Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Randomly meeting some other foreigner whom you don’t know, in a rural part of Japan such as where I live probably rates as one of the most improbable things that could ever happen. You see, in the thinly-populated rural areas of nowheresville Japan, the ONLY other foreigners are people on the JET programme - all of whom you will know quite well, since these are your ‘colleagues’ in a larger sense. Sure, in built-up areas and cities you will have other foreigners doing all kinds of jobs (you know, ‘real’ jobs) who will remain strangers to you forever but out here in what Japan calls the ‘inaka’ - a word roughly meaning “damned soil of eternal suffering monkey apple” - the only possible way you would see another foreigner whom you weren’t already acquainted with, is if someone created an Improbability Drive with the power to harness the cosmic energy of the universe itself, to make the most improbable situations so probable, that they actually HAPPEN*.

And that’s what happened on Friday.

It was just an average night out at Avanti - the bar ‘renowned’ in Hitoyoshi for being so culturally up-beat it actually has a pool table - and as a group, all the JETs in the Kuma-Hitoyoshi area were having a bit of a drink together. When suddenly, another foreigner walked in. A guy. Tall. Dark hair. Immediately it was assumed that one of us knew him; since I have already stated that for an unknown foreigner to simply appear in this locale was so improbable that it makes my eyes want to burst just thinking about it. “Hey who’s that guy?” criss-crossed around the table until we came to the horrible conclusion that none of us knew who the frick he was.

So now we come to the choice. In Japan, there are several ways in which foreigners tend to acknowledge each other’s presence, depending on the individual, such as giving an eloquent nod, an old-fashioned “hello” or briskly crossing the street to avoid having to do anything at all. For arguments sake, we will assume there are two types of foreigner in Japan. The Friendly and Outgoing, and The Territorially Uptight.

The Friendly and Outgoing are, as their name suggests, a nice bunch of people. These kinds of people are happy to meet others, be they native or foreign and generally make up the majority of foreigners in Japan.

The Territorially Uptight however, are not so nice. These are a small minority of people who have fallen in love with Japan so much (or fallen in love with the fact that Japan loves them) that everything becomes some warped game of Japan-ownership. These are the kinds of people who are likely to say “Japanese women love me” and tend to shy away from making friends with other foreigners, since it ruins their “Japan bubble” which is mutually beneficial since other foreigners usually find them obnoxious and generally unpleasant to be around. I would say that most foreigners in Japan tend to have had at least one experience with this kind of person.

So anyway, I can safely say without a doubt that all of us JETs in the Kuma-Hitoyoshi area fall into the first category. Suddenly bumping into another foreigner here is something any of us would EMBRACE with arms wide enough to catch a zeppelin. It’s like a messiah being sent from another world, someone new, someone fresh - and crucially, someone who speaks English!

However there is a fundamental problem in that it is not entirely unlikely that this person simply does not want to see other foreigners (thus falling into the latter category). I mean, Hitoyoshi-Kuma is the foreigner equivalent of the eerie silence after a bad midget joke - which is an analogy that doesn’t even make sense, further emphasising how alienated I am with the world and thus what a barren wasteland of non-foreigninity this place is. It seemed possible that he had come to a place where there are a mere 15 foreigners spread out over 12 towns and villages and a few hundred thousand Japanese people with the full intent of never meeting another foreigner and just had the extreme misfortune to turn up at the one bar in which every foreigner in the 40 kilometre region surrounding the bar just by coincidence happened to all be drinking in, at the exact same time.

So you face the conundrum thus: Initiate conversation and find out he is a nice guy, or initiate conversation and find out he would rather pretend you don’t exist.

Which certainly had the potential to cause some kind of unpleasantly awkward situation. And if there is one thing that British people fear the most in the entire world, it’s an unpleasantly awkward situation, like finding out the attractive lady you are talking to is in fact a post-op transvestite. Thankfully, I was the only British person there, and all the other - more outwardly going and socially competent - people who represented other nationalities were more than happy to waltz straight up and say hello.

And he turned out to be a nice guy. He was an ex-JET, from a rural village in Oita prefecture (northern Kyushu) meaning he was more than happy to chat, thanks to years of similar isolation in the middle of nowhere, like us. He had come down to Hitoyoshi to be with his girlfriend and to find a job. Well good luck to you, Bonnoir (quite possibly a gross misspelling) and welcome to hell.

*to those who recognise this reference - you are all geeks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2004 at 8:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.