Americans Have Too Much Free Time?

Interesting cultural observation I made the other day while watching a Japanese TV show with Kuniko.

Before I describe the show, I have to make the usual disclaimers – I am not a native speaker of Japanese, I have lived in Japan just about seven years now, and am by no means an expert on Japanese culture/beliefs. I could be wrong in this case, and have been wrong in many other cases. Now, back to the story…

The show is called “世界おもしろ珍メダル第11回バカデミー大賞” in Japanese, and in English translates roughly to “11th Annual World’s Funny and Rare ‘Bacademy’ Award”. The play on words here is that “Baka” (馬鹿) means fool, stupid, and idiotic all rolled into one, and by combining it with “Academy” they make their point in two ways.

Anyway, the show is a lot like the old TV show “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, in that they show mainly videos that come from other countries that have captured people doing funny/stupid/idiotic stunts – some for promotion, some by chance being caught on video. It’s a funny show – I enjoyed the old “America’s Funniest” very much (if you cut out the host – sorry Bob!) and this is along the same lines. In between a series of videos they cut to a panel of actors/comedians/talents who talk among themselves about which videos were funny to them and why. More entertaining then a Bob Saget monologue, I’ll give them that.

But the interesting cultural point that got my attention was that the word that kept coming up among the hosts and with Kuniko was “hima” (暇) which means “not busy” which as you might imagine in hard-working Japan, doesn’t have a good connotation. “Hima” has the negative meaning of “bored” – but also the feeling like there should be something to do, and you (or someone else) should have figured that out by now.

So often when somebody did some crazy stunt, or kind of weird prank at work or at home, the hosts would be saying “hima” in describing these actions. It was if regular people in Japan shouldn’t/wouldn’t be doing these things, while in every video it seemed as if regular people (mostly Americans as it turned out) had too much time on their hands, and were avoiding work.

Of course, Japanese are famous around the world for the crazy things that happen on their game shows and entertainment shows, but the difference there is that they are professionals. Their job is to do crazy things, and it is perfectly reasonable to expect someone to strap bacon to their head and play chicken with a giant lizard because that is what they are paid to do.

These people on these videos were not working when they could have been, and that is why they were deemed “hima” – they should be working hard. There was a real sense that the hosts were getting some sort of pride out of watching these antics and knowing that regular Japanese people worked harder than these foreign folks.

The merits and demerits of working hard here in Japan is a topic best saved for another day, but it was very interesting to see how these people reacted to what most Americans would call being silly, blowing off steam, or just having a good time.