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Nyororin (Offline)
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09-13-2010, 11:43 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by edelweiss View Post
I think it's funny that people don't seem to believe that there are any natives in Tokyo who do not wish to closely encounter foreigners while going about their daily routine. If someone told me they encountered something similar in San Francisco I'd tell them they hit upon a rare instance but I wouldn't tell them it was impossible. People are funny, they have preferences. Who knows why they react the way they do.

(....)

I run across waaay more weird and random behavior riding the bus in my own city, my odd run-ins in Tokyo are rather innocent in comparison. After all, I didn't have to ride the subway with a half naked clown making suggestive balloon animals in Tokyo.
But would you bring up the weird people you have encountered in your own home town as an example of how the US is weird, or how people there are racist/hostile/whatever? If someone from some other country was talking about how there were so many half naked people in the US with so much suggestive behavior... And someone popped up and said "Yeah, I saw them too when I rode the buses" because of one or two experiences over years of living there... Chances are others reading aren`t going to catch the "one experience in over a year" - all they`re going to see is "It happens all the time, it will happen to you."
I don`t believe it is impossible that this has happened to you and that similar things have happened to other people. The thing is, most of the time it probably doesn`t have anything to do with being a foreigner. Who knows, the lady on the train might just HATE having people anywhere near her and scowl at everyone. But the assumption is made that it is because you aren`t Japanese. For all we know she could just be some weird person randomly doing such things.
As for the fat because of hamburgers thing - welcome to the rest of the world. True or not, almost every country thinks that about the US. Unpleasant, but not what I would call "racism against foreigners" in Japan.

It`s the almost automatic assumption that foreigners make while in Japan that anything negative they experience is because they`re foreign. Not because there are weird people out there, not that it may just have been random, not that there are crazy people in every city/country... But because they are foreign and therefore it must be racism. This totally ignores the fact that similar stuff happens to Japanese people too.


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