To be able to explain a bit of a culture difference I am going to have to use a personal experience. Since I am now living in Japan I see my own culture from a completely different perspective sometimes.

In Japan I was together with my school, visiting a day care, playing with kids between ages 4 and 6.  We were playing a ball game and all the children got divided up into two teams. This was no big surprise because believe it or not we do that in Sweden too.  What was a big surprise was what happened when the game started. In the group there were, as I said children of all sizes since they were different ages. And in every group there will always be children who want more attention and will do almost anything to get it. In this group there was a girl age 6, tall for her age and very loud. She continually snatched the ball from the other children and then threw hard shots at the others.  Since she was physically stronger than most of them and had pretty good aim as well, it hurt when they got hit. I reacted and turned to my classmates wondering if anybody was going to take the girl aside and talk to her about being careful with her friends and that the point of the game wasn’t to win but to have fun and build up good teamwork. That is what I have been taught in Sweden since I before I can remember. Teamwork, having fun instead of only focusing on winning and not hurting the people who are weaker are VERY central values in Sweden, even after school. All through life Swedes hold those values very close to heart and I believe that that makes Swedes very good citizens.

My classmates looked at me in a strange sort of way and didn’t understand what I meant at all. That is the way they played and they don’t really see anything wrong with that. That was a huge shock for me. And I almost immediately got filled with an anger at the people letting these small children be hit by hard balls like that… not giving everybody a chance to improve as a group, and that the weakest child in the group got kind of ignored was to me at first and maybe even still not understandable. I thought it was extremely unfair, but then another thought popped up in my head. “This is a different way of raising children” completely different from the way I was taught but not necessarily a wrong way of doing things. I am here in Japan to learn about other cultures and even though I may not always agree with their way of doing things, I still have to try to respect the difference. What I also realized more clearly than ever is that when you go to another country you initially think you are going to be experiencing another completely different culture, and that is true, but what is also true is that you experience your own culture as well. There is nobody forcing you to change the ways you do things, just because you see a  different way of doing it.

But from my personal experience of my own culture being questioned, you should at least try to observe that difference for a while, and try to understand why the people there are still doing it, then you can after that, choose to go back to the way you have always done it if you want to.