blue and brown books

“Don’t pretend the people that you meet are any better than the people that you know.” - from Greg MacPherson’s “Buy A Ticket“

It’s hard to describe, but there’s a certain feeling of negativity I have when I come across other foreigners in Japan. This is a really touchy and complex subject that I’m very uncomfortable even thinking about, and don’t quite know how to articulate adequately, please do not take it lightly.

It is a mix of jealousy, embarrassment, anxiety, and responsibility.

This feeling might have something to do with the majority of foreigners I’ve come in to contact here and their blatant disregard for a kind of cultural sensitivity to Japan. ‘Cultural sensitivity’ doesn’t really describe it, more like lack of even a ’sliver of decency’. Most of the bad experiences involve foreigners are blatant tourists, or at least seem to have a ‘tourist’ mentality. If foreigners are settled in, or plan on being here for an extended period of time, it is an entirely different matter, but upon spotting one, regardless of knowing their context, I immediately assume the former.

The majority of males in particular are constantly and consistently obsessed with the very idea of the ‘asian woman’, so as to add to the upset of a disregard of cultural decency I have to tolerate the sexism and outright racism as well.
…
Coming in contact with people who are jerks reminds me that people in general back home are jerks. Which brings me to the complexity that perhaps this entire japan experience has been a bit of an escapist outlet from North American horeshit in general. That being said then, who is really the tourist? The drunken loud mouth with the camera? or the bookworm ‘gaijin‘ who wants to forget the bigger problems of his own life by fleeing his own culture to hide out in a foreign one?

Remember when you used to play with your younger sibling or a friend when you were a child and you decided that the toy they were playing with you wanted only because they were playing with it at that time? I would not be at all surprised if this incident of seeing foreigners on the train would be the ‘cultural’ equivalent.

This might seem a bit out of character for me, quite mean spirited and irrationally judgmental, and I think that’s why I’m so upset by it. That Japan is a place that is still very much isolated from ‘Western’ influence (either that or they have incorporated these ‘Western’ notions to their existing cultural intricacies) and it’s been an odd meta-selfishness in my being entirely taken with this country and its people.

Last night was my first time in a ‘gaijin’ bar, the kind of establishment that foreigners frequent in japan. Although the train-foreigner experiences have been consistently plaguing me, this post has really stems out of the foreigner-bar experience. Stepping in to this place was like stepping in to its equivalent back home. Shitty music, shitty food, and the shitty attitude of people wanting to get very drunk, and very laid. I abhor this kind of place back home, and to stumble upon its equivalent in my innocent Japan (har har) was more than unsettling and a bit traumatic.

Maybe my view of Japan, and Japanese mentality is too moralistic. In fact, I know it is. The point though should not be taken likely that Japan is more moralistic than the West. For more reasons that I’ll touch on later… Thinking about it more, perhaps the ‘honeymoon’ with Japan is over, so to speak. It may just be the case that I am getting used to the simple first impressions of this place, and I am only now seeing its more complex intricacies.

Japan is beautiful in so many ways. I knew that by coming here I would learn and see so many new and interesting things, but I didn’t think that I would learn so much about myself (whatever that means).

I just don’t ever want to be a fucking tourist.