D39: The Gaijin Dilemma...

I ran across an interesting posting on another blog that I couldn't help but share the premise of. It's the dilemma that foreigners living in Japan face when they see other foreigners. Normally you'd think that when there's only 1 foreigner for every 10,000 Japanese, we'd stick together. And in some ways that is true. But when you've lived in Japan for a while, something strange starts to happen. It starts to become uncool to acknowledge other foreigners. I was recently discussing this with a friend of mine who married the Japanese woman he fell in love with during his 5 years there. He acknowledged that when he was living in the city, it wasn't cool to say hi to other foreigners on the street. Because Japanese people naturally expected you to say hi to them, somehow it was pleasurable to go against the grain and not do so. Reading through the post, I had to remember that curious dilemma I felt during my time there. I lived on an island with 160,000 people and only about 25 of them were foreigners. 16 of them were fellow English teachers that I knew. The rest were missionaries or people in business I had no contact with. I was close friends with many of the teachers. Because we were on a small island, we'd all often make excursions into Kobe and Osaka on weekends for a taste of big city life. It was there that the gaijin dilemma really kicked in. When you're alone, wandering a big city and no one looks like you, it's natural to feel a surge of excitement when you see another foreigner. But after you've lived there a while, your mind tells you that you probably have nothing in common with them besides being a foreigner, that they may not speak English, that they might be tourists and ask you to explain things that they'd never understand without having lived there, etc., etc.

Another commenter at the end of this blog posting actually made me laugh by mentioning that sometimes we don't acknowledge other foreigners because they are invading our turf! When you're the only foreigner in your town, you feel a bit like a celebrity. So your 'specialness' can be a bit threatened by other foreigners. Bizarre, isn't it? Have a look at this post and tell me what you think...


http://anenglishmaninosaka.blogspot.com/2006/06/gaijin-dilemma.html