gave up at the beginning and only made it to "he-" and then dragged it out"-eeeeeeeeh".

A year ago when I started living full time in Japan I thought it was the dumbest sounding word ever. It's one of those filler words that you use when someone tells you a "fun fact" and your like "wow." but feels a little more like saying "herp derp." It sounds hella stupid, and I used to think that when people used it, that they sounded like a dumbass by association.

Recently I've been finding myself using this...word... more and more often. And I've come to the realization that it's actually quite useful. It skips completely over the pretense that you care, and goes straight to "I don't give a shit." It's short. And for a language that people say tends to beat around the bush, it sounds pretty much exactly how you feel.

Herp.

My guide to how China is changing

Happy Lunar New Year everyone or as we call it in Chinese Chūn Jié or spring festival! Hope everyone experiences lots of happy things this year. I know it's kind of special year for a lot of you since it's the year of the pig. In Chinese tradition everyone gets one year older over the New Year (instead of during your birthday), which means that you've turned 24 (or some multiple of that)! So happy birthday!

Setting off a string of firecrackers on the beach since it's illegal to do it within the city.

This year's the first time ever that I've celebrated it in China. And it honestly it's the first time I've ever really had off for Lunar New Year since it's not something you get off when you live in America. On New Years eve we had a huge dinner with my grandma, cousins, uncles, aunties, with lots of auspicious dishes like fish and geese. We went to the beach and we set off fireworks (which I often forget is actually a Chinese invention). And watched lots of reruns of the new year's programming on TV.

Lighting incense so we can offer food to our ancestors.  

For the past four years I've been traveling back and forth from the U.S. to Japan quite frequently. For studying abroad, for my summer internship, for school, and now for work. And that has indirectly given me lots of opportunities to visit China to see my grandma, and other relatives like cousins, uncles, and aunties. In the past four years I've gotten to visit China five different times (compared to just 2~3 times from age 6 to 18 growing up in the states), and while I can't speak for how China is different from when my parents left in 1995, I've been able to see with my own eyes how China is evolving.

Shantou's old district was very busy over the new years. Swatow is how you would pronounce Shantou in the Chaoshan dialect (which I can't speak D:)

From my experience as an American watching the news, you get this sense that China is this large looming threat to the United States, I think because China's often portrayed as the antagonist, media portrayal of China is often made to intimidate. "Look how fast China is growing, be scared." On the other hand working as a designer in Japan, a lot of what I see is technological innovation in China that is moving in a different direction from how technology integrates into our lives in both the U.S. and Japan.

Driving down a road in Nan Ao, my uncle told me that this place is known as China's Hawaii.

In the past week I've living here and talking to family about how life is changing here in China. So here's a micro-look into China's development from one perspective in one city.

Expanding Infrastructure

The train I took to get to back to Hong Kong for my return flight. Every seat was packed.

China has been rapidly expanding it's network of high speed rails since the early 2000s. These trains are bullet train fast, the kind that doesn't exist in America. Last year when I visited Shantou, I flew into Hong Kong's airport, and took a 5 hour bus from Hong Kong to Shantou. This year, there's a new high speed rail station in Hong Kong, which shortened the ride to just 3 hours by train (which honestly could've been more like 2.5 hours if we didn't stall at Shenzhen for half an hour). To give you some perspective that's like if we could travel from New York to Boston in 2.5 hours. Imagine if there was a convenient way to move from state to state that didn't involve long distant driving or going to an airport. This is the kind of infrastructure that China is spending it's money on. The kind of infrastructure I wish the U.S. was spending it's money on.

Was it a similar experience to riding the Shinkansen in Japan? Not really. Most people I see riding the Shinkansen are business people. In contrast most of the travelers I traveled with on the high speed rail were people going to or coming home to family. Granted, this was peak holiday season, so it's not a fair comparison. Maybe I'll do a blog someday on trains in Japan because, I love the trains.

The Nan'Ao Bridge, which you guessed it, leads to Nan'Ao Island. (Huaxinnet)

One of the days we headed off to Nan'Ao, an Island off the coast of Shantou to set off fireworks (it's prohibited to set off fireworks within the city, but you hear people do it anyway). One thing that was super striking to me was the Nan'Ao bridge. You used to have to take a ferry to get to the island but more recently they built a super long bridge connecting the two so that you can directly drive across the ocean to China's Hawaii (though tbh, I went to Hawaii for the first time recently, I am absolutely in love, and Nan'Ao doesn't hold a candle to it). I was impressed by how freaking long it was, I'm not sure I've been on a longer bridge.

Proliferation of QR codes

Originally I was going to post something useful like a video of someone actually purchasing via QR code but then I found this music video on youtube.

I feel like QR codes in China is something that either you know is rampant in China or you have no idea what I'm talking about. Well, QR codes are everywhere. You know those things that never really took off in America? When's the last time you actually took the effort to scan a QR code?

In China, QR codes are almost the defacto way that people pay for goods now. In America I carry around a credit card. In Japan I fumble around with cash. In China, most people will scan the merchant's QR code, which takes them to the store's payment page where you would type in how much you pay them, and then press pay. And wahlah! The money then gets transferred to their account. There are two primary payment processing companies, one of them run by Tencent that's connected to your wechat account (which is the messaging app of choice in China), the other is run by Alibaba, the Amazon/Ebay of China.

People in China actually scan QR codes. You can put a QR code on your advertisement, and you can reliably count on interested people to scan the code to get directed to your website. QR codes aren't just used for purchasing from stores or people, there are also vending machines everywhere that take payment via QR codes. Here are some examples:

Bike Sharing

Normal bikes costs 1 RMB per ride. Motorized bike shown above costs 3 RMB per ride.

I know I said vending machine, but lets talk about bikes. Dock-less bike sharing is huge in China. There are multiple bike share companies that can be seen cluttering the sidewalks everywhere. These bikes are cheap cheap cheap. You scan the QR code located below the seat and it'll cost you about 1 RMB, or 15 cents for a single ride. You don't have to find a specialized dock, you don't have to worry about any time limits (probably, I've actually never ridden one because my relatives escort me everywhere I go), they're convenient for the consumer but come at a cost of taking up a ton of space.

While walking around the streets of Shantou it's apparent that these share bikes vastly outnumber personally owned bikes. Most people prefer to rent these bikes than buy their own. I was told that their popularity is due partly to the fact that Shantou doesn't have good local public transportation infrastructure so these bikes can be alternatives to buses that might only come on the half hour. Though that seems pretty typical tbh if you are in America.

A pile of broken share bikes.

I walked past a mountain of these bikes just piled up like a scrap heap and I was like smh, people just treat shared property like shit (or like the educated like to say, aghast! The tragedy of the commons!(am I using this right?)) . But my cousin reassured me that this isn't just any old pile of bikes, people with broken bikes are directed towards these piles, they leave it there, then the company picks them up and fixes them up for redistribution.

It is still a mystery to me how these companies are profitable when renting bikes are dirt cheap and people are not taking care of them.

Phone Charging

Tiny phone charging station located at a dimsum resturant.

This box was outside a dimsum restaurant we ate at. You scan the QR code and you can then keep your phone in the box to charge while you eat. I'm skeptical people use this particular one because it looks kinda sketchy and you could probably just pick it up and run if you wanted to steal a bunch of phones at once. But apparent phone charging stations are pretty popular in China. Probably cause everyone's constantly glued to their phones.

Tissue Paper Dispensing

Tissue paper vending machine located outside a mall bathroom.

This one is the funniest example imo. Most bathrooms in China lack toilet paper. In the past it was probably something like if we put toilet paper in the public bathrooms people will steal it. I think we are past the era of stealing toilet paper, so my theory on why there is still no toilet paper in public bathrooms is that people are disgusting.

You know when you walk into a stall and you find that half of the toilet paper is on the floor and there are crumpled pieces of paper scattered everywhere. I think they're trying to avoid that. I personally feel super grossed out when confronted with disheveled toilet paper, and I'd imagine that other people do too. There's no trust in nasty public toilet paper.

This is why people bring around packets of tissues when they go out. You bring your own toilet paper, that way you can trust your paper, and you're unlikely to be a messy asshole. In the event that you forget to bring a pack, pray that you do not need to number 2. Anyway, all this talk was to point out that in this mall bathroom, right outside the door is a tissue paper vending machine where you can scan the QR code and for a little bit of money, gain access to "the loo roll".

Societal shifts

Throughout my week in Shantou, one of my uncles would constantly tell me about how soon life in China is basically already better than life in the U.S. or Japan. I will say that quality of life in China has improved drastically since my parents emigrated in 1995, but as someone who has experienced living in all three, I'm nodding my head yes cause I don't want to make my uncle feel bad...but in my heart it's still a no. Anyway here are a few things I noticed about Chinese society.

Pursuit of trends

Streetwear

It's like wearing COMME des Garson.

China is very trendy, for better or for worse. You know how more recently the Chinese international student look has shifted from poor pHD student to rich hype beast?  I was sitting at a hotpot restaurant, looked down, and everyone was wearing Adidas ultra boosts. And these people aren't even that hype. They were my cousin and my uncle's friend's kids. You go to the mall and the predominant fashion for young people (from 50 to as young as 2) is street wear. Phone cases are Gucci, shoes are those chunky looking Balenciaga that look like you fused two shoes into one. And if you can't afford that you're wearing either counterfeit or a knockoff. Personally I don't really get the point. What's the point of getting expensive hype stuff when the person next to you is paying pennies on the dollar for Soupremes. 

Muji Copycat

This is the inside of a Muji Store (Power Plant Mall)

Muji is a pretty ubiquitous brand in Japan, it sells clothes, travel items, cosmetics, furniture, and is well known for it's stationary. I would say it has as much brand power as Uniqlo within Japan, and has a decent cult following in the U.S. among the designer types *waggle eyebrow*.

This is the Muji lookalike I found at the mall

I was walking around the same mall with the tissue pack dispenser where I found this Muji copycat. I was like, wait is this Muji? Except the logo was different. Except I literally own the same travel-sized shampoo bottle at home. It's not unlikely that the products are the same exact thing with a different logo slapped onto it. I mean many companies do their manufacturing in China, and these factories I suppose can sell to many different brands.

I feel like for a lot of things in China, rather than having their own innovative ideas, Chinese companies just copy what is doing well in the mainstream. This happens a lot in tech. 

Huawei MateBook X Pro review from my favorite tech youtuber Dave 2d.

One example the Huawei MateBook X Pro, it takes heavy inspiration from the Macbook Pro. 

And a broader example is apps. Because the great Firewall of China blocks many of the apps you and I use in daily life (here's a blog I wrote about it a few years ago), China has it's own unique app ecosystem. For Messenger there's Wechat (actually it's kind of creepy when I get a notification that it's running in the background despite me not have had open it), for Google there's Baidu, for Amazon there's Alibaba, for Uber there's Didi Chuxing. You can bet that for every tech giant in not China, China has something like it. These companies have a huge sandbox in China with a captive audience of at least one billion people. Capitalism, am I right?

The Line Bunny

The Line bunny casually hanging out outside the real estate office

So LINE is the messaging app that people use in Japan, I know some people who use Facebook Messenger, but the vast majority use LINE. The thing is, LINE is blocked in China like everything else on my smartphone. Yet, Cony, a LINE mascot has been everywhere in Shantou. Cony was in the claw machines, Cony was chilling out at the real estate office. This really felt like something being popular for the sake of being popular abroad. China has no cultural ties to Cony, the real estate company definitely didn't ask if they could use Cony as a mascot. Why can't you go design your own mascot.

Bonus picture. Kumamon, another Japanese mascot, chilling out in front a buffet resturant. 

Cleanliness

So...the parts of China I've been to, they are not clean places. Japan might have ruined me. Unlike Japan, China actually has trashcans everywhere. In Japan I carry my trash on me everywhere I go because there is a distinct lack of trashcans. In China, there are trashcans everywhere. But there's still a large amount of trash on the ground. Like you know those moments when you're so shook that you don't know what to do. I was going on a walk with one of my relatives, and when they finished drinking their juice pack, they just tossed it on the floor. I mean if we just kept going there would've been a trashcan in another minute, yet they it threw it on the floor. And I kept walking. Cause I was paralyzed.

And it's not like Chinese people are dirty all the time, it's just I've noticed this distinction between mine and not mine. People tend to treat public areas like shit, but you walk into their houses and you've got to switch to slippers cause otherwise you'll make the floor nasty.

Shoe shrink wrap machine at the real estate office.

One interesting intermediate I saw was at the real estate office for apartment condos by the beach. They had showrooms of these apartments you could buy from them and there were these cool machines that would shrink wrap some plastic onto your feet so you wouldn't make their floor nasty.

Anyway, there are people just spitting on the sidewalks, and children peeing behind signposts. I find that even new trendy drink shops tend to look on the rundown side because nothing public ever feels clean. People don't take care of what's not theirs.

Shrink wrapped utensils at the hotpot place we ate at.

One interesting example of this is bowls and utensils in restaurants. At the hotpot place our dishes came in shrink wrap. The restaurant does this to show us that it's clean. After they wash it, they shrink wrap it so you can be sure that no one has handled it with their grubby hands. But then, they bring over a tub of boiling water. Which after unwrapping our utensils, we wash it in the tub a second time. My aunt said that this is largely symbolic at this point, but you've got to wonder how deeply ingrained is this distrust of public items.

Here's a picture of the food at the hotpot place. It was only beef. We ate only beef. It was delicious.

Social Credit System

So the last thing I'm going to talk about is the social credit system. For those who haven't heard of it, the government is attempting to keep a tally on every Chinese citizen, assigning them a score depending on what they do or don't do. If your Social Credit is good, you can have advantages like lower interest rates or better access to public services. If your Social Credit is bad the Government can stop you from traveling by stopping you at immigration or high speed rail stations. This score isn't just based on data the Government has on you (like if you've been breaking laws), it's also based on data that private Chinese companies have on you (like maybe if you buy "items that good people wouldn't buy" from Alibaba). It sounds terribly dystopian, and if you want more information on it you should google it (unless you're reading this from China...which I'm not sure is possible? Since Blogger is owned by Google?) since I am not a subject expert. I have however a few stories of how it's changing China though.

Bike Sharing

Nice and clean share bikes.

So earlier I was talking about the widespread diffusion of share bikes in China. Because these bikes are dock-less you can basically put them anywhere and no one can stop you. A while back they were having problems with people abandoning bikes in rivers and lakes. Now these companies are looking to tie your bike share account to your Social Credit. Dump a bike into a lake, your Social Credit will drop.

Traffic safety

Being in a car in China feels dangerous, especially since I'm not used to it. Lanes are more like suggestions, people weave in and out of traffic frequently, and do not believe in pedestrian right of way. However, according to my grandma, it has gotten significantly better over the past couple years. She said that in the past if you were stuck in the crosswalk when the light turned red on you, you were just stuck. Grandma would stand in the middle of traffic as cars zoomed past her on either side because no one would let her finish crossing. She said that more recently cars will yield in similar scenarios. 

A traffic camera that we passed. Not too different looking from your average traffic camera.

I've noticed a decent amount of traffic police at intersections, supposedly they would call out bad behavior and your Social Credit would drop if you were found disobeying traffic laws. There are also a ton of traffic cameras along the freeway. And they are not discrete. When you zoom past them they will flash to let you know they've taken a photo. They can tell if you're speeding, if you're driving without a seat belt, and they will send you tickets based on your traffic violations. Get caught too many times and you'll get your license revoked. You can be sure that this is tied to your score.

No picture of the poor Social Credit monitor, but the map app alerts you of nearby cameras.

One part of the Social Credit system is that people with low Social Credit will get their photos posted in public areas, kind of like that thing people do with bad behaving dogs on the internet. This is probably to discourage you from doing bad things cause you'll lose face (by having your face everywhere). I thought that this had to be a joke, because it just sounds like something you would do if you wanted people to call your government evil, but lo and behold as we drove by a toll, there was a small monitor right outside of it with eight or so faces of people I'd assume have poor Social Credit. Not quite what I was expecting, I was imagining something more like a time square billboard. I wanted to take a picture of it but it was so fast that by the time I registered what it was, it was already too late. 

So my thoughts on the Social Credit system. Yeah I mean it sounds pretty fucked up. But from an on the ground standpoint I think partly it's just the government trying to stop people from being assholes. China has developed extremely fast for the past few decades, but some people need to do some catching up when it comes to social etiquette. Like please, I know the bathroom has a small line, but if your going to let your child pee in public, at least find something to hide behind.  

For offences like traffic violations and damaging public property I would say it's pretty black and white what is right or wrong. But it's on more grey issues like anti-government speech or cycles of poverty that result in poor Social Credit that make it unpalatable to my westernized self. 

Final Thoughts

I think that China is modernizing in a way that's different from how developed nations today have modernized. Partly it's due to the fact that it's growing up in a era with new technologies like big data and new trends like the sharing economy. 

The old district in Shantou, super lively due to spring festival events. Do you know there are 5 million people living in this city? Yet you've probably never heard of it before.

I think that Chinese citizens are very connected digitally, most people I saw were glued to their smartphones. There are an abundance of ways to interact with the physical world using your smartphone, QR codes being the obvious example, but also things like shaking your phone when a prompt appears on TV for a chance at getting digital Hong Bao (or red envelopes) filled with money.

Copy-paste condos, this picture is from when I went to Shanghai.

I think that it's full of stark contrasts. You see new multi-story condos getting copy pasted throughout the city, but at the same time you have old buildings falling apart also sprinkled throughout. You see the person head to toe in expensive expensive brand name clothes, and you see the auntie standing next to her rickety bike hawking vegetables. You can also see the sidewalk, which are meant for people, but instead parked from edge to edge with expensive luxury cars.

This is the China I see, cobbled together from my experiences over the past few years.

I'm not sure exactly what any of this means, and I'm not exactly sure where things are headed. But one thing that I am certain of, is that China is changing.

Bonus funny picture from when I went to Xiamen in 2017. The couples taking wedding photos outnumbered the rest of the beach go-ers.