See also previous post re: "Three Japanese Girls for President"

I recently found myself packed into an elevator with probably ten other people, among them several young Japanese women.

It was a very long elevator ride from the upper floors of a high-rise building, and about halfway down, one of the women said something in Japanese and all the others laughed, in this bizarre, shrill, little-girly giggle, and I said, oh my, that is clearly a learned, culturally-conditioned behavior.

I am now interested in how people from different cultures laugh. Sometimes, laughing is a fairly incontrollable response, but oftentimes there's an element of conscious choice and, perhaps, conscious modulation.

I mean, when we hurt ourselves very badly, we tend to make horrible, agonized noises that are probably fairly similar cross-culturally. But as for the slings and arrows of daily life, well, obviously the word "ouch" isn't some primal exclamation built into our genetic code; it's an Anglo-Saxon word we've all learned to say when prompted by pain.

Similarly, even "um" and "uh" -- words we almost never say deliberately -- are culturally learned. The French, in contrast, often fill gaps in their speech with this little gesture wherein they purse their lips and blow out an audible puff of air. I suppose this is slightly more articulate than saying "um."

In any case, Japanese women laugh like three-year-old fairy princesses.