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11-20-2011, 06:21 PM
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11-20-2011, 11:46 PM
I am well aware of that. What I am also well aware of is there are a lot of pretentious people in the world.
Anyone that thinks some people are ''weaboos'' isn't cool. If someone called me a weaboo I would just laugh. Most normal people would. Whereas I just,you know,like people that generally aren't offensive?
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11-21-2011, 12:01 AM
Did he call you a "weeaboo"? He might have, but I haven't seen that post here on this thread. What I saw was him saying that you would be the type of person to leave Japan because everyone else did. I will agree with you, that was offensive. You aren't alone in disliking offensive people, but I suppose I won't hold that against him.
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11-21-2011, 12:23 AM
Sorry to sound inhumanly analytic, but this thread is interestingly one-sided. I still haven't crasped the need to hate and despise flyjins.
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Anyway, I heard a rumour (hence no links to corraborate) that for every flyjin there were ten Japanese who fled west. What about those (if assumed true)?
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11-21-2011, 12:28 AM
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As for the rumor, I find the numbers a bit hard to believe (1 to 10 seems like a lot) but I do find it believable that there were Japanese that left if they had somewhere else to go.
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11-21-2011, 02:15 AM
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The whole attitude was incredibly reminiscent of what I experienced. With that out of the way... All the other exchange students I encountered in school were incredibly negative toward Japan. This was at the high school level, so I think most of them were in Japan either because their parents thought an exchange would be a good learning experience... or because they wanted to get away from their parents. I was never really close to any of them so can`t speak for their reasons. Anyway, they sort of bunched together in a group taking cracks at anything and everything Japanese. That wouldn`t have bothered me - I just didn`t associate with them. (I was more interested in actually learning something.) One of the other students seemed nice, but peer pressure won her over and she ended up following them around. Rather than it being an exchange student vs. Japanese student sort of thing, it was more of a high school level social clique with the added bonus of having a different racial/cultural background. There was a "leader" of the group, etc. If there was any reciprocal feeling from the Japanese students, it was because the group sort of demanded to be treated differently and get special privileges. I can`t say I saw any though... Because the "group" was kind of prized by the school, the "leader" tried to take advantage of it by pulling the culture card all the time. Foreigners don`t do this so we shouldn`t have to. People in MY country do this all the time, so don`t make us obey that rule. Etc etc. If all the exchange students agreed, then the school would bend the rules to be accommodating. My personal terrible experience was some really awful bullying at their hands because when the leader pulled the "We do NOT get in onsen outside of Japan - there is NO WAY we are getting in there naked. It is just common sense for non-Japanese. We want private baths in a private room! It is our religious and cultural right!" card, I wasn`t about to let her ruin my chance to get in a rotenburo for the first time... So I rolled my eyes and went to enjoy the onsen anyway. Suddenly, it wasn`t "common sense that any non-Japanese would agree with". My choice not to go along with them made them look bad. My actually *wanting* to get in and telling the teachers I thought it was a wonderful chance was even worse for them. Why was *I* willing to do something they had thrown such fits about being "common sense" for foreigners, even though I was a foreigner too? Maybe they should try some of the cultural stuff too for once. Maybe, just maybe, all those "No foreigners would ever do this!" excuses in the past were exaggerations... This apparently made the leader girl VERY mad. They basically stormed my room that night and did all sorts of crap to me. Somewhere on here there is another post about it. I have a very depressed memory of sitting staring out over Nagasaki from the hotel window and just crying through the night. With the flee Japan stuff, there was no bullying type outcome for me - we`re all adults now - but the attitude of "It`s only common sense for us foreigners, what do you expect?" and the whole "If you don`t go too it makes our excuses look bad!" thing felt very very similar. It all left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth. ETA; I found the post I made a long while back about it - it says pretty much the same thing as above, but I will link to it anyway. Learn Japanese if you want to live in Japan
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11-21-2011, 02:32 AM
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Wow, I have to say, you're kind of awesome.  I know it may not sound like a big deal to you, about not following the crowd, but where I come from you're completely shunned from being different. I keep an extremely low profile. I actually want to go to Japan as a foreign exchange student myself, my senior year of high school in 2013. Unlike the exchange students you met, I want to go because I really do have a desire to learn the language because I have an absolute passion for the culture. & it's NOT because of anime. (people on here might not have thought that to begin with, but there was a website where exchange students could talk to each other, and nearly all of them told me that I was close-minded for wanting to go to Japan, and that I was going for all the wrong reasons, when they didn't even know me! I don't even watch anime [it doesn't interest me]) Ever since I was 3 years old I've wanted to go to Japan. I was always pulling my mom into Asian antique shops so I could see oriental art. My mom always tells her friends how long I've wanted to go. Not many people have had an interest since three years of age. I'm learning the language, and I've researched practically everything about Japan, but I truly will never know what it's like until I go. I hope that I can make a positive impression on you as an exchange student.
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11-21-2011, 04:42 AM
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 But anyway, many Japanese "abandoned their posts" just like flyjins. Why is that not an issue? It seems extremely unlikely that foreigners could cripple any functionality in Japan by simply going away. Yeah, ok, factories with high number of unskilled foreign labour, yes, I grant that. But majority of Japanese companies do not have significant levels of foreign workers, and rarely in any critical position.
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