an531 comments

Yes! Just because you are outside the culture does not mean you have no worthwhile observations. De Tocqueville had published some excellent observations about the fledgling US culture, many of which ring true even 200 years later - and he was from France.

When I first arrived in Tokyo, at the beginning of an 8 year stay, I had a date that same evening with some white guy who asked me out when he saw me standing in the lobby of the Kimi Ryokan. I had a marriage proposal from a handsome and well-educated Australian a couple of months later, and a member of the French mafia working with the Yakuza tried to recruit me into porn movies after I ran into him at the Yurakucho tourist information center.

I don't consider myself "hot" - in fact, I've got a pretty big inferiority complex, and as a female I'm larger on the average than most American women, so most of the time I felt like the incredible hulk in Japan. Maybe it's my double d's that were attracting all the attention - I don't know.

I've run into plenty of "charisma men". I could have cared less if they were dating or not, but a lot of them would tend to get into my business by parading their date in front of me as if to say "Ha ha! I'm getting some (finally?) and you're not." These imbeciles are seen all over Asia. Some of them are dead ringers for John Mark Carr, with some pretty creepy baggage in addtion to not knowing how to dress (e.g. waistbands pulled up around their nipples.) And I'd see these guys dating on occasion some very attractive local women, and wonder just what the hell the women were thinking. The charisma dudes seem to have a complex about who they go out with - usually only a razor thin arm-charm will do, and some of these guys were noticeably gay and using the girl as a "beard".

If the truth be told, it was pretty easy for me to find a guy in that country. What I found annoying was the attitude of some of these charisma losers who seemed to want to make getting a date some sort of competition. Luckily, there were more than a couple of "normal" guys that I worked with who had settled down with the local women who did not engage in this adolescent behavior. The other guys at work seemed to be keeping tabs on my social life while at the same time saying how much they despised "ugly western women". Talk about bruised male egos!