Stereotypes for Japan! True or false?

As I've been living in the US almost two years, I found a lot of stereotypes for Japanese people by communicating with people from all over the world.

Today, I'm going to write about if those stereotypes are true or false!

The first stereotype is that Japanese people love anime. 

Japan is well known for anime so you might expect that Japanese people are familiar to anime. However, it's not true. Including me, there are so many people who are not familiar with anime. 

http://instudy.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/anime.jpg

The second one is that Japanese people are hard-working. I think it depends on people of course. Sometimes, people have this stereotype from how Japanese people work in company. There are some different ways to see this fact, but I think this is because there is the idea that working super hard is beautiful. This idea has been changing, but there are still many people who think in this way. 

As many people know, there is a word "Karoshi" which means deaths from overwork. This includes people killed themselves because of overwork so Japanese suicide rate is the highest in the world, which is really sad.

http://dol.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/a/7/670m/img_a7186396a79681c9511c86205d638f5b660119.jpg

The last one is that Japanese people are really polite. This also depends on people. As people from other countries say, Japanese culture have tons of rules to be polite. For example, there are more than 30 rules only for using chopsticks. Also, we use really complex honorific language to respect people. From this point of view, Japanese people might be polite.

http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/autobahn139/imgs/1/f/1f25a0ab.jpg

However, since I came here, I thought American people are also really polite. At the same time, I thought Japanese politeness and American politeness is a little different. American politeness includes friendliness. On the other hand, Japanese people try to make a distance to respect people. From this experience, I started to think that people from all countries are polite, but the type of politeness is pretty different. Isn't it really interesting?

I hope you enjoyed this topic!

Have a great weekend:)

Misaki.O