The holidays of Christmas and New Year's are switched in relevence. In AMERICA Christmas is the most important, it is also a family holiday, whereas New Year's Eve is a boyfriend/girlfriend holiday. In JAPAN New Year's is the most important holiday that is spent with the family. Christmas is the night you spend with your significant other. Usually, couples will buy an exhorbitantly priced but very pretty Christmas Cake. It is treated as a normal day though, and foreign folk working in Japan do not get the day off work.
Most people already know that when you go to a Japanese home, you take off your shoes at the door and walk around in slippers or stocking feet, so as not to bring outside dust indoors. What is strange to me is this: even in homes with westernstyle toilets, you must take your slippers off at the bathroom door and step into a different pair of slippers, the hideous bathroom slippers. Bathroom slippers are often made of the same fabric or design as the fabric scheme of the bathroom. And then, of course, you take the hideous bathroom slippers off when you leave the bathroom and put the first pair of slippers back on.
Despite the fact that 7-11 came from America, the Japanese have pushed the convenience store through a marvelous transformation. Not just 7-11 of course, but skads of others. They are clean, sell a variety of ready-to-eat foods from sandwhiches to riceballs to curryboxe, as well as providing the magazines and batteries and emergency hairspray that could be needed at any moment.
Does the English language have a name for the people who cut your hair? Hair cutter? Hair stylist (but what if you dont get it styled, what if you just get it cut?)? Hair artist? The Japanese language does. What about a word for the place where you get your hair cut? Salon or barber shop? Most people where I live dont use either of these words. The Japanese language has that too.
Japan does not have soap operas. No, it really doesnt. They have dramas of the two types we have in America: daytime and evening. However, whereas American soap operas go on and on for years and years, never dying even when its clear they should, Japanese dramas last for an average of one season. Sometimes -rarely- two seasons.
For more insight, go to Dan in Japan's Observations