Ethnocentrism

When I was in middle school I happened upon an amazing show called Sailor Moon.  Laugh if you will but I can trace most of my interests today to my initial love of this cartoon.  Like all cartoon-network-marketed dubbed anime series it is a "gateway anime."  Much like research suggests that smoking majiruana leads individuals to do harder drugs, my personal observation suggest shows like Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z (perhaps Yu-gi-oh and Naruto are today's examples) open the way for people to find other, higher quality animes.  These will of course be subtitled, through which the cultural disconnects will become aparent.  This process had many results for me, one of them was that by the time I was in high school I was a fan of Japanese culture.

So naturally when I came into my Intercultural Communications class this semester I was excited to find the teacher was born and raised in Japan.  All the insights and interesting tales she will have!

To her credit, the stories are pretty good.  What I wasn't prepared for is the tone she tells them in.  She has been in America for years and is eger to tell you how completely she assimilated.  She could be a cheer leader "Up with individualism and down with confusionism, team low context go go go!"  When she uses words like terrible and makes generalizations about how everyone is unhappy I just want to raise my hand and be like "would you like to look at my notes from your first lecture about the negative effects of ethnocetrism on communications?"