Dear cozy little Lemmy World Japan Life community,

I made a random small self-observation recently and would be curious about y’all’s opinions. Where I’m from people casually talk about being super busy. A conversation can go like: “Hey, how are you doing?” “I’m fine, just drowning a bit in work. I have these 5 projects in parallel, 3 families to feed, and do some sports on top, but yeah, nothing exceptional”.

I don’t understand this as “bragging” in most cases, just a casual conversation item and most people really are super busy these days.

In Japan however, I noticed the dynamics around this are a bit different. I feel like I am quite busy here as well. But when I say something similar the conversation often becomes a bit awkward. For example, a friend recently asked me for a translation job as a favor. In a later conversation, I casually mentioned that I’m quite busy, so they felt bad for burdening me with even more work and directly addressed this (“I’m sorry that I asked for this, I can try to ask someone else” - “no, no, that’s fine! That translation is not so much work actually! In fact I enjoy it even!”. In my mind this was not really connected, but after saying it, there was this little awkward moment and I needed to do some conversational repair work. I had similar experiences with other friends, but now I thought that’s an interesting small cultural difference. Here, I feel people would rather appreciate and talk about how much other people do (as manifested e.g. in お疲れ様).

I know, it sounds a bit cliche (“Japan is so awesome, wow!!!”), but I was actually more curious if you had similar experiences/thoughts about this?