ABSTRACT

I am Japanese but currently living in the North West of England. When I first came to the UK, I used to wonder why British girls wore unnecessarily tight fitting clothes. They appeared to me as if they had bought the wrong sizes. Now I get used to seeing that as the taste of British girls. Something ordinary for British people appeared so strange to me at the start of my stay here. The effect of humour, preference of colours, shapes, textures etc., are very hard to articulate or explain logically and are derived from our received cultures. They hugely affect our daily life and design activity. Since I came over to UK, I have always felt vaguely uncomfortable-as though I were wearing the wrong spectacles! Expressing subtle feelings was very difficult for me because of my different cultural background. ‘Although basic emotions, i.e. Joy, Distress, Anger, Fear, Surprise, Disgust, are universal and innate, emotional expressions are not like words, which differ from culture to culture; they are closer to breathing, which is just part of human nature’ (Evans 2001). Linguistic expressions of emotion vary from culture to culture, and it was interpretations of language that created my feelings of unease. For example, I knew the meaning of the expression “Oh my God!” I understood that a person was expressing astonishment, but it took time for me to sympathise with it because the word always trapped me into thinking ‘which god does the person mean?’