Strange things can happen to foreigners who live in Japan for too long. They might watch TV while drinking beer and eating shredded, dried squid as a snack without thinking about how odd it would look to their friends back home, or start bowing to people while talking on the phone. They’ll probably think nothing of a grown man riding a bicycle with a basket on the front and a little bell on the handlebars that makes a lovely ding! sound. If from the U.S., they’ll probably only know their shoe size and weight in the Japanese (Metric) system. (When I was in California last month I actually kept my iPhone’s weather widget set to degrees Celsius, which is unheard of for an American.) Carried to the extreme, being in Japan for too long can even change your personality. There’s a legendary gaijin living in our prefecture who came here from the States during the Vietnam War and forgot to leave. When some English teachers formed a basketball team, he volunteered to coach, but it didn’t work out very well. It turns out that the guy had been mellowed out by Japan’s extremely non-confrontational, cooperative society so much that he was unable to motivate the players as a coach should, threatening to kick their sorry asses off the team if they didn’t shape up and play better, and so on.
