I think it’s the whole high context / low context language dichotomy coming into play in the China conversation. The same goes for the “would” thing. And songs in English have weird, abstract lyrics, sometimes! I dunno if I’d accept that as vagueness. Hmmm.

2 things I think are pretty vague in Japanese are the ambiguous words ぜんぜん（全然） and やばい. They have perfectly opposite meanings in common usage. While you can easily figure out what meaning they are implying at any given time by looking at the context in which they are said, it is frustrating to have words that are their own connotative opposites. Ha ha.

Anyhoo – welcome to the blog and thanks for the comment!

Japan’s also taught me a whole new appreciation for the word ‘would,’ as in ‘what I would do in some hypothetical situation.’ In English there’s a clear difference between ‘I will go to China’ and ‘I would go to China (if I had the money)’ but there’s no such distinction in Japanese. So this conversation happens all the time:

Coworker: I will/would go to China.
Me: You’re going to China? Awesome! What will you do?
Coworker: ::looks at me very strangely:: I’m not going to China. We were just talking about what we’d do if we won the lottery.

I also see the present perfect tense in a whole new light because of Japanese. Can’t you think of a situation where it might be important to tell “It isn’t raining (now)” apart from “It hasn’t rained (recently)?” Certainly if I think they mean sense 1 and they meant sense 2 and I don’t take my umbrella, I may be surprised when I’m drenched to the bone the minute I walk out the door.

Kacie Landrum’s last blog post: Korea, Part 2

One thing is clear that Japanese tend not to speaking up everything what they actually think. Therefore even among Japanese it’s sometimes not easy to understand what other people think. (Or some people don’t feel the need to understand others, as they are always pretending to be good persons.) This thing is called 本音と建前(honne to tatemae) in Japanese. Off course this does exist everywhere in the world to some degree. For me or for some people, the thing is kind of cultural gap between people who have contact with outside world and who haven’t or a kind of generation gap. This thing often appears like Japanese are reserved or polite. But if the thing works negatively, it’s hard for foreigner (especially for westerner) to deal with it.

I hope my small talk helps you. Take care.

So you like the 復習? I do too. I just thought it would be fun to write another essay. I think it’s good practice and whatnot. But I found both of the examples for reading comprehension in the test interesting. This one about vagueness and the other one about the choice of whose name to use after marriage. By the way, your harmony idea makes a good deal of sense to me. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head to counter it.

The Japanese aren’t strange or vauge; they are obsessed with harmony.
So I think that the indirect answers are so set that they are practically idioms; everyone knows what you really mean, and they are therefore not vauge at all.
例文：
部下：今日は行かなくてもいいですか？
上司：それは難しい。。。。

The subordinate knows the answer is no, and it’s indirect, so harmony is mantained.

What confuses me is the one kid out of all my schools that doesn’t speak kindly to me or anyone. All the other students seem to think he is cool, instead of making him an outcast as one might predict. That is the only mysterious nihonjin I know.

外国人が見たNIPPON

There are set phrases like, “それはちょっと…” which people can take as being vague (not technically ‘yes’ or ‘no’), but I suppose that once you’ve become accustomed to the way things go, “それはちょっと…” is tantamount to “NO.”