I’ve learned a few things during my time in Japan, including dozens of ways to use mayonnaise as well as “never click on Hetalia fanart unless you know what the content is ahead of time.” I’ve also come up with what I call Peter’s Outsider Principle, which states that people from a certain country may tend to take that country for granted and feel less passionate about it than “outsiders” (which is what the term gaijin actually means) who came from some other place. Whenever the sakura bloom in Japan I bug my Japanese wife to do hanami flower viewing with me, but she whines about how cold it is outside, and who wants to sit on a blanket with drunk salarymen all around you, and what’s so special about cherry blossoms anyway? I face a similar challenge whenever I get the urge to visit Kyoto and try to get her to come along — while I’d gladly spend weeks exploring Japan’s ancient capital city, she’s not nearly as excited about the city and would be much happier visiting Los Angeles or New York. I’ve got an Italian friend from Rome who has never been to Venice even though it’s just a few hours up the superstrada from his house. Instead of looking at the “old crap” (his word) that’s surrounded him all his life, he’s much happier eating Osaka-style kushi-katsu in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Shibuya and drinking in the energy of life in Tokyo. I’ve always thought that the extra passion for a country felt by those who have come from elsewhere to be analogous to the difference between someone raised in a given religion vs. those who have made the conscious choice to convert (the difference between Peter and Paul, if you will).
Outsiders can feel more passion for a place than natives at times.
