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| Gaijin-San |
Last month Shizuka returned to Aichi to visit her family. She was there for 3 weeks and returned with an interesting point of view. Because she has spent the last 10 years living in NZ she now feels like a foreigner in Japan. Now you may think that feeling this way would make anybody a little bit sad but not so with Shizuka. She says that feeling like a foreigner means you tend to act like a foreigner. With this new found attitude she can get away with doing and saying things that ordinary Japanese would dearly love to but are afraid of doing.
She thinks this is great and has learned to become as rude and pretend to be as ignorant as any gaijin. I witnessed this myself when we were in Nagoya last year. We were about to buy tickets at a train station when all the ticket machines crashed and shut down. Now I've never seen this happen before so didn't really know how to respond to it. Not so for the 50 odd schoolkids behind us. They knew exactly what was going on and en mass they all ran to the only manned ticket window. So now we were faced with standing in a line of squawking schoolkids for god knows how long. Not a problem for Gaijin Shizuka however. She calmly strolled to the front of the line and just cut in. I couldn't quite believe that A) she had done it so blatantly and B) not one of the kids protested. Because I am obviously a foreigner and she was behaving in such an unJapanese manner everybody assumed she was too. I like to think of this as the "gaijin Privilege"....you never have to stand in a line of Japanese schoolkids!!
She thinks this is great and has learned to become as rude and pretend to be as ignorant as any gaijin. I witnessed this myself when we were in Nagoya last year. We were about to buy tickets at a train station when all the ticket machines crashed and shut down. Now I've never seen this happen before so didn't really know how to respond to it. Not so for the 50 odd schoolkids behind us. They knew exactly what was going on and en mass they all ran to the only manned ticket window. So now we were faced with standing in a line of squawking schoolkids for god knows how long. Not a problem for Gaijin Shizuka however. She calmly strolled to the front of the line and just cut in. I couldn't quite believe that A) she had done it so blatantly and B) not one of the kids protested. Because I am obviously a foreigner and she was behaving in such an unJapanese manner everybody assumed she was too. I like to think of this as the "gaijin Privilege"....you never have to stand in a line of Japanese schoolkids!!
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