Like every nation, Japan has a segment of people from other countries living there, although at just 1.5% of the population or so, it’s a much lower number than most other parts of the world. Naturally, not every Japanese person is 100% happy about having foreigners disturbing the “wa” of society by doing things that are unexpected, and sometimes downright rude. There can be friction between foreigners, too: “lifer” types like me, who think living in Japan is great, don’t always get along with the small number of foreigners who are sometimes negative about the country they’re living in, which we’ll refer to here as baka-gaijin for the purpose of this post. And let me tell you, everything Japanese people don’t like about baka-gaijin, reasonable foreigners like me really don’t like about baka-gaijin. You can’t do anything around baka-gaijin. Can’t sit around your favorite beer vending machine talking to people who stroll by on summer evenings, cause ignorant-ass baka-gaijin are peeing behind the machine, causing the owner to cart it off in disgust. Can’t attend a Japanese wedding, because the other stupid gaijin that got invited brought a toaster instead of the $200 cash gift that Japanese manners require. (I was so embarrassed I paid his fee myself, and I didn’t even know him.) You want to hide your money from a baka-gaijin? Hide it in a Japanese textbook, cause baka-gaijin don’t study Japanese, even though they may live in the country for many years. And you know the worst thing, the worst thing about baka-gaijin? Thinking that the rules of society don’t apply to them just because they’re different, or because they don’t speak the language. Thinking they can ignore paying that traffic ticket they got, or that it’s okay to cut in line when waiting for the train, and so on. (Incidentally, if you consider yourself a sometimes baka-gaijin, we’ve got a cool T-shirt to link to…
I joke (with apologies to Chris Rock, whose monologue I’m parodying) about other foreigners who I encounter in Japan, of course, but sometimes I do get frustrated. Being American, I tend to associate with Americans, Canadians and various English speakers from Europe, but people from any country can violate the rules of what is polite or good sense when living in another country. I once met a gaijin who was playing in a band with other foreigners. Since he was a musician, I thought I’d recommend some of the JPOP bands that I liked and make a CD for him, so he could start to take an interest in the music of the country where he would be spending the next year (at least). He declined my offer, though, saying that Japanese music was “the worst thing in the world” even though he hadn’t tried to listen to it at all. There was another foreigner I knew who didn’t realize that some jokes that might be funny in English didn’t translate so well into Japanese. He made a pun about a girl we knew, essentially substituting the onomatopoeia pera pera (meaning “fluent at a foreign language”) with pero pero (roughly, the sound of licking), which resulted in an extremely rude insinuation about the region of the body that the girl liked to lick. A lot of the negativism I saw in other foreigners game from teachers in the JET program, a government program that hires native English speakers to teach in Japanese elementary and junior high schools around the country. JET teachers would often hang out only with other JETs, venting about some of the problems they encountered living in Japan to each other, which served to reinforce negative feelings and keep everyone from learning anything fun or useful about their host country. (This is partially why, in my overview of teaching ESL in Japan article, I say that if you’re going to do JET, take at least two years of Japanese and take the CIR path instead, facilitating understanding between the teachers and the Japanese side of things, learning the local language, building connections for the future, and so on.)
The Japanese study a lot of English, usually six years for most high school graduates, and up to ten years for college graduates. By and large, they’ve chosen to standardize on American English and spelling (e.g. “color” instead of “colour”). When a friend of mine went to Australia for a homestay, everyone at her new host family exclaimed “You talk like an American!” (which is funny, since most North Americans would not be aware of any “American” accent underneath the Japanese one). English is spoken all over the world, of course, and the Japanese do their best to cover other dialects of English — NHK, Japan’s version of the BBC, has alternate English conversation shows on TV, including lessons in the “down under” dialects. In one textbook a junior high school student of mine had, there was a story about a girl who went to study English in Australia. She was terrified when someone told her “It’s a good day today” because it sounded to her like they were saying “it’s a good day to die.” As they get out into the world and actually use English, I’m sure that most Japanese eventually learn there is no such thing as a true “baseline” version of the language, something I was reminded of in Baltimore, where many of my customers spoke dialects ranging from Georgian to New York to Bostonian and even the local Baltimorese (yes, there is an official dialect called that).
The San Diego Comic Convention is right around the corner. If you haven’t attended this massive comic book, SF film, animation and art convention then you really should — it will blow your mind, it’s so huge. We’ll be busy beavers tomorrow, setting up our display and preparing all our stock for the 100,000+ people who will be coming by. If you’re going to be at the show, make sure to head for the 100 aisle, also known as “anime alley.” For all those who can’t attend, we’ve got a little gift for you: free shipping (or half price shipping for international) on English dating-sim games while the show is on. This means it’s a great time to pick up a game or four, and save!
