First were Japanese people who were oddly thrilled to meet a
foreigner. It was as if I was some sort of super star just for being foreign. There
were numerous times that I would ask a random Japanese person on the street to
take a picture of me with my friends and they would whip out their camera and
take our picture with both their camera and ours! This whole behaviour is
something I certainly didn’t expect, and in all honesty I must say I miss the
feeling of being different.
Through research
before traveling to Japan, I knew that Japan was a collectivist country,
emphasized by the proverb “The nail that stands out gets hammered down”. Now let’s
see, I’m 6.2, blonde with blue eyes and wear blue jeans with an American Eagle
polo quite often. I’m pretty sure I am a
nail that isn’t even in the board to be able to be hammered down. But these
difference really to two distinct interactions with various Japanese people
that I met.
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| We had a crowd of Japanese people taking our picture. |
The other interactions that I was exposed to were that of
the complete opposite. People seemed to avoid me like the plague. Case and
point – Subway train would pull up, I’d get on. Next stop entire subway car
empties into another subway car. I’m left alone.
Now this didn’t happen often, and certainly rarely to this
extent, but there was certainly a general feeling that I didn’t belong in their
country and they were making no effort in hiding their feelings.
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| Picture taken after the March Earthquake. No one left in class... |
To summarize, when meeting a random Japanese person, I’d say
it’s fairly similar to picking a random Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean. You
really never know what to expec.t
