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Originally Posted by tokusatsufan
I mean she's passed level 1 of the citizenship test I think
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A bit late to notice this... But if she is saying this - start doubting her.
There is no "citizenship test". Trust me.
If she is unable to discuss certain things with Japanese, that is her personal issue. There are obviously taboo subjects in every culture - avoiding friendships with an entire group of people because of the handful of taboo subjects is silly... Which leads me to believe that it isn`t what she is talking about, but rather that there is some other issue putting a wall up in communication.
Chances are - it is one of the common "want to complain about Japan, but Japanese people don`t want to listen, agree, or complain about it too" issues. There are a lot of foreigners in Japan who hate various aspects of Japan and want to let every Japanese person they meet know how bad Japan is in those areas. (And get agrement from the Japanese person, which will add fuel to their argument.) They have a weird tendency to bring these things up pretty much out of the blue and very early on in the relationship... So friendships fizzle quite quickly.
It is kind of sad because they don`t realize that if someone came up to them and wanted to complain about how screwed up their home country was... They probably wouldn`t think too highly of the person and not be their friend either.
It has been a while since this happened, but someone actually complained to me about how no Japanese wanted to talk about how awful Japanese such-and-such was, and how they couldn`t make any Japanese friends because everytime they started talking to someone they would "run away" as soon as she brought up the idiocy of Japanese society. People like this assume that their personal world view is obviously correct, and that everyone will agree with them and not be offended even if their home is insulted out of the blue. Everyone is expected to be very unsatisfied with society, and a lack of complaints is seen as "not wanting to talk". But without realizing that complaining about your own culture/country is quite different from complaining about another.