You probably know or have heard at least some of the deomgraphic bullet points on Japan. According to the wikipedia ^[1] (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 ^[2] 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 ^[3] represented 0.1% of total US Pop. ^[4]).

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