momoninja comments

My dearest Melissa, we all feel your "pain", no likes to see abusive behavior, whether verbal or physical. I can imagine that in haughty-taughty, holier-than-thou Western Country or wherever it is you called home before coming here, assuming that you are above all others of your same foreigness & being so ignorant as to think all horrible things happen back home and not here in utopia is simply a way of proving your hooti-tootiness and gaining street cred. Fair enough (well, not really, but I won’t get into that here), but in case you’ve failed to notice, things are different here, including you.

Quote: "...but work to dispel the stereotype that all us gaikokujin, or gaijin if you insist, are just loud, obnoxious barbarians." EXCUSE me??? Since when were ALL "us" Koreans, Chinese, Thais, Indonesians, Peruvians, Turks, Mexicans and all the rest singularly considered loud, obnoxious barbarians? Wow are you ever en elitist.

Continued: "But in the span of a few seconds, your thoughtless, immature and petty behavior pretty much negated all that." Negated "all that"? ALL that? I mean seriously Ms. Feineman, you are all over the place here. One moment you're essentially stereotyping Japanese as a group of stereotyping all foreigners in Japan as barbaric, thus stereotyping "all" foreigners yourself; but in the next moment you then proceed to stereotype some obnoxious idiot himself of being from either Ohio, USA or the UK, and then go a step further by suggesting that this particular indivual's behavior is representative of people from Ohio, the UK and just about anywhere else ( "or wherever it is you called home before coming here"), and that said behavior is acceptable in these places.

You obviously suffer from some sort of "good gaijin/bad gaijin" complex. Get over it and get over yourself. i can't even tell you how many times I've witnessed absolutely deplorable behavior by Japanese men towards women, some of them clearly yakuza, others just jerks, and on occasion men I actually know/knew. And yes, I'm honest enough to admit that during my early days in Japan, I actually got into the bad habit of stereotyping Japanese males as mostly barbaric and/or perverted, but I eventually checked myself and got over that.

I would suggest you take a long time to think about what you're actually trying to say next time you decide to write something. And take a look around at current Japanese society, there are far more 'gaikokujin' here than you will ever know, even right in front of your face. So take some time and get to know this land you'tr living in.