Trifter

When one talks about Japan, it is important to realize that we are talking about an Island. Being on an Island, the Japanese people are not able to just take their car and drive to another country. This means that the majority of Japanese people who are not able to travel due to financial or other reasons, will only meet foreigners who travel to Japan.

Image via Wikipedia. The image shows various sightseeing places around Tokyo. The Tokyo tower, the Tokyo skyline, Tokyo by night, Shibuya station and so on

 In Tokyo and Kyoto, the majority will be tourists. Outside those places, be it in other parts of Honshu or in Shikoku or in Hokkaido or in Kyushu or Okinawa, the majority will be English language teachers and English language teaching assistants. Depending on their salary, these people will be present in different layers of the society. This point will give way to the first stereotype: all foreigners are the same. The similarity in language and the fact that all these language teachers are recruited in the UK, the US, Canada or Australia, make that Japanese people don’t realize that foreigners might as well be German, Cuban, South-African and so on. With so many English speakers in the country, the Japanese don’t realize that not all foreigners will speak Japanese with an English accent and are surprised if you happen to speak it without. Furthermore, connected to the lingual ability of foreigners, they assume that you do no speak Japanese.

 That means that they might ignore you even if you speak Japanese, because they expect you to say something in English, which they will not understand. There is also a big difference between the discrimination that foreigners experience when they go to Japan. While Caucasian people may suffer from positive discrimination, black people and most other races will most likely suffer from negative discrimination. This has to do with the fact that these assistant language teachers usually have a stable job and certain class and look white, while this is not the case for people from other races. The Japanese are a peculiar people and not all of them are discriminatory, so let it not be a dumper on your travel to Japan. Just be beware that you may and possibly will encounter ignorance towards you, depending on how you look and which stereotype your appearance matches.