I lived in the continental US for my first six years of life, and always took my shoes off because my mother didn't want the floor to be dirty, and for the sake of comfort. Much time has passed since then, and I STILL take my shoes off mostly for comfort. If you want to ask "Why exactly do Japanese think this?" types of question, you should be asking why they think they are the only ones who don't fold socks on the table. I'm not any kind of Asian, but I had never imagined anybody folding ANY of their clothes on the table, so imagine my irritation when I read this(this is courtesy of J-List):
Quote:
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When I arrived in Japan, one of the concepts I had to get used to was joshiki (pronounced joe-sh'ki), a word meaning "common sense" which is quite important in a homogeneous country like this one. Joshiki is the list of things that every Japanese person knows unconsciously, but which are totally alien to foreigners since we didn't grow up here. In Japan it's joshiki that socks are never placed on the dining room table
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WTF?! Who even does that?! This is one of the few instances where I've been enraged by Japan(because they act like they are the only ones who do this, know this, or thinks that way).