Look Over to the Other Side of Truth and Assumptions

If you have ever traveled to Japan or shipped stuff to Japan, or even better, just go on Google map and look closely at a random street in Japan, you will find that in Japan, many streets are unnamed.  And if you look a lot closer at the map, you will find that the blocks are identified with numbers.  Street names are mostly left blank except for maybe a couple of highways.

Living in Calgary, we always use street names, and I assumed that this is true for all people around the world.  However, this is not completely correct, as I figured out when I considered the way Japanese have and have had used to address their locations.

One interesting video that discusses and look at this instance of opposites that exist in the world is below:

You may ask, why would they use the block system? Well, here is an awesome answer by another youtube user:

The reason why they ended up adopting the block system was the during the feudal age, the military made roads and passages as complicated and twisted as possible to prevent the enemy from invading the main castle, and did not give street names as Roman tradition taught europeans. So during modernization they decided to use the block address system because cities were already in a complicated layout with non existent street names.

– GikoSan

Of course, the opposites in the world aren’t limited to the ones introduce in the video.  There are many interesting normal things that are actually the opposite of what we think they are.

Off the top of my head, some that I’ve noticed so far are:

• The colour of your blue shirt is not a blue shirt, because all the colours that the shirt absorbs are not blue.  The colour that is emitted or reflected from the shirt is blue because the shirt does not absorb blue.  Hence, the blue shirt is made of colours that aren’t blue.
• If you hit someone, you are actually hitting yourself as well.  Action = Reaction.  Another closely related example is that when you are walking forward, you are actually applying force backward.
• When you say you are cold, you are actually hotter than your surroundings.  You should really be saying your surrounding is cold and you are hot. And of course, vice verse.
• We have learned that nucleus of an atom is positively charged and the electrons are negatively charged.  In the world of anti-world full of anti-matter, the nucleus would be negatively charged while positrons orbit around it.

If you have any awesome Opposites that you notice in your life, please share it with us.

Hopefully these examples made you look at the world more objectively.