On being a western man in Japan
Being a foreigner in Japan (especially a white, European, male foreigner) usually means at least one of the following things:
- You are a massive anime/videogame nerd.
- You are an English teacher.
- You are desperate for a(ny) Japanese girlfriend you can find.
Fortunately, I’m none of those, and that being the case, I have to constantly justify my decision to come here to a surprising number of people. The Japanese are a strange race. They will happily accept that you travelled 6,000 miles from your home to get some action, or to get your hands on original Pokémon merchandise, but when you tell them you are here to further your career prospects and to try and master the language, you are usually greeted with an odd silence.
The distinction is perhaps borne out of the educative process in Japan, where you live for the day you get into university, after which you are either made or ruined for life. University for Japanese is a social affair, as important for its networking as it is for its pursuits of academic excellence. And so perhaps that is why the Japanese I speak to fail to grasp the idea that I’m here to work. Not to prey on drunken Japanese girls in bars, not to shop for mildly paedophiliac game or anime related merchandise. Those assumptions are borne out of fact at least, the expectation is that I am like all the other foreigners they see - people here for those exact reasons.
スナック バー？
This is a country far less prudish than England about sex. You’ll find rape porn and Disney classics sharing the same shelf space, and you’ll wander down an otherwise typical market street only to be cajoled into a hostess bar (if it happens to be one of the few which will permit foreigners on the premises) where you pay through the nose for the flirtatious company of a girl whose ethnicity decides the price scale on which you can expect to pay for her ‘services’ (Thai and Chinese girls are bargain basement, Eastern Europeans are middle of the road. It’s with the Japanese and western girls where the real money ). They never claim to be offering sex as a service, but you can be sure that it happens, and that people frequent these places with that understanding.
This behind closed doors extroverted sexual behaviour is again probably due to the otherwise stunted nature of Japanese relationships. Holding hands is about as far as you’d ever go to show your affection in public.
Anyway, until next time, from the sexually perverse south of Japan - またね。
