Regarding Debito Arudou's Sept. article, "Meet Mr. James, gaijin clown": So, we are again faced with the fact that the Japanese are rather clueless about foreigners. My consistent reaction to Arudou and others on these pages is, indeed, to get over it. You do not have a right to be treated exactly as you wish by the Japanese. Sorry. And spare me the connections to the U.S. civil rights movement. Blacks were brought to America forcibly as slaves. Most of us came to Japan voluntarily looking for easy money and/or cute girls.
Would it be nice, fair, good, right, smart for the Japanese to better accept foreigners? Sure. Is it in their best economic and political interests? You bet! But they can't. It's simply too difficult to be Japanese, and that causes the Japanese to neither understand foreigners nor understand why the hell a foreigner would want to be Japanese.
So rant about it all day long; it just ain't gonna change. Which means your only choice is to change yourself, accept that you're not going to be accepted, and find what good and beauty you can in Japan and in the world in general for that matter.
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