Not Your Japan

I've been wanting to blog about what my life was like in Japan for a long time.  Most of the blogs about gaijin living in Japan are written by men, and many of them come from very specific points of view, like guys who love otaku culture or guys who are just really desperate to find a Japanese woman who will nag them for the rest of their lives.  I read these blogs from time to time when I find myself missing Japan, but I always come away dissatisfied because none of them really come at all close to the particular experiences I had while I was there.  No, Internets, I'm not saying that I'm some kind of special snowflake, because I know that that will get me immediately kicked off the World Wide Web, just that...I lived a life there that was perhaps a bit out of the ordinary for a gaijin.

I wasn't a hostess or a geisha or anything cool like that.  But I went to Japan pretty much tabula rasa.  I don't care about manga, I didn't know much at all about Japanese culture, and I didn't speak Japanese to any great extent.  We'll get into why I went there in another post.  I did have, as I suppose most Americans do to the extent that they have any ideas at all about Japanese culture, the idea that Japan was very unfree, very patriarchal, very unfriendly towards women (especially women who aren't looking to be housewives).

After spending three years almost entirely in the company of very ordinary Japanese men, I came to believe that, except for the "unfree" bit (and that is just complicated), those accepted ideas about Japanese society are wrong.  All wrong.  I know there are a lot of people, some of whom having lived there much longer than I did, who would disagree with me, but I don't care.  I think they would disagree because they would have had quite different experiences.  Being men (mostly--or Western women looking to get their biases confirmed) they would necessarily have had very different experiences.  Being men who are interested specifically in fetching a Japanese wife (which, sadly, describes a great number of the foreign men who go to Japan--or, worse, the fellows who just want an "Asian" wife and hop from country to country looking for one), whether explicitly or not, gives them another layer of bias.  They're sympathetic to the ladies from the get-go, and I am not particularly.  To be perfectly honest, most Japanese women bore the daylights out of me.  And I really have a hard time taking grown-ups who carry stuffed animals around with them very seriously.  Unless it's a gift for your kids and you're just on your way home to give it to them, it's not a healthy sign in my book.

So, welcome to a blog about Japan that is more focused on Japanese men than women, that says nothing about manga or anime (except Full Metal Panic, if that counts), and that seeks to undermine a lot of popular notions about the Japanese based totally on special-snowflake anecdotal evidence.  If you find another in a similar vein, let me know.