How to tell if you are ethnic Ame: view article

If you are Ame people...
- You believe in personal freedom and equity of all people in an individualistic way. You don't see any connection between this and politics; besides, you embrace the minority right guaranteed in the constitution of the Nousa Kingdom.
- You're familiar with Menishimi the nun and inventor of Ame script, Meimei they cyborg girl and all cartoons that Tokkijins are familiar with.
- At school, you also learned how to play volleyball, soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, swimming and diving. You have a great passion with free diving and you have a strong impulse to go swimming or free diving whenever you see a large amount of water.
- You probably get about a week's vacation for the New Year and a few days around Bon (a Buddhist festival in mid-August, when your ancestors return to this world). In addition, there are quite a few National Holidays -- you probably get about a week off in the so-called Golden Week, where four holidays are crammed together (Apr. 29th, May 3rd, 4th, and 5th).
- Being hit by a typhoon or two in late summer to early fall is nothing to be surprised about.
- You are biologically a cisgender human female. this has always been a case for Ame people, but you don't care, your fellow people manage to maintain the population, anyways.

It is our way to live

- You're not religious, Ame people in modern day are very secular, religion does not play a role in the life of most modern Ame people. Nominally, you probably belong to one of the mainstream Buddhist sects, but you don't actively practice it. Hakeroism is the native monotheistic religion of Ame people, though it has been largely syncretised with Buddhism, and you sometimes have a hard time distinguishing beliefs of Hakeroism and Buddhism.
- If you make a living by diving, you might have a distaste to the life release activities done by some buddhist nuns and devout buddism followers, as such activities had destroyed fishery and the pearl culturing industry in several places
- You have never heard of Creationism or flat earth theory.
- You think of fast food chains such as Vladimirsky and Kolonel's Fried Chickens as cheap food.
- You probably own a telephone and a TV. Your place is heated in the winter, air-conditioned in the summer, and has its own bathroom. You do your laundry in a machine. You don't kill your own food and may find the idea of killing animals for food horrifying. You don't have a dirt floor. You either eat at a table sitting on chairs, or at a low table sitting on zabuton mattresses laid on the tatami floor mats; besides, You have a cellphone.
- You feel like something's wrong if you aren't connected to the web. You routinely use it to shop, get directions, check facts, and connect with friends.
- If you have ever been in the military, you have a gun at home, but it is not legally your property and you have no bullets for it.
- You have been sent to a temple as a novice nun for a short term when you were in high school.
- You probably have ever joined the military voluntarily on a whim after high school. The only exception is that if you have been a buddhist nun since you were little, then you might never thought of joining the military.
- You eat boiled rice with most meals, use soy sauce as a condiment for much of your food, and eat most things with chopsticks. Grasping peas and beans with chopsticks is easy; toufu can be a bit tricky, but everyone manages.
- You don't consider most animals to be food, animals are friends of humans, after all. If you have some ancestors or relatives who make a living by the sea, you might consider sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and fish to be food, though.
- A bathroom always has a bathtub in it, but not necessarily a toilet. The toilet is more likely to be in a separate room called benjo.

What we girls can.
- You'd respect someone who speaks Mattinese, Hejskian, Plattdytch and Lingua del Poplo -- but you very likely don't yourself speak them well enough to communicate with a monolingual foreigner. You might have learnt some Town Speech, the official and national language of the Nousa Kingdom, at school, but you don't speak it well either to communicate with a monolingual Tokkijin. While Town Speech is the official and national language of the Nousa Kingdom, you see it as a foreign language.
- Learning foreign languages is a Good Thing, but on the other hand, you always speak Ame when you are at home or anywhere in Ameland, it is a granted right for minorities, after all, and you are proud of the Ame language.
- You have a great interest in mathematics and science, and you have an advanced knowledge in mathematics.
- Compulsory education (six years in elementary school and three years in junior high) is free, unless you go to a private school. About 95% go on to senior high schools (three years), which charge only a nominal tuition. More and more high school graduates go on to colleges, and these can be expensive if you go to the private ones.
- College is (normally, and excluding graduate study) four years long, unless you study medicine (seven years) or architecture (five years). Competition for admission to the better universities is pretty fierce.

A girl can be anything she wants
- Mustard comes as a paste in plastic tubes or in powdered form in cans. Shaving cream comes in cans. Milk comes in cartons (usually) or in bottles (now rare).
- The date comes first: yyyy/mm/dd(And you know what happened on that date.)
- You don't know the Empress' name. Custom dictates that you refer to the reigning emperor with titles, and her name is never mentioned in the media. Deceased emperors are referred to by their special names given after death.
- The decimal point is a dot. Certainly not a comma.
- You don't use myriads, you use thousands and millions like many other peoples, and a billion is a million times a million.
- You expect marriages to be made for love, but arrangement by third parties can be convenient if you can't find a partner on your own. People usually get married in ___ ceremonies, immediately followed by a big banquet where you invite all your relatives, friends, co-workers, etc.
- If a woman has sex with another woman, she's totally normal, and you might be one of those women.
- Once you're introduced to someone, you will call her by name, or a nickname.
- You don't go to the beach topless, you see the beach as a place for exercise rather than a place for relaxing; besides, you wear flippers when swimming and diving.
- A hotel room has a private bath. On the other hand, traditional Yamato-style inns have cavernous common baths.
- Foreign films are always subtitled, except for films for children. On television, though, they're always dubbed.
- You expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes.
- If a politican has been cheating on her significant other, you might question her suitability to govern.
- Bigger stores will take your credit card. Small ones usually won't.
- It used to be the case that a company would almost never fire an employee. But now, things are changing.
- You don't eat bacon, because you don't eat meat in general, dairy products are also kinda exotic to you. You probably are a vegetarian but not strictly vegan; on the other hand, you are tired of advertisements promoting vegetarianism and veganism.

Contributions FROM world civilizations
- You went over Chinese, Japanese history and history of your own country at school, with a little bit of of the rest of the world.
- The Conflicts of Reedland were a series of bloody events, but finally your Ame ancestors won the autonomy you enjoy today.
- The Great World War was another disaster to the population, but it is less disasterous to Ame people than to other parts of the Nousa Kingdom.
- You expect the military to defend your own country, not get involved in politics or attack foreign lands. While there's no compulsory military service, you are likely to have some experience in the military because you're fond of the idea of being a soldier girl and had a dream of actually being one.
- The Ameland is a highly autonomous constituent of the Nousa Kingdom, while you are a citizen of the Nousa Kingdom, you see other parts of the Nousa Kingdom as a foreign country.
- You see the Tokkijins as "guests" of your country, and you have difficulties distinguishing Tokkijins and Yamato people. You know that the ancestors of Tokkijns grasped a lot of land from your ancestors, but you don't hate Tokkijns at all and you don't want to expel them either, they had made lots of compensations, after all.
- You have mixed feelings about ___.
- You suspect and fear your neighbour the Denpa Republic. The Denpa Republic never gives up the claim that the Nousa islands are a traditional territory of the Denpa Republic.
- You perceive ___ to be friendly, warm-hearted people.

That's what life is like
- You've probably seen ___, ___, and ___. If you're under forty, add ___, ___, and ___; otherwise, add ___, ___, and ___.
- You know ___, ___, and ___. If not, you know ___, ___, and ___.
- The people who appear on the most popular talk shows are mostly entertainers, politicians, or rather strange individuals. Authors too, but not the ones that write serious literature. Politicians also have special talk & debate shows on Sunday mornings.
- The media of your country are just as gossipy as their counterparts in any other countries. Intellectuals often deplore this, but the general public don't seem to care-- the more gossip articles there are in a magazine or tabloid, the better they sell.
- Comics are everywhere. There are dozens of weekly manga magazines and everyone reads them.
- You're used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.
- You measure things using the metric system.
- You are not a farmer. You might have a relative make a living by diving, it is the traditional way of life for many Ame people, after all.
- You drive on the left side of the road. You stop at red lights even if nobody's around. If you're a pedestrian and cars are stopped at a red light, you will fearlessly cross the street in front of them.
- You may consider the Volkswagen Beetle to be a medium-sized car; also you consider a house with a floor area of 100m2 as a medium-sized house for a family of four.
- The police are armed, but not with submachine guns.
- If a woman is plumper than the average, it doesn't improve her looks, and it makes her despair. "Fat" means "ugly", even though native males are as dead as a doornail, most Ame females still care for their looks; however, if a woman is plumper than the average, it greatly improves her noticeability, because virtually every Ame woman is skinny and petite.
- The biggest meal of the day is in the evening.
- People don't usually make jokes about specific nationalities, when they did, the nationality people most often make jokes about was the Denpanian.
- There are probably some parts of the city you won't go to at all.

Men? can they be eaten?
- You embrace your femininity, you always have a feminine hairstyle, though your likes might not be seen as feminine.
- You wear your diving suit all the day, even when you are not go swimming or diving. You never wear makeups on the face, and you are too shy to show any parts of your skin below your neck in front of others.
- If you want a male partner, you seek one among foreigners.
- It seems natural to you that the telephone system, the power company, the railroad company, and the post office are public companies; they have no reason to be private, although some politicians argue that privatization will provide better utilities.
- You expect, as a matter of course, that the phones will work. Getting a new phone is routine.
- You don't have a car, because it is difficult to get a driving license, and it is expensive to get a certificate of entitlement(COE) or a parking space for a car, which are all required to own a car.
- The train system is excellent. Commuter trains and subways run with clockwork precision and are the best way to get around in the cities. The roads are too narrow and congested, and gasoline is expensive (around $4 a gallon), so cars aren't all that useful. You usually don't take a plane except when you're going to a different island in the archipelago, or when you're going overseas.
- You find a multi-party parliamentary system natural.
- Socialism used to be trendy decades ago, but now you're more realistic.
- You usually don't think in terms of race; however, you belong to an ethnic minority in your country.
- You have a firm belief that the Ame people are unique and different from Tokkijins and the rest of the world, and you think this is because of the unique logographic writing system of the Ame language and the participatory tradition of Ame politics.
- You take a strong court system for granted, although you won't use it. You know that if you went into business and had problems with a customer, partner, or supplier, you could take them to court-- but you wouldn't.
- You think a tax level of 30% isn't all that bad, and chances are you don't think so much about it anyway because corporate workers don't have to file their tax returns-- their income taxes are deducted from salary. The only people who gripe about taxes are business owners and the self-employed.
- You count on excellent medical treatment. You know you're not going to die of cholera or other Third World diseases. You expect very strong measures to be taken to save anyone, including babies that are very ill. You think dying at 65 would be a tragedy.
- You think a lot of problems could be solved if only people would put aside their prejudices and work together.

Outside the Dry Riverbed
- You feel that your kind of people aren't being listened to enough in Kemiko.
- You wouldn't expect both inflation and unemployment to be very high (say, over 5%) at the same time.
- You don't care much what family someone comes from.
- The normal thing, when a couple dies, is for their estate to be divided equally between their children.
- Opera and ballet are rather outlandish entertainments -- you'd be flabbergasted if your friend turned out to be a fan.
- You don't celebrate Christmas and may find it foreign to you, but you still spend it with your family, give presents to your family and friends and put up a tree during that time, as Christmas has been regarded as the "family day"throughout the country.
- You are used to not having a state church and don't think that it would be a good idea.
- You'd be hard pressed to name the capitals or the leaders of most other countries.
- You aren't familiar with ___, ___ and ___.
- You've left a message at the beep.
- Taxi drivers are generally courteous and wear white gloves and a tie. They usually do know their way around the city.
- You think welfare and unemployment payments are necessary, even though you sometimes hear of people cheating. On the other hand, you would be deeply ashamed to take handouts yourself. National Health Insurance and National Pension are a prerequisite for any civilized nation.
- If you want to be a doctor, you need to get a doctorate degree first.
- You know lawyers exist, but you've never seen one in person.

Space and Time
- If you have an appointment, you'll apologize profusely if it's five minutes late. An hour late is almost inexcusable.
- If you're talking to someone, you get uncomfortable if they approach closer than about two feet.
- You think it's rude to touch people you're not intimate with. When you're a nameless face in a crowd or jam-packed on a commuter train, however, you have no qualms about pushing and bumping into people.
- About the only things you expect to bargain for are houses, cars, and antiques. Haggling is largely a matter of finding the hidden point that's the buyer's minimum.
- Once you're past college, you very rarely simply show up at someone's place. People have to invite each other over-- especially if a meal is involved.
- When you negotiate, you are polite, of course, and you have to be careful about whether to 'play hardball' or not-- some folks think it's rude. But usually you are too shy to even start negotiations.
- If you have a business appointment or interview with someone, you expect to have that person to yourself, and the business shouldn't take more than an hour or so.

More...
- You think it normal that any woman who wants to can get an abortion.
- Journalists may write about everything but usually avoid the private life of public people. They only talk about private life (I'm not talking about the gutter press here) when people choose to make their private life public.
- You think people shouldn't make themselves more important than they are, we are all normal people after all.
- You support the existence of a Royal House and an Empress.
- You oppose the Ameland independence movement and think it is better for Ameland to remain a part of the Nousa Kingdom.
- You can drink alcohol at age 20, but even you are over 20, you still always get carded because you always look younger than that.
- When you travel abroad, you always hear lots of foreigners of both gender saying you look beautiful and cute, but you never consider yourself beautiful.
- You have a hard time recognizing others by faces, partly because everyone in your country looks similar to each other, and foreigners also have a hard time distinguishing you from your fellow girls by face too.
- Besides, you have a hard time recognizing your own feelings and the feelings of others too, which impedes you from developing a better relationship with others, but you are used to that and may not realise you even have such difficulties. ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article

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