Don’t make any mistake about it – if you ever decide to live in Japan for any significant length of time, you will encounter racism. It won’t necessarily be in your face, directly antagonistic, although many people do encounter that. More likely it will be in little things here are there. Direct confrontation is fairly rare, so often it comes out in other ways.

Someone might refuse to acknowledge you because you’re foreign. Perhaps even people you know will occasionally slip and you’ll realize that they don’t really consider you one of them. To be fair, most people I have met seem genuinely open and welcoming. However, there are always those who don’t appreciate having too many gaijin around, and they will make sure you know it as well. I can even attest to the fact that after living there for a while and embracing the language and customs, you may start to look down on other foreigners who bumble their way through Japan unintentionally or willfully ignorant of The Way Things Are Done.

Certainly racism is Japan is nothing like here in the U.S., and many short term visitors or residents may never really encounter any serious problems. Most anyone who has lived in Japan, however, can relate a few stories of ways in which they were treated as a lesser person for being non-Japanese, and it is a widely recognized problem.

The otaku who think that Japan is a wonderful fantasy land need to wake up (or get mugged in Tokyo). I’ve had people try to tell me that all of Japan is like Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka – and they’ve never even been here yet! I seriously want to punch the people who idealize Japan with Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons (although to be taken with a grain of salt there) and tell them to wake up.

During various parts of my life, I’ve been in Japan for more than the standard 2 weeks tourist deal and I’ve been to more places than most of the Japanese people I’ve met. There are tons of noticeable differences but there are also tons of similarities. Maybe I’m focused too much on human emotion and interaction, but very little makes me say “wow” because I’ve seen it back home in the US before. The town that I’m currently living in has very similar scenery and small-town dynamics as my town back home. The only huge eye-catching difference is kanji, but that’s to be expected.

But guess what? I some of the listed in the US as well, but it depends on the region, state, city, town, group, and individuals. It’s somewhat the same with Japan.

On the other hand, I’m Chinese American and when I taught in a couple of conversational school branches there, most of the students adored me, they accepted me as an American with an Asian face. Except for two people who refused to come to our school upon seeing me and talking to me, just about everyone who talked to me thinks I’m perfectly American, and yes, perfectly foreign, but acceptable. I got to visit one of my student’s home and he was gracious to me. And I didn’t even live in Tokyo, I lived in Fukuyama and Izumo, the former a small industrial city, and the latter a famous but really somewhat “hick” town without any industrial structures at all. The biggest employer and sometimes I wonder, the only employer there is the local power company.

Japan has a lot of social stigmas, rules and expectations and other restriction apply, probably more than most countries on this earth. Also they have many hypocrisies and unreasonable things or at least what we would see as unreasonable things (and dare I say, are indeed unreasonable), and they way they can accept and live with these and other things such as living with and completely accepting two absolutely conflicting views simply drove me crazy. But even the average Japanese these days are starting to voice out what they starting to realize are rights and wrongs and they’re starting to question themselves on accepting what’s clearly wrong to just about everyone else on earth. We are seeing some of that in anime these days.

Oh, and they need to treat women better and respect them more, specially when a lot of the women are so much more willing than the western ones to do what the men ask – that’s when men really should give them more respect for having to put up with men.

On the other hand, a lot of women in Japan just pretend to be nice but they really want to break out. That’s the other thing, the social stigma in Japan is just way too heavy for many if not most foreigners to bear – it wasn’t designed for foreigners in mind and even a lot of the average Japanese secretly hate it. That’s why a lot of younger Japanese who go to the US or Taiwan, where things are more relaxed they often look less artificially mannered – although in truth, these people are indeed more mannered on most things than a lot of us (obviously me included).

Being born and bred in the UK, I’m especially interested to experience a society that may be fairly similar to my own in some ways – both the British Isles and Japan are island states, both have an interesting history and a few other details but are not without their flaws. I’d love to know just how different – or similar – the two countries are, in both good ways and bad.

On of these days I’ll stop guessing and just book the damned plane tickets…

Well, then again, I see myself living in either Canada, Switzerland or Europe, probably Sweden. And it’s mostly out of necessity.