Quote:
Originally Posted by Sphinx01
Hmmm..is that so?
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Oh yeah. It probably happens less in Tokyo, where foreigners are more common, but I was 1 of only 2 obvious foreigners in a city of 55,000 (there were 2 other Asian-American JETs besides us, but they blended in enough that most people didn't know they were not native Japanese until they started talking), in a countryside prefecture. I met tons of people who had never in their life seen or talked to a real live non-Asian person. I probably got amazed stares from kids at least once a week, if not more. I even met an old grandmother who said she'd never seen a foreigner in person in her life!
Seeing other non-Japanese people was so rare that 1 day some white guy got off the train, looking somewhat confused. We'd never seen him before, so we started talking to him, and it turned out he'd gotten on the wrong train (and there was no train heading back toward Osaka until the next morning). So one of the other JETs let him stay at his apartment overnight!
By the way, I only personally knew 1 black guy in Japan, but he loved it there... he'd done 3 years on JET and then married his Japanese girlfriend and was living there permanently. He was fluent in Japanese, and knew all kinds of cool places to go, where to get stuff, etc. (Veteran JETs tend to help newer JETs with that kind of stuff, and having stayed even beyond JET, he was like an old pro at Japanese Survival.)