Have you felt sadness for your parents, friends or others? Sadness is a common feeling for all people and there is no cutoff line beyond which people feel no sadness anywhere in the world.
However, people who live or spend time in different countries, cultures and religions, feel and express sadness in different ways. People who live in two different cultures may come to express sadness in the two different ways of the two different cultures, as I have. I live in Japan 15 years and in New Zealand 3 years.
Emotions are very related to the number and depth of connections that people have with other people. Now I want to tell you about how Japanese feel and express sadness in several ways.
The feeling, sadness, has different intensities. Your sadness would be intense in a situation such as the feeling when your leg is cut off, or such as your mother is dead or people have died by terrorism.
The intensity of the feeling, sadness, could come whether people have a relation or not. For example, in New York the World Trade Center was destroyed last year. All Americans have deep sadness for it, that because they have a relation as Americans. So sadness for others, like in this situation, would create sympathetic feeling in mind. And also, you have a different feeling of sadness when your relatives are illness or dead. You may be upset you could die. So closer relation makes more sadness.
On the other hand when you have absolutely no relation to people your sadness may only be pity for them, just like watching a TV drama.
How Japanese feel and express sadness are very related to the old customs derived from the Samurai spirit. The Samurai spirit is the wisdom of the ancients, which tells how you should behave with great courtesy for others.
Five ways of the expressions of sadness:
1. To rub one’s nose
2. To sniff
3. To hang one’s head down.
4. To cry quietly and to not show crying face
5. To place fingers under the eyes, and touch skin.
To rub one’s nose and sniff is used when people are too shy to show off sadness. For example, the guy in the picture went on to the finals in the Atlanta Olympics and he lost the game. He endures expressing himself in front of heaps of people because Japanese are implanted with the rule that a man should always be proud and be a man.
To hang one’s head down is the same as to rub one’s nose. When a Japanese hang his head down with a quiet and stammering voice, it means that he feels down and gloomy with lassitude.
Most Japanese cry with quiet voices and suppress tears wherever they are. And also Japanese feel sad and cry when they feel happy. For example, in a marriage party people cry.
To place fingers just under the eyes is one of the Japanese expressions for sadness such as when people get angry or blamed. Young girls mostly use this action with sympathy for men and try to curry favor with the opposite sex.
