New Arrivals
You probably know or have heard at least some of the deomgraphic bullet points on Japan. According to the wikipedia (and I bet it’s been said a couple hundred-thousand times, but what a beautiful site…look at that URL - concise and human-readable, mmmmm). Here’s some highlights: the population-count currrently stands at 129 Million; about 65 Million of them live on just 7,558 of Japan’s 377,899 square kilometers (that’s 8,600 people/sq km); Foreign Citizens make up 2% of the total population, and foreigners from native-english speaking countries about 0.1-0.2% (aside: in 2001 native Japanese represented 0.1% of total US Pop.).
So while Tokyo has around 40,000 Americans and thousands of other English-speaking people, we are still somewhat unique and our presence seems to almost invariably inspire this question, from other English-speakers just as often as from native Nihonjin, “Why did you come to Japan?”
This is an interesting but difficult question for me…for two reasons. The first is (I think) the result of my upbringing in the US. Our cultural/educational indoctrination (absent home-schooled religious fundamentalists and crazy, backwoods militias) instills in the majority of us the idea that in broad terms, immigration is a “Good Thing
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Your post resonates with my own experience. You say that you have no plan beyond just a “zen” approach to life. But realize that this in itself, aside from being true for me as well, is not very common in the US. Practically every Japanese I meet in Tokyo thinks that I don’t act “american,” whatever that means. I think it is mainly a product of american television being the main interaction most people have with americans. I don’t know how old you are, but for me, once I got here I realized that a huge set of experiences I had as a child in the 1980s built into me a love for the really beautiful aspects of both old-Japan (Kyoto-style) and “neo-Tokyo”. Only now that I’m here does the negative side become strikingly clear. *After* moving here a friend sent me the entire back-catalog of a web-comic called Megatokyo, written from a really starry-eyed perspective. I’m enjoying seeing it from “on the ground”. No one ever mentions that the air in Tokyo often smells of acrid burning plastic…