So I live in Japan around 4 years and had already few situations which left me very confused. I always thought making foreign friend will be much easier than with Japanese people but in my case is opposite.
I don’t live in Tokyo but in place where sometimes you can meet foreigners which are working here, live or so on.
In kindergarten where is going my son there is one British lady which I met previously in park( in English). We had small talk on the beginning but after that she started ignore me. Even in kindergarten, she even doesn’t respond for simple hello. Once even when I was with my friend in park and our kids played together this British lady came and started speak in Japanese to my friend and still ignoring me. When we moved I didn’t speak Japanese but now I can keep daily conversations and stuff in city hall without English support; So my friend and this lady speak and I added something to their conversation and she was like surprised I’m still standing there and daring to say something. My friend next day said she was confused with her.
Today situation, I went to shop after my classes to buy some stuff for dinner and during shopping one foreign girl bumped on me. She was recording something on her phone, didn’t apologize or reply for my question if she is okay. Just gave me strange look and left. After this I saw her in cashier where had a problem with something. She didn’t speak Japanese and old lady didn’t speak English. I asked if they need help. I did it and again no thank you, sorry etc. Just strange look. Where cashier said so many times thank you. First I thought maybe this girl can’t speak English but after this she spoke to phone. And that was English.
I already gave up with idea to make a friends with foreigners. I know also no one can’t be pushed to became a friends. But I ask only for minimum of self culture.
I lived in few countries already and the biggest difference how people are treating each other is here. Not sure why, maybe someone has any idea?
Sorry for any mistakes or errors. English is not my first language.
40 comments
In my experience, a lot of foreigners in Japan experience “main character syndrome”. By this, I mean that they feel that they somehow are unique for being a foreigner living in Japan and do not like to encounter other foreigners, as they mess with that illusion. When I lived in the inaka, that was always the sense that I got. “This is my part of Japan and there can only be one foreigner.”
People can be assholes 🙁
The woman in your story does sound rude.
But in other cases, I think some people feel like they don’t need to make friends with every other foreigner who crosses their path.
I’m not searching for new friends. I already have my life, including friends and family. So I don’t say hello to every person (foreign or otherwise) I meet. But of course I will engage in polite conversation with anybody who approaches me.
Also, I think it’s fair enough if people don’t want the fact that they are a gaijin to be some sort of defining feature about them, that acts as an invitation to other people to assume they have to be friends.
This is obviously hyperbolic, but it could almost be considered slightly racist that you saw somebody and thought “they are not Japanese, so they should be my friend.”
why do we got to hang out just because we’re both foreign
I always try to at least make eye contact, smile, and nod. I figure we’re all minorities here in Japan so we likely have similar difficulties. I want them to know that I acknowledged them. Some people ignore me. Like I know they obviously saw me amongst all the Japanese around me, but they pretend like they didn’t. It’s amusing. But I still try to be friendly to the next person.
True that some foreigners are rude but in my experience, most I encountered here are really nice and cool people. With that said, I will say they’re some little weird ones, like myself. We all come from different location & backgrounds that might create barriers. Just cause their foreigners doesn’t mean it is the same as making friends back home.
The Brit in your story sounds incredibly rude but I have experienced it many times too. Hell, yesterday I was talking on the phone, not too loud, and some foreign lady was just glaring at me like I am satan himself.
I feel like many come here to fulfill a fetishized fantasy that just won’t go the way they imagined and you aren’t included in their fetish. Best to concentrate on yourself and when someone stable and decent does come along and acts as a friend, you can make the most of it.
A variety of reasons I suppose. One story does have a very rude person, the other may be simply your personality doesn’t jive with hers.
I’ve been told my some fellow expats that “gaijin need to stick together, support each other!” Admittedly those expats have little connection to Japan – as in they may have a JP wife and kids, but they spend most nights at a foreigner-friendly HUB or similar. No Japanese friends.
To me, it kinda comes down to a situation of not avoiding fellow foreign-folk, but not feeling any need to hang with them simply because they are fellow foreigners. As a friend said one time as we were chatting, “Sometimes I meet someone, talk to them a couple times, and realize, based on their personality and life views, that if we were both living in our mutual home country, I would NEVER NEVER hang out with them. There is nothing about that person that would be in a friend of mine! So why should I hang with them here, just because we are both from Canada?” I feel a bit like that. I’m not going to hang our with fellow people from my home country, just because we are from the same country.
That hasn’t been my experience. There are quite a lot of weird and quirky foreigners however. Tokyo.
This is a hot take but here goes.
A lot of the other foreigners I have met in Japan are weirdos. We laugh at who dispatch companies will hire, but don’t forget that they are living among us. I’m also don’t want to be a persons friend just because they are foreign. How often are you asked by Japanese people if you know another person because they are foreign????? Even where I work, if we have a foreign visitor, they’ll be introduced to me, then its expected I will fully take care of them and maintain contact with them after they leave (which isn’t part of my job….).
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Now I do have foreigner friends, and they are not weird. One of my mamatomo who goes to my sons day care is someone I talk to in English, we both were ALTs before moving on to other things.
I wonder if it have anything to do with social order… As many of us know Japan is a hierarchical society, so people are very aware of who they are taking to and where they stand. But foreigners can be a bit of a wildcard, and so there is often confusion and frustrations when it comes to communication. I think that sometimes other foreigners feel frustrated about communication and this may cause them to blow out in strange ways. Expressing frustration with other foreigners is likely more safe than expressing it with a Japanese person.
That’s a them problem, some people, believe it or not are unfriendly and disingenuous. I have a simple solution (living here for 7 years), if I am not introduced to you (local/foreign) by someone I know, you are as mundane as a shadow, a passing breeze. I’ve helped heaps of people (mainly in train stations) because I see them struggling, maybe with kids, reading and understanding the signs, can’t understand the attendant and I don’t expect to have any interaction with them beyond that, just happy they are on their way, I assume most were happy for the help. The one or two who look at you with disdain for trying to help them………shadow and passing breeze.
Japan attracts people with strange fetishes and mental illnesses like flies. Don’t try too hard with people like these.
It’s so rare I agree with stuff here but this one is kind of true.
To be fair, I’ve met a few really good close friends who are foreigners like me. It’s obvious that there are nice foreigners here too looking to make friends like us but there is some truth in the whole main characters syndrome theory.
I recently took part in a health exhibition for work and all the foreigners visiting from overseas were fine, but honestly 90% of the ones who live here completely blanked me and didn’t want to talk at all. One American girl asked me randomly how long I’d been here and if I spoke Japanese (her Japanese ironically was terrible) she acknowledged my answers and just said goodbye and left. She was very much a ‘bit it’s myyyyy nihonnnnn’ type.
Sounds like you only really had two bad experiences?
I mean, it can really depend though. I tend to not make friends with foreigners because simply all they can talk about is being a foreigner.
When I have met a handful of people, they talk about where they are from, what they do and just really basic stuff and then it just gets boring from there. (The same happens in Japanese conversation as well).
So for me, it is more the other person is kinda… shallow?
Other occassions, its mostly that they are using me to feel better about a situation because they are shy and people tend to crowd around next to the person that is closest to them into terms of situations or even status. And I tend to avoid that as well.
So I think there can be a lot of reasons. However, that boils down to the person regardless of where they are from.
It’s an interesting phenomenon.
I live in a smallish “mansion” (in the Japanese meaning of the word) and it’s a real mix of nationalities. There’s a Chinese guy, an American couple, and also Japanese residents. Everyone’s cool with everyone else. But I’ve seen the “unfriendly foreigner” thing more times than I can count, even in the workplace – in Tokyo, where foreigners are close to dime a dozen.
I think it’s basically insecurity plus, as other people have mentioned, the whole “exclusivity” thing. Japan does attract some, how can we say, oddball types…
Many foreigners are totally used to gaijin-smashing and being the centre of attention like a celebrity – they basically live the life of a socially mal-adjusted weirdo, but because they’re a foreigner, they get gaijin-passed by their Japanese associates.
Then when this weirdo encounters someone the gaijin pass doesn’t work on, they either malfunction or seem like a complete weirdo.
I know what you mean. When I moved to Tokyo, I saw fit to try to make friends with some other foreigners. My first experience was at the public stand. I saw another white dude who looked to be a cool dude, enjoying himself and just kind of being friendly to all the people around him. I went up to have a conversation, and he immediately started belittling me, like I was encroaching on his territory of potential mates. Since that day, the same thing happened a few other times. Like someone else said, it has to be the “main character syndrome.” I’ve also since gave up on making friends, which is strange for me because I’ve always felt that I make friends very easily.
> Why foreigners are so rude to each other?
I don’t think it’s a “foreigner” thing. You might be focussing on the wrong trait. I obviously don’t know more than you do about your experience, but it sounds like just a “people” thing to me.
I understand what you mean, and this isn’t just a phenomenon among foreigners. Japanese people living abroad often behave rudely toward other Japanese, especially those residing in Japan. I don’t have many positive experiences with Japanese individuals abroad.
When I studied abroad, I felt that communicating with fellow Japanese often turned into a competition, where we tried to determine who spoke the local language the best or who had the most local friends among us.
Unfortunately, I often ended up primarily communicating with other exchange students or local people, even though I initially wanted to connect with fellow Japanese individuals.
Some people also have what I call ‘my Japan syndrome’ and don’t want other foreigners around them. They are eager to be the ‘only gaijin’ in a community to garner more attention and maintain a sense of uniqueness, especially in small cities or rural areas. That’s why they sometimes hold resentment towards other foreigners.
OP
Just be the nice and friendly person you showed you can be. Those people who don’t return kindness aren’t people you want around your orbit anyways.
I’ve learnt that life is short, and there’s no point in caring about what others think. Be the best you can be.
Good luck.
I have certainly encountered foreigners who were overly rude or just refused to talk to me but I would not go as far as to say that most foreigners in Japan are like that.
Maybe you get such an impression because Japanese people are generally more reserved and (at least on the surface) polite which makes rude foreigners stick out even more.
I just feel that being “non japanese” doesn’t warrant instant friendliness or any sort of connection, I behave the same with a Japanese person: we’re just strangers.
Maybe if we’re from the same country ok, but being both foreigners is meaningless to me.
A lot of people here are blaming Japan for attracting weirdos in the first place but I don’t feel like this is a Japan thing…
I’ve lived in 4 different countries, and everywhere I lived, there was always that subset of foreigners who wanted to “go local” so much to the extent that they started to scorn other foreigners. It was like a status thing:
How well do you speak the language? How many local friends do you have versus how many foreign?
The answers to these questions allowed foreigners to rate each other on a sort of assimilation hierarchy. Hell, I fell in the trap myself the first time (I didn’t know any better).
Japan is nice in the sense that I don’t feel the need to race to assimilate. I don’t care who is more or less Japanized than me…I will always be a foreigner in the eyes of the Japanese themselves. So that’s the end of that!
There are plenty of foreigners who are civil but not overly pushy or clingy toward other foreigners, but there will always be that subset that can’t stop competing among themselves…well I say to them…have at it! Have fun guys…haha.
Hi OP, I’m here to maybe tell you a different perspective I haven’t seen in comments yet. I think there are two main types of foreigner in Japan. The ones who come for economic reasons (original country’s salary sucks, or transferred) and the ones who come because they somehow idealize Japan (or to escape their reality and “restart” their lives somewhere new). In my experience, people who come here for the first reason are more friendly, since they don’t care about “protecting themselves and others” of whatever they think and idealized Japan is and should be.
Japan definitely attracts more foreigners who are weirdos than any other country I’ve lived in. Probably has something to do with all the anime and hentai crap which mainly only attracts weirdos in the first place.
What if the first few foreigners you meet are jerks and the next 100 are nice?
I noticed recently, not only foreigners, but Japanese too, simple manners are gone, like a thank you, hello, please, you‘re welcome. I would have said something to the lady in your case, as a joke or just to clear the uncomfortable air.
I have a few haafu friends, we now laugh about it, but we used to look at each other know we are all haafu, but ignore each other. It’s the same phenomenon. In your home country, you might be a minority being half Japanese. Not so much in Japan lol
Because I came here to get away from you fuckers!!!
/s
Seriously though I don’t think it’s foreigners so much as that particular woman is a bish.
While many of the explanations you see here may have some credence, it seems to me that you’re practicing confirmation bias.
How many of your interactions with foreigners have been positive verus negative? What about with Japanese people? Could the avereage be similar between the two groups given the same number of encounters?
I think a lot of the time when I’ve acted like the British woman it’s because i’m trying to talk to all of the Japanese people in the room as well, and when another foreigner comes over you instantly get pushed into the corner with them and nobody else will be willing to talk to 2 foreigners. It’s too intimidating.
It’s a bit like going to a party and trying to talk to the girls there and the weirdo eccentric guy comes over and wants to talk about video games or something lol. Like, i’m not against that, but let’s do that some other time and not in front of other people please haha.
From my perspective (and I get that this is only my perspective), the rudest foreigners in Japan are also the least qualified in terms of skills. I work with a lot of software engineers, and they are really nice and well adjusted. I have a few acquaintances that are English teachers, and damn, are they (not all, but many) are insecure. Talking shit about everyone. Then there are the recruiters, who talk shit about the english teachers. It is like they are all in some sort of social hierarchy pissing contest.
I wanna guess you aren’t white. It would be a possible explanation.
But fuck those people anyway. You don’t need them and you never will. ❤️
The worst people I have met by far in japan have been other foreigners… especially foreign white men.
I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as you make it out to be. For example, I live and work in two different places, but they’re close to each other.
When I’m in the place where I live, I’m a neighbor and a father of children, so can pretty much expect to need to socialize with anyone on any given day at any given time.
The same applies to my work. I teach at a private high school and have way too many classes. It’s still the countryside, so I can definitely end up meeting parents who all of a sudden tell me that their kids say that my classes are interesting, so basically at any given time near my workplace, I need to be a social creature.
So if I’m not in either of those two places, and you meet me, whether you’re Japanese or foreign, I’m probably not going to say anything to you unless it’s absolutely needed. No offense, but being social for work and the neighborhood can be really tiring.
Some of us are “expats” and some of us are “immigrants” and you can’t always tell which just from looking. It’s the same story around the world. A Korean guy in Canada becomes too Canadian and the Korean community excommunicates him (just for example), thinks he’s too cool for school because he insists on using English when introduced to another Korean at a party. A British lady in the Japanese countryside gets called cold because she didn’t try to be friends with the other person from Greater-Gaikoku. Just my perspective, as someone who probably comes off as cold sometimes, even though I don’t mean to. I think foreigners who are assimilated here seem especially cold because that’s just Japan. It rubs off on you eventually. You don’t see it as abnormal. If I lived in Italy for a decade I’d probably be warmer to strangers.
Maybe I just got lucky, but for every rude foreigner I’ve met in Japan, I feel like I’ve met 10 friendly/cool/nice/normal ones just living their lives here and interacting similarly towards either Japanese people or other foreigners. Though I’m sure there’s some truth to the main character syndrome discussed here, I also suspect our brains have a way of making negative interactions stand out/remembered more strongly than the normal interactions we have with friendly gaijins along the way.
May I ask your ethnicity?
When I lived in Tachikawa I saw plenty of foreigners, loved to give a big smile and a hello while they either ignored or gave back a glare/confused look. It was a little petty, but it made my day every time I got a rise out of one.
Yeah, you see stuff like this a lot living here. I have a British coworker who treats Japanese people and foreigners in the office very, very differently. With Japanese people he is friendly and helpful, but the moment another foreigner speaks to him he’s suddenly all pissed off and confrontational. I really don’t know what his deal is but it’s probably just a case of “I’m unique cuz I live in Japan” syndrome and seeing other foreigners at work knocks him out of his fantasy land.