kata4a:

kwarrtz:

I wonder where the anime trope of American transfer students being super physically intimate comes from, because in my experience American culture is almost neurotically touch-phobic, at least outside of certain specific circumstances. If you really want an excuse for a character to have no sense of personal space make them European instead.

this doesn’t exactly answer your question, but when I was looking up “american culture” in japanese a while back I found a lot of stuff about hugging in particular

Which is funny because I identified “skinship” as a particularly Japanese concern