Before the Internet, Japan was a truly mysterious place, and it was difficult to access information about the country from the outside world. (Maybe if you were really lucky you could find a friend who’d send you third-generation VHS tapes of Japanese TV once in a while.) Now, of course, getting access to Japan is much easier, thanks to websites like YouTube and J-List. Still, while it’s great to be able to find out about the latest in Gothic Lolita cat-ear fashions in Tokyo, viewing Japan through the lens of the Internet is not without its problems, because the stranger aspects of the country will tend to be magnified while the less-flamboyant details are lost. A good example of this phenomenon is ice cream, which can be found in bizarre flavors like miso, squid ink and basashi (that is, horse sashimi, try not to think about it too deeply) if you visit specialty shops in parts of Japan frequented by tourists. And yet 99% of the ice cream actually consumed by anyone is vanilla or possibly green tea. But since blog posts about the popularity of vanilla in Japan wouldn’t be interesting to anyone, we’re far more likely to be influenced by messages like, “OMG OMG the Japanese have seaweed ice cream!!!11!” when in fact hardly anyone here even knows this exists. This is similar to the signs that say “no foreigners allowed” which are supposedly everywhere in Japan, at least according to the Internet and activists like Ardou Debit (who wrote a useful book for considering a move to Japan). And yet, in 21 years of living here I only managed to have service declined only once, at a video rental store that had unfortunately had a large number of videos stolen by a foreigner the week before, and when I calmly explained I would never do something like that to them they apologized and let me rent videos from them. The issue isn’t about whether or not there’s discrimination in Japan — of course there is some everywhere, though gaijin enjoy a better situation here than foreigners in their own home countries — but instead, why are certain aspects of Japan magnified so disproportionately when viewed through the Internet? Bottom line, while we all love fun and wacky tidbits of news about Japan, like the bacon and scrambled egg onigiri I saw in Seven-Eleven last night, a lot of the information about Japan we receive needs to be taken with several grains of salt.
The most popular ice cream flavor in Japan is…vanilla.
