I gathered as much.
But if nobody had spoken out about that, tongue-in-cheek or not, just presenting the advice not to do it in Japan sounds like “It’s perfectly OK to do that in America, but don’t do it in Japan”.
No kidding. We Austrians usually include Germany when we need to compile a list of countries, but that includes some rounding up, as we would consider the North of Germany to be, Northern rather than Central.
The old Habsburg monarchy and some of the adjacent regions is a recognizable cultural unit, and in Austria that’s what we use as the definition of “Central Europe”. So, wherever the cities look “just like home” even though everyone might speak a different language. Which means that I’d include Zagreb, but exclude Hamburg.
But the truth is, of course, that there are multiple overlapping regional cultural influences on the European continent; several of these have been claimed to be the essence of “Central European”. At some point, Germany as a whole decided to be Central European, so that leads to a different definition. And Poland seems to have decided that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is what defines Central Europe.
Ok, a compromise: if the Germans get to include all of their country, I want to include our include our friends & neighbours from Slovenia, Trieste and Northern Croatia.
I wonder if that strengthened our identification with the term “Central Europe”; even in Cold War times, we thought of ourselves as Central Europe, we only almost forgot that Central Europe continued beyond our Eastern borders. Our post-war national anthem even includes a line about our country being “in the center of the continent”.
And in case we fail to agree on anything else: Central Europe is a region that includes neither the United States nor Japan and where shoes are taken off more frequently than in the US and less frequently than in Japan.
