JAPUNDIT reader Daniel Mick points us to a couple of reports on “Paris Syndrome,” the name of an ailment suffered by some Japanese tourists who are shocked senseless when they discover that the City of Love is filled with rude French people.
Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported Sunday.
“A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses,” Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.
Already this year, Japan’s embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors — including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.
Previous cases include a man convinced he was the French “Sun King,” Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being attacked with microwaves, the paper cited Japanese embassy official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.
The cause of Paris Syndrome seems to lie in the disappointment experienced by (mostly women) tourists from Japan who simply cannot handle the fact that the realities of Paris are so totally out of sync with what they expected.
The Japanese have long had a love affair with Paris, nurtured by dreams of sophisticated manners coupled with physical elegance, exquisite food and lots of Louis Vuitton handbags. Most of the 28,000 Japanese residents of France live in the capital, which is visited every year by millions more.
What they find though is not always what they had been led to expect. “Often the people I show around are extremely disappointed,” said Akira Hasegawa, a Japanese tour guide who has been working in France for 15 years.
“They think Parisians are going to be clean and polite and friendly – and it’s the exact opposite. What they want is the old France – full of people like Jean Gabin and Alain Delon – but it’s not like that at all. You British have the same experience, no?” he says.
Nearly all of the victims of Paris syndrome are women, who tend to be more besotted with the city’s romantic image than men.
Daniel offers us his own views on this phenomenon based on what he experienced while living in India.
The broad naivety of many Japanese for most anything outside of Japan continually baffles me and often irks me. But it’s a crying shame that such positive traits that the Japanese hold dear, like trust, politeness, and congeniality, are the source of ridicule and exploitation when the Japanese travel in other countries.
Before coming to Japan, I lived in India for 6 months doing volunteer work and traveling. Indians tend to be the most friendly people I’ve ever met. But Indian beggars and touts are notoriously vicious. All of my friends who were beggars and touts noted that Japanese tourists, naive to the point of danger, were by far the easiest marks. Some of them even pitied the Japanese for being so oblivious.
Why is this so? I can understand slight shock that other places aren’t the same as your home environment. But Japan is a modern nation with modern education. How are so many Japanese so blindly ignorant about the rest of the world? Anyone who has lived in Japan has quite a few good stories of laughable beliefs about other countries they’ve encountered in Japanese people. What is it about Japanese culture and/or education that causes this?
I saw this and read it and thought it was hysterical. You beat me to posting it!
But actually, I think there is a lot of truth to the article. I’ve seen Japanese people come to New York and fall in love with it, and seen others go off absolutely shocked by how the reality was a different than the way it is protrayed in the the movies.
The same is true with visits to Paris. I met one couple who booked a room at the Paris Ritz . . . and literally never left. That was their Paris experience. The hotel.
I guess for people like that, Japanese theme parks and “themed shopping centers” are better than a trip to the real place!
YEah I read this also and my first reaction was “huh?” you mean people seriously need to go to treatment for this?
That was quite suprising. But I suppose if you’ve spent sometimes as much as a hundred thousand yen to a destination of your dream with high expectations only to see your dreams collaps in a storm of French B.S., then yeah ok I can see someone getting pissed.
It was noted elsewhere but I think its true. France is wasted on the French…
France is wasted on the French…
I’m sure the French themselves don’t think so… at least the white ones anyway…
I had similar experience in Paris too, but I came prepared, so they simply “met my expectations”. However, I found the French girls A LOT friendlier than the French men!
Go look at Craigslist for Paris, ‘women seeking men’. You’ll find all sorts of these naive tarts about, looking to hook up with French men for their first cultural experience. Most are American, and I dare say a few probably are not as naive as the typical Japanese and are looking for a real hip locking and not “l’amour francais”, but after a few dedicated B+ to A years of high school French or a year or two in college with little experience in country, what more can be expected? I’ve run into a few of these ladies back in the states, after a month or two abroad they come back being somewhat cynical but thoroughly educated and generally dumping the idea of studying French ever again.
Paree let you down?…..well there’s alway’s Algiers - you’ll luv it there..the locals parle a bit of francais as well - (one tip don’t mention the war).
I treat French the same way I treat Koreans: praise the hell out of them (oseji, in Japanese), telling them what a nice country they have, how ashamed you are that anyone could think that the Japanse invented Kimchee when it was of course invented by the great Koreans, etc. You kill them with praise and hopefully they won’t horck in your food.
I always find these stories strange. When I lived in France, both in Paris and the countryside near Rouen, I loved it there, never encountered any of these stereotypes, but maybe because I spoke the language…. this legendary French rudeness I never saw it once……but then I was young and in love…..go figure!
danny! danny! - in love and on the road to Rouen…ha!ha! - just as i said about the two of hearts..(yes mate.. I “figured”):roll:
on the road to Rouen…..it never ends!:smile:
That one’s particularly de-Gaulling though.
i marseille your very quick today overoften…
Yes, I normally have nothing but d’Estaing for comments that don’t Boulogne, but I’m feeling very French today, in that I can’t resist.
and i’m guillotine rather quesy looking at these pinks (blauugghh)
Don’t bezique. It’d be a shame Toulouse your lunch.
maybe i’m getting calais-ed away and diverting from the central theme which is the Paris Syndrome.
I have experienced it’s East Asian equivalent - the Tokyo Syndrome..that is..no matter how hard you try to communicate in nihongo with them.. they just ignore it and burst into the most awful,mind bending japlish..(incroyable !!).
remora in “Brings comments thread back on topic” SHOCKER!
Come and see for youself if you think I’m Avignon. (:oops:)
you can always breton overoften to come with something astute…
(hey i almost punned my own name) or was i just pauling my own leg…with bells on…
it’s gitane late - i must go ..au revoir!
thanks for the bon mots overoften et.al.
(lets try Finland tomorrow - thats a lot harder to pun)
:wink:bye bye.
Are you Crécy?! You can’t leave now!
sorry to renault on you old chum…I’m sure you understand.
the road to Rouen
That really is funny. A shame it was missed by Crosby and Hope.
Hating to follow the puns, but I agree with Danny. I even found the French waiters to be very friendly on my last trip. I had my heart broken by a Swede whose brother turned out to be her husband, or the other way round…I forget. I wandered through Pigalle, through a gamut of some very forward elderly tranvestite streetwalkers, through a near fistfight with some aggressive Persian touts, and finally to a bar where I could get drunk. I hated Paris, and was only too eager to leave the dump. But the French themselves were mostly very nice.
I flew off to Hamburg where (dare I say?) I found a bit more to bite into.
Ah, thank goodness the punny people have returned to Japundit.
I’m actually with you, Danny. I spoke French when I lived there and really didn’t have any problems. Most people I met were wonderful, and since I didn’t have tremendous expectations–just tried to take the culture as it came–I wasn’t disappointed.
I had some adjusting to do when I came back to the States, but that is usually the case with me after a long foreign visit. I remember standing in Long’s Drugstore trying to decide which bottle of shampoo to buy because there were so many more choices than in France. That may have changed by now, though.
[…] JAPAN - Paris Syndrome ““Paris Syndrome,” the name of an ailment suffered by some Japanese tourists who are shocked senseless when they discover that the City of Love is filled with rude French people.” […]
I have always found this topic fascinating. Why does everyone from a 1st world country think their country sucks and paradise can be found everywhere but home?
Are you a Caucasian American loser with no chance of having a girlfriend? Then Japan is paradise for you!
If these expats aren’t able to take the bad with the good in Paris, then maybe they weren’t happy people to begin with. Most North American expats who “go native” in Asia spend year 2 and on bitching about the country they moved to. I’m always baffled by this. I want to ask, then why are you there?
I also noticed there are often similarities between who loves what foreign country. Dorky white Americans LOVE Japan. Asians LOVE Europe (especially France).
Just today I sent my friend (Chinese-American) an article about the firebombing currently going on in Paris, and she responded, “You can’t make me not love Paris.”
Wow, that sure is a lot of exaggerations and stereotypes to dump into one comment.
I’m not sure that the subject here is what you profess it to be. The subject is how (predominantly) Japanese tourists are to a greater or lesser extent naive about what awaits them in their tourist destination, and how their own society has ill-prepared them for the realities of ‘the rest of the world’.
As for your own comments Vin, just because someone expresses a liking for a country, this doesn’t necessarily exclude the love of their own. It’s usually others’ perceptions that one must be better than the other. From my own experience, of course I compare Japan with my home country, but that comparison doesn’t become a value judgment. They’re just different.
I also find it amusing that the internet is littered with comments, usually from Americans, who criticise their compatriots for trying out life in Japan. If they’d moved to Spain, or Brazil, or Australia, it’d be said they’re broadening their horizons. But move to Japan, and you’re a fanboy, or a pervert, or you’re running away from something. Might be true, might not. But it’s probably true of any other country too. But only Japan seems to be singled out.
As for bitching about the country you live in, be it Japan, the US or wherever… Wouldn’t we all go mad if we didn’t? I find that the non-Japanese in Japan who bitch the most (and often unreasonably) are those who plan only a short-term stay. Sorry to say that I have found those on the JET program to be among the most negative, for whatever reasons, be it the job, the language, the one eye constantly on “going home”. Those with a determination to make a life here tend not to bitch so much.
This Paris Syndrome reminds me of what I call, the “Hollywood Movie Syndrome.” Aren’t there a lot of people all over the world who are afflicted by the Hollywood Movie Syndrome?
[…] Just as manga attracts Japanese tourists to France, it also attracts French visitors to Japan. But is there a reverse version of Paris Syndrome? […]