Where do you get your statistics?

4.5% of marriages in Japan are between a Japanese and a non-Japanese (as of 2002) and that number is going up. There were 44,000 in 2006, and that's in Japan. That number is growing dramatically year by year. That's after a couple seconds research and doesn't touch the number outside of Japan.

I didn't say discrimination didn't exist, and if we are going to have a dialogue you can't put words in people's mouths.

Any Japanese parents surely have fantasies about who their son or daughter marries and I am not so blind to think that those fantasies probably don't include a foreigner. This is surely true of any country in the world, not just Japan. That being said, just because that is true doesn't mean parents can't or don't warm up to the idea.

I am not sure where you are from, but the USA isn't quite as open to immigration as you seem to think, and American parents surely have the same ideas about who their daughters and sons marry as Japanese parents.

When I was in Japan in March I was outside of a real estate agency looking at the layouts of apartments posted in the window (just to pass the time) and the agent came out to greet me...for what it's worth.

They didn't "lay a finger" on me either, it was more a figure of speech I guess. They were just that persistant.

i think it might just be the older people who have a thing against foreigners. i think there are more japanese that like foreigners that hate them.

BTW, long time no see Triple M

Even with the countries you mention there are noticable differences and thats before they open their mouths. The J-Police spend allot of time dealing with chinese immigrants and the problems they bring.

Sometimes so, and sometimes not. I think it greatly depends on the person and their personality. Not all Chinese immigrants cause problems - I would actually say those who do are very much the minority... But just like all foreigners in Japan, the bad behavior of a few ruins the image of the whole. There are more encounters with misbehaving Chinese immigrants than most other places because there are simply more Chinese immigrants in Japan than most anywhere else - not because they`re particularly problematic.

On the other hand, I can tell most of the time whether a woman is Japanese or not based on the way she dresses. There is just something drastically different about the style.

My experiences with rental agents (fudosan), when I was renting, have ranged from crap to horrible -- in Tokyo. In the "countryside" (suburbs) there was only one fudosan where I lived, and he found me a very nice apartment, no problems at all, except of course for the various "deposits" that were never returned.

In Tokyo I found I needed an introduction to get an apartment. Once, when I walked in the door of a fudosan, the boss came running out at me shouting "gaijin dame!" Another time, a nice-seeming old lady sat down with me very patiently (we were speaking Japanese) and explained that Japan is an ancient society, you see, and it has many customs, don't you know, that are very hard for foreigners to understand, you see... all to the effect that no, she wouldn't show me any apartments.

That was 15-17 years ago, when I was an English teacher.

Nowadays, I know a fudosanya-san who is a great contact and looks for ways to save me money. Of course, he is a contact introduced by a good friend -- and also I'm a buyer now, not a renter.

If what I hear from you, Nyororin and 3M, is that this is no longer the case, it's very good news, and a welcome update of my impressions.

But I'm going to test this out myself. Next time I'm back in Japan I'll walk in a few fudosan near the train station and see what kind of reception I get.

I have a feeling that some of the older, smaller places may still be like this... But any of the larger chains certainly aren`t. I`ve never gone into anywhere other than a chain. I`ve had nothing but wonderful experiences with Able, MiniMini, and ApamanShop. Can`t speak for the other chains, but I imagine they`re all similar as I can`t even remember the differences between those 3. (These were all alone, by the way, without my husband tagging along... Although he did come later on when we got to the actual deciding stage. Up until then he was happy to let me have them show me around alone so I could pick out the best options.)

Those "deposits" that don't get returned aren't deposits, and therefore don't get returned. Doesn't matter if you are gaijin or not.

And I didn't say you will never experience discrimination at a Japanese real estate agent, but sometimes other things are going on besides discrimination (of course, sometimes not).

In the city where I used to live some JETS (who lived in seperate apartments) consistently got complaints from neighbors, so they ended up moving the all those young gaijin to the same building where they could be loud together. Guess what happens the next time a gaijin tries to rent from her? What memory is she going to have? AND her responsibilities are to your neighbors just as much as to they are to you.

After my first year our lease was up, and I lived kinda far from the school (to me at least...a 20 minute bike ride) and asked about moving into an apartment closer. It was a pain in the butt, but the school was nice enough to ask for me for a certain building that was actually cheaper than the one I was in (which was probably why the school was willing to ask). The real estate agent just said "You don't want to live here". And after repeated askings, that's all she would say. I felt I was discriminated against until later I brought it up with someone and it turned out there were quite a few underworld types living there and the cops came around once in a while (maybe that's why it was cheaper), so in the end, I stayed put, and was probably happier for it.

I forgot to comment on that bit. No one has them returned - it has nothing to do with being Japanese or not.

However - these days certain areas are moving toward reducing or making those fees completely illegal. Japan is sort of in a transition period, so some areas are FAR worse than others when it comes to this now. I can`t say from personal experience, but I have heard that Kyoto is terrible when it comes to these fees... One of my husband`s co-workers was sent there for a year and came back with stories of not being able to find anywhere with less that 6 months rent worth of "fees" in addition to the real deposits. (So a total of 8 months had to be paid in advance.) Not to mention being turned away at quite a few places because he was only going to be there for a year, possibly two. He thought it would be cheaper to rent a normal place, but ended up going with one of those furnished apartments (Leopalace) as it ended up being a lot cheaper in the long run. He`s Japanese, so foreignness had nothing to do with it.

Now that I think about it... I have to wonder if at least part of the lack of willingness to rent to foreigners in some places had/has to do with time of stay? If everyone thinks foreigners only hang around for a year or two, it might have something to do with it.

ETA; I have to say I do agree that a lot of it is past experiences, and hearing about past experiences of other land lords. I think I recounted this before on here (couldn`t find it with a search - I tried!), but in one of the apartments we lived in, a Filipino couple [Disclaimer - we weren`t close with them, and I`m not 100% sure. They might not have even been a real couple, all I know is that the visible female side was pregnant so I assumed.] lived in the same building. Turns out they totally trashed the place top to bottom, and ran away in the night (literally) leaving water on, lights on, and a bunch of unpaid utility bills for the landlord to pay. He was a very nice guy, always incredibly nice to us, and told me point blank that he thought we were great tenants but were very lucky to have moved in before them... Because if we hadn`t, he would never have trusted a foreigner - and doubted he`d be able to trust any again. All the other landlords in the little local landlord group had warned him, and now he was getting a bunch of "Told you so"s.
I couldn`t really blame him. They had to remodel the whole room, and the vacant one below it due to the damage.

That's a good point. The untracability of foreigners jumping back home makes them a higher risk.