Cul­tural shock always inter­ests me— assum­ing I’m not the one expe­ri­enc­ing it xD

Expe­ri­enc­ing the dif­fer­ent man­ner­isms of far­away cul­tures can be bewil­der­ing, espe­cially when one has no clue how to inter­pret or respond to what is obvi­ously an extremely seri­ous ges­ture. Ikoku Meiro comes as one of the only anime I’ve seen which shows this in full impact, as Yune’s per­fectly pos­tured Dogeza left Claude com­pletely off bal­ance and, in his case, utterly out­raged. It’s not really sur­pris­ing either— the Dogeza, or any form of pros­tra­tions that’s so deeply set into tra­di­tional Asian man­ner­isms, had always been mis­un­der­stood by west­ern­ers not accom­mo­dated to the cul­ture. Read the rest of this entry »