A few years ago a Japanese friend of mine told me that
Americans hug way more than Japanese people do. In fact, people don’t hug each
other much at all in Japan. I asked him why.
“It’s just creepy,” he said.
He must have been voicing the national sentiment, because in
the ~6 weeks that I’ve been here, I don’t think I’ve seen a single hug take
place. People do carry and sort-of hug very small children, but the adults seem
to have outgrown it. When friends see each other, they just wave. Even family
members don’t hug each other. Not even in the privacy of their own homes,
according to my sources.
One place you do see people hugging is on romantic dramas. In a
climactic scene where the couple has just declared their love and, in an
American drama, they would kiss, they instead enter into a long, awkwardly
stiff hug.
This, for example, is the final scene of a 11 episode
romantic comedy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hD_vFxMOLk
The actors seem like they haven’t hugged someone in a really
long time and aren’t sure if they’re supposed to hold their breath or not. They clearly need practice.
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