Positive and Negative Foreigners in Japan
There are, of course, many kinds of foreigners living in Japan, from English teachers to engineers to web designers and Brazilians working a dekasegi job to earn money for a few years before they return home. While everyone must decide for themselves how they feel about Japan --a country both extremely advanced yet hopelessly backward, where people embrace the latest technology yet still use 1970s-era passbooks to record bank transactions --I do try to avoid foreigners from English-speaking countries who for some reason decide to be as negative as they can be about the country, even while they live and work here through the hospitality of their Japanese hosts. Some foreigners would choose to pick up on any slight they imagine has been done to them, despite the fact that the vast majority of the "discrimination" they are likely to encounter in Japan is actually positive in nature, like Japanese people giving them gifts or $50-an-hour teaching jobs, or girls writing their phone numbers on chopstick wrappers. No matter what these pessimistic gaijin do, they can't get away from a cycle of negativity, especially if they encapsulate themselves inside a bubble with other negative foreigners, which sometimes happens with JET teachers if they're not careful. One suggestion for these individuals would be that they embrace the word mae-muki, one of my favorite Japanese phrases. On the surface it just means "forward-facing," yet it's filled with positive images of walking forward with your face raised up to see the brighter future you're moving towards. The anime character that embodies the concept of mae-muki more than anyone else is Kafuka Fuura from the anime Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (Goodbye, Mr. Despair), the always-cheerful and optimistic girl who acts as a foil to the most depressed teacher in Japan.
Fuura Kafuka is an exceedingly optimistic girl. Plus she has those cute hair pins.
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:01 PM
17 Comments:
You just said it in passing, but the chopsticks wrapper thing was hilarious for me.
I was in Japan for the majority of May, and made friends with a freshman English major in a restaurant. She wrote her e-mail down on a chopstick wrapper for us. I had thought that it was unusual, but now you make it sound commonplace!
11:52 PM
It happens in just about any country, Peter. When I was stationed in Germany, there were quite a few people that just refused to see anything good about being in Germany. For me, I loved the place and call it my second home.
I think the main thing us english speaking people need to do is to get to know the local people. Once you get to know the locals, a new world opens up for you and you get to see things a different way.
Just learn the language tho, so you don't make the mistake of buying cat food tuna instead of regular tuna for lunch.
12:00 AM
A lot of it is just culture shock, especially from chefantwon's rant post it is culture shock he is describing, most of the time culture shock is that for the first month or so they love everything about the country because it is different and then after spending some time in the country they begin to hate every god damn thing about it and if they take the effort and stay long enough they will begin to like it again.
here is an excerpt from this website: The Honeymoon Stage
During the first few weeks most individuals are fascinated by the new. They stay in hotels and associate with nationals who speak their language and are polite and gracious to foreigners. This honeymoon stage may last from a few days or weeks to six months depending on circumstances. If one is a very important person he or she will be taken to the show places, pampered and petted, and in a press interview will speak glowingly about progress, goodwill, and international amity. If he returns home may well write a book about his pleasant if superficial experience abroad.
But this "Cook's tour" type of mentality does not normally last if the foreign visitor remains abroad and has to seriously cope with real conditions of life. It is then that the second stage begins, characterized by a hostile and aggressive attitude towards the host country. This hostility evidently grows out of the genuine difficulty which the visitor experiences in the process of adjustment. There is maid trouble, school trouble, language trouble, house trouble, transportation trouble, shopping trouble, and the fact that people in the host country are largely indifferent to all these troubles. They help but they just don't understand your great concern over these difficulties. Therefore, they must be insensitive and unsympathetic to you and your worries. The result, "I just don't like them." You become aggressive, you band together with your fellow countrymen and criticize the host country, its ways and its people.
This criticism is not an objective appraisal but a derogatory one. Instead of trying to account for conditions as they are through an honest analysis of the actual conditions and the historical circumstances which have created them, you talk as if the difficulties you experience are more or less created by the people of the host country for your special discomfort. You take refuge in the company of your countrymen and this cocktail circuit becomes the fountainhead of emotionally charged labels knows as stereotypes. This is a peculiar kind of shorthand which caricatures the host country and its people in a negative manner.
http://www.worldwide.edu/travel_planner/culture_shock.html
3:02 AM
add ".html" to the link I posted.
3:03 AM
I agree with Chefantwon, but I think that regarding Japan things are a bit different, there's a lot of people that, despite working/living/loving/procreating in Japan, keep on bitching about everything Japanese, from people starings (just don't care, would you? or stare back, it's funny!) to transports (take the shortest Italian route, and then TRY to bitch about Japanese Metro...). It's annoying! You don't like Japan? LEAVE. Just, let us gaijin-wannabes know when you leave ;)
3:44 AM
This is a bit off topic, but I really need to figure this out. I want to go into the medical field and I want to attend college in California (Loma Linda University). How hard would it be to become a doctor in Japan (with all/most of my college in America)? Do I need special Japanese training?
7:21 AM
I know exactly what you mean about negative foreigners. I recently came back from an 8-month abroad program in Japan, and I was often really frustrated with the students who wasted their time moaning about how much they hated it.
No matter where you are, the important thing is to live in the moment and appreciate the good things you DO have.
I mean, it got to the point where they would hole up in American chains in Japan and then cry and complain about how they had no Japanese friends.
9:43 AM
That is because nikki its culture shock that they are experiencing. As a result your advice, no offense, wouldn't really work at all for those people who experience culture shock, to just appreciate the good things they have in life, ya that won't work for those that are experiencing culture shock.
9:17 PM
Is age a factor in dealing with culture shock? Are kids less succeptible to culture shock than adults? Maybe the more you know, the more you are resistant to change and accepting differences...
11:09 PM
Since I came to Japan very well educated about the country and with a good grasp of the language (thanks Vienna U!) I never experienced culture shock. I am still afraid it will set in some day...
I have heard of and seen people who just got more and more cynical and negative about Japan as time went by. And of course the guys in my host uni who had no clue of Japanese got extremely negative extremely fast.
It's really sad, and really really annoying. I wish there were no people like that.
For the record, I have never gotten a girl's number written on a chopstick wrapper! Does that make me a loser? :o
12:27 AM
Chefanwon, yes, this kind of problem can happen to anyone living in a new country. Think what a different place the world would be that one Saudi guy who created the ultra-orthadox school of thought had had a better time in the U.S. (or maybe had gotten laid).
Noliving, good points, I'll try to follow that blog.
Kenshin, I've observed before that white gaijin from English speaking countries (the people I am most likely to know, hence I'll avoid making comments on other groups) sometimes think Japan "owes" them something, perhaps for war reparations or something. If you have that thought in your head and things don't go really well for you, you'll turn on the country. Best to know yourself before coming here, to get that stuff out of your system beforehand.
Colby, not sure how you'd get a medical license for another country, I imagine it would be easier to move the sun from its current orbit around our galaxy ^_^ I have a Japanese friend who is an MD in the U.S. but she lived there for like 10 years and probably had some training beforehand to pass the various tests there are.
Nikki, yes, the best thing to do is not group together, since of course you're building a wall that way. A friend of mine shunned all the other foreigners when he went to Waseda (the International Division, a kind of Japanese as a Second Language school inside Waseda), instead joining the Outdoor Drinkers' Club, a group of Japanese men who camped out all night before sporting events drinking. Sounds like fun ^_^
Mawalar, I've read that it's good to have had an experience living abroad as a child, when doing so again later in life. I lived for a year in New Zealand (hence, I was able to freak out Jango Fett actor Tem Morrison at a Star Wars convention) by singing his national anthem to him. I think that was a first for him ^_^ Bottom line, anyone can live anywhere but they have to be flexible.
12:55 AM
I think that in a lot of cases (but certainly not all), people going to Japan or other foreign world for an extended period of time forget that they are the visitors. They come with their preconceptions of how the world should run, and react negatively when things run differently. The resulting behavior is then either to aggressively attempt to change those around them accordingly, or to isolate themselves from their environment. Ranting about how terrible Japan is would be an example of the former, hiding out and never leaving one's apartment without other gaijin in tow would be an example of the latter.
I believe that thinking of visiting someone's house could be used as a metaphor. If you're only visiting for a day, the host goes out of their way to accommodate whatever you might need, likely changing the flow of the house's normal behavior to make you more comfortable. On the other hand, if you are going to be visiting a person's home for an extended period of time, such as for a homestay, then you are expected to quickly learn the natural flow of the home and adapt accordingly, out of consideration for your hosts. If you were to visit your friend's house for a month and either make no attempt to adapt or else put it in shambles, violating norms in that house left and right, you'd be a heavy burden on your friend and would probably find yourself miserable as a result.
Once acculturation has occurred successfully, you can start to contribute to that society constructively.
1:24 AM
I know about this personally from spending a year studying abroad in Hirosaki, Japan, last year. At first I was in that honeymoon stage, it was like I was in a dream world of clean streets, kind people and nigh-alien archetecture and customs. However, about a month or two after settling into classes, my lack of Japanese frustrated me quite a bit. I'd often get upset and not want to go out, or worse, just hang out with the other foreign students.
Luckily, though, I took some positive steps at the beginning of the year to get involved with the Japanese students. I joined a club my first week, despite speaking next to nothing. I gathered up all the email addresses I could from the "tutors," Japanese students assigned to help new exchange students, and emailed them just to email. One of the girl tutors has turned into one of my best friends who I still keep daily contact with, and if I can get back to Japan after graduating next year, I can see something more coming out of it. :)
Anyway, I think the biggest thing about being in Japan for the long term and being happy is to embrace the people, not shun them. I can tell you, if you have a problem with the bank, city hall, hospital, etc., it's so much better to get help from a Japanese person than a fellow foreigner who probably knows as much as you. Being in a foreign country for a long period of time is very taxing, if not for the simple fact that daily things that come naturally in your home country suddenly become challenging. Do your best to make your daily life in Japan like your daily life back home and you will be much happier for it.
3:40 AM
noliving-- I am well aware of culture shock, and those that I described were also told many many times about the "stages" of being abroad and about culture shock, etc. Of course, just because they were educated about it doesn't mean they can avoid it, but in the end, going through a difficult time also doesn't mean that you completely lose your mind, either.
I personally think there's a level of self-awareness that can help make these experiences more positive, and a person's attitude cannot be 100% written off to a phenomenon.
3:44 AM
Colby, I'm not really sure how it'll work with the doctor, but if you want to study at a Japanese university (real student, not exchange student) you'll need a JLPT lvl 1. There's no way around that. Lessons are in Japanese and they won't tarry just because of you. If you want to work as a doctor over there after finishing it in the US you will need an abbrobation (pretty much the approval of the Japanese government that your doctorate is equivalent to a Japanese doctorate) and you will also need the JLPT lvl 1, because without it you're screwed, especially in that field of work (where you need to think in Japanese.)
Now for the topic at hand!
There are many people who go to foreign countries and expect things to be like at home. Which makes me wonder: if I want to be everything like at home, why do I even leave home?
I go to other countries because they are different. If I want the same old I don't have to fly across the globe.
I see it all the time with tourists at work. I pity the tourguides who have to deal with them. Luckily I'm in security, so I can just watch them from faaaaaaaaaar away!
Even with countries such as Austria and Germany it's like that. Sure, there are many similarities, but there are also striking differences. German tourists can really be annoying here. Either they're making fun of us because they don't get certain things or they're completely lost because they don't understand our dialects.
I've been to Japan a few times, and I must say I love the transport system. Because... it works! Unlike here at times. And it's faster. As for the "overcrowding", well, try the first or last subway here, it's just as full.
All the people I know in Japan are Japanese. I've never set foot into Roppongi even once. I wouldn't know why I'd go there. If I want to deal with people who're not Japanese, why go to Japan? I have that here on a daily basis!
6:14 PM
(2nd part)
It's true though. Learning the language helps a lot. Tourists won't do that, of course, since most tourists get herded around by tour guides (I always pity the guides, not only here, but also those girls in Japan, how do they manage this? How can they always be nice and friendly when dealing with all those silly tourists? Amazing, really.) But everybody else should work hard to learn the language. I mean, the moment you understand it, you see a whole new world.
I've been to places in Japan where tourists usually don't venture. Usually because I know they don't go there. I avoid them as often as possible.
I agree with Peter. You have to be flexible. If I go to Japan, I have to adapt. If I go to the UK, I have to adapt (and don't make me start on British food, oi!) If I go to Canada, I have to adapt. If I go to Italy, I have to adapt. I've been to many countries in my life. Netherlands, France, UK, Italy, Hungary, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Germany, and yes, Japan. The one way to get through it in one piece? Adapt. Be flexible. Show interest in the local ways. Adapt. You're a foreigner, you can make mistakes, you can err, but it's easier for them to forgive you if you try instead of not trying at all. If you're able to somewhat communicate in the language, just ask them. From my experience, no matter what country, locals are usually quite helpful when you ask them. This can lead to comical situations, sure, but eh... I rather have a good laugh with a local because we're both butchering around in different languages and end up confusing each other than ending up grumpy because I have no idea what's going on.
And it leaves a good impression if you don't come across as the typical stuck-up tourist.
I remember, ages ago, someone once said that, even as a tourist, you're an ambassador of your own country. And, let's face it, how many of us have said "Those damn *insert random country here*" after dealing with one person from that random country who was a prick? I do it all the time, I admit it. One second I say "Damn Germans." Ten minutes later I go "Gotta love the Germans", because I ran into a German tourist who was not a prick.
When I go to a foreign country, I'm an ambassador of this one country. I don't want people talking bad about me or my people. So I adapt. And adapting makes things go smoother anyway.
Flexibility!
Humans... we sure suck.
6:14 PM
Yeah, I'm starting to agree with Peter that it would be easier to move the sun from its current orbit around our galaxy. Getting a doctorate degree here is hard enough! In the western world medical terms are pretty universal (because they are Latin based), but I have no clue about Japan. I will continue my studies in Japanese and maybe change my career path to teaching in Japan. What is the test level to teach in Japan? How much Kanji do you guys know?
12:59 AM
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