More on Gaijin: Statistics in Japan
Here are some numbers on the 2.2 million foreigners who live in Japan and make up 1.63% of the overall population here. While the classic image of a bumbling American or Brit on a mountain bike asking for directions to the train station might be prevalent in the minds of most Japanese -- this is because the foreigners they've had the most contact with have been their English teachers -- in reality Americans and Europeans make up only a small number of the total. The largest "foreign" group here are Chinese followed by Koreans, and as I mentioned last time, many of these were actually born and raised in Japan but maintain a unique identity for cultural reasons that are beyond my ability to grasp. (Interesting aside for anime fans: Lynn Minmei from Macross would have fallen into this category.) The next largest group are the nikkei (Japan-related) from Brazil and Peru, descended from Japanese who went on a diaspora to South America a century ago. In general, foreigners in Japan each find their own specific niche to occupy, and truth be told, I couldn't tell you much about the daily lives of people in most other groups. When I was an English teacher, I did English-teacher-type things like go see American movies, explore my city for hidden temples and study Japanese. I did my best to break out of that shell, though, hitting all the Peruvian restaurants the Japanese are too timid to enter, working out with a big guy from Iran for a few months (we communicated in Japanese, always an amusing sight to see), and challenging a Chinese friend to see who could get a higher score on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. (I beat her score barely.)
Breakdown of foreigners living in Japan by country. I assume the U.S. figures count military stationed here.
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:24 PM
7 Comments:
So what if you're Chinese (bred and born in China), but a US citizen?
1:13 AM
They'd probably go
1:51 AM
They'd probably go by whatever your passport said.
3:08 AM
A lot of Brazilian nikkei have a very hard time trying to fit in when they arrive in Japan. Somehow they have this idyllic image of Japan in their heads and most of time Japan doesn't treat them the way they thought it should. Truth is we will always be the Japanese in Brazil, no matter how many generations of your family were born here and when we go to Japan, we'll always be gaijin. I pretty much feel like a Brazilian myself, of course I was born and raised in this culture and luckily it's not so bad to be perceived as Japanese, but for some people it can be quite confusing...
Anyway, I find it very cool that Brazil has the largest number of Japanese and nikkeis outside Japan and that Japan has the largest number of Brazilian outside Brazil, beating even the US, where HUGE number of Brazilians imigrate to now a days.
12:44 PM
Yes, it's interesting. I learned a ton about Brazil after coming to Japan, which I didn't expect at all ^_^
By the way, did I mention that Asami, the J-List employee who is interested in capoeira, was present when the Emperor made his visit to Oizumi-machi (a stone's throw from us), where like 20% of the town is Brazilian, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of that ship that took the first Japanese to South America. He told her "Ganbatte kudasai."
8:18 PM
Ya it does include the US military. It's really funny that most japanese seem to assume that if your white and you speak english they think you are american but if you look at the stats and take out the US military, american population in japan is surprisingly small.
5:26 AM
Yes. We're in Gunma, far from any of the bases, so no one assumes that I'm military here. But if I were closer, they probably would. Okinawa would probably be a whole other world from the Japan I know, of course. So YMMV as in all things.
1:20 PM
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