This week for my RocketNews24 W.T.F. Japan article, I wrote about the top five hand gestures that Japanese people don’t understand.
One of my favorite parts about different cultures interacting is when a person from one culture does something that is perfectly normal to them but completely foreign to the other. And nowhere else is this more apparent than in body language.
When your face, legs, or especially hands start doing something that the person you’re talking to has never seen before, then suddenly you’re exploring new cultural frontier.
It’s happened to me personally several times, so I thought it would be fun to write about the ones that come up the most often. The #1 item on the list comes up all the time, and it’s something that we take for granted so much in English that it’s hard to explain. But that’s exactly what makes it so fun to use.
If people like this article then perhaps I’ll have to do the obvious sequel at some point: Japanese hand gestures that we don’t understand. We’ll see how it goes!
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