Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
Most foreigners who shop at H&M in Tokyo are tourists.
If you were a tourist and he didn't give you the tourist discount he would have lost his job.
I am sorry, but this story sounds quite silly. You insisted he charge you more because you are a temporary resident, rather than a tourist? I would have taken the discount and ran.
This kind of self-righteousness is what gives gaijin a bad name in Japan. Oh, good for you! You made a fuss in an essentially homogeneous country to show you were an extreme minority in order to pay MORE money for a item because you have blue eyes. The foreigners who will now have to show their visas at H&M to get that discount now surely thank you.
When you have lived there 10 years and get this treatment at stores you regularly frequent, then this complaint is legit. But when you go to the Disneyland of retail fashion and complain about being mistaken for a tourist, I feel no sympathy.
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I'm not asking for sympathy, nor do I blame the guy himself, as I said.
I wish you could hear your own argument. You're telling me that in order to avoid an outward racial profiling that I should just avoid certain stores?
What you call self-righteousness, I look at as being a martyr to a cause. If no one ever calls out a problem then it doesn't get fixed. I could care less if tourists would have to show their visas, that's a necessary inconvenience to benefit from a discount IMO, but I digress on that.
The fact of the matter is that there shouldn't be a kind of "Hey, he's not Japanese, so I'll give him a discount." If there was a kind of stipulation where if I wanted to earn a discount from a particular store then all I had to do was show my visa, then I'd be all for it, at least for tourists to benefit from. But to automatically give it to me is what bothers me.
Do they look at other East Asians who are non Japanese and guess whether they're Japanese or not if they can't tell, and then determine the discount? How does that system work?
It all goes back to this "It's their society so you play by their rules" idea that many of those who I'd consider elitists have about Japan. Well you know what? I fvcking pay taxes to this country and I'm a part of it too. I shouldn't be treated differently based on my looks.