Life as a Japanese Major

Yeah, I know, it's been a while. Four months, in fact. I could give you some excuse, but instead I'll just tell you the truth.... I was busy. Deal.

Anyway, as I've mentioned, I'm a Japanese Major at my college. Judging from people's "HO SHIT!?" response when I tell them this, Japanese isn't exactly a common thing to major in. Shockingly, the world of Japanese (I'll include East Asian Studies too) is very different than the world of Business Majors or Math Majors or Psychology Majors. For one, if you choose to be a Japanese/East Asian Studies major, you have to be interested in Japanese/East Asian cultures or languages or whatever (this probably goes for most language majors).

For example, let's say you're Joe Schmo, living in Westchester and your parents are forcing you to go through college to get a degree in something. Are you going to pick the major that requires being fluent in a bunch of goofy symbols? Fuck no you aren't. You're going to pick Sociology or Documentary Studies or whatever bullshit major you can find. My point is that, everyone who is a Japanese major is at least somewhat interested in Japanese.

Before I continue, read this article about the "Resident Douchebags" in Japanese classes. This has been 100% true in practically every Japanese class I have taken in the past 5 years, from high school to college (except for the Japanese Night Class I took where it was just me and my friend). Although, I've noticed that in my college classes, the "Resident Douchebag" was female. Actually, it was the same girl because she was in my classes for two semesters in a row. I swear to god, if she's in my class next year, I'll flip shit.

This brings me to the second point: EVERY JAPANESE MAJOR HATES EVERY OTHER JAPANESE MAJOR. Well, that's not entirely true. But at my school, there's roughly 75-100 Japanese/East Asian Studies majors/minors. Within this, there's cliques of friends that hate everybody outside their group of friends. In fact, there's fucking WARS between groups of people here that have been going on since the beginning of time. I transferred into this school, so I don't know exactly why but, seriously, it's ridiculous.

The reason for this? Do you remember that kid in high school, who never really showered a lot, and wore Naruto sweatshirts, and didn't really talk to anybody besides his friends who all played World of Warcraft? Rougly half of Japanese majors are Anime Nerds like this. And Anime Nerds don't really know how to act properly social... especially the females. As a result, you get Bitch World War over here.

Luckily, I'm part of the small portion of Japanese majors who might have Nerdish Qualities, but we're not anti-social pieces of crap either. For one, we actually talk to the Japanese people on our campus as opposed to the Anime Nerds who get all of their ideas about Japan from Gundam.

This was probably a boring article, but hey, it's something. I could write so much more about the World of Japanese Majors, but I'll save it for another day.