The Japanese word is gambate. It means, roughly, “Try with everything you have.” ABC missionary Kari Davidson says the expression is used “in just about any situation, from toilet training your kid to making a lovely swan from a small square of origami paper.”
Kari says the idea of “trying hard” is a cultural norm “so engrained that you stick out like a sore thumb if you’re not, say, a businessman who stays at the office for 12 to 16 hours a day or a mom who spends hours painstakingly making beautiful boxed lunches for her children.” She adds that there are both strong group expectations and a sense of personal perfectionism that are intense in almost every area of life.
“One of the most valuable things God has taught our little family is to keep right on laughing at ourselves,” she says. They may not be able to blend in with Japanese culture, but “there are ways to meaningfully relate to people who have been informed by radically different ideas about what’s ‘normal.'”