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by kadoban
1377 days ago
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I have noticed, anecdotally, that the non-religious tend to be more superstitious, but no that's not really what I mean. Japan just has a lot of rituals that people do daily and ~seasonally, and they tend to be well attended. The few people I've talked to about it didn't seem to have some superstitious or religious reason to do them, it's just a thing to do. |
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We have the same thing in western societies, it just isn't often as homogeneous. Taking the USA for example we don't call them rituals, they're just "how we do things" and the like.
Honestly I find it similar to the formal system of addressing people in Japanese and other languages with lots of words or modifiers for expressing your relationship to another person. We do the same thing in English, just less formally and with more variation among groups and regions. For example even if I am familiar enough to address my boss by first name I wouldn't address them a nickname: shortening names or nicknames tend to flow down or across the hierarchy in English, rarely up. The exceptions themselves are usually expressions of an extremely close relationship. Obviously this doesn't apply to people who are so far removed from the speaker that it isn't a relationship at all... that's another unwritten informal rule: if we grunts have a nickname for the CEO it would be extremely rude to use it in a meeting where the CEO is present, even if not addressing them directly.