> No one is going to pick your pocket
I can't fathom this. I cannot imagine a world in which passed out drunk guy doesn't get audited in his sleep.
I can't fathom this. I cannot imagine a world in which passed out drunk guy doesn't get audited in his sleep.
I couldn’t be farther from the reality. Japanese people are so kind and welcoming, and their cities and towns are beautiful, safe, and clean. Just a simple hello led to some amazing conversations, and I felt as if I was living at the edge of the future because we talked by passing our phones to each other. Google translate enabled us to have real time conversations and get to know about each other.
I met an old man who gave me my Japanese name and dropped some wisdom. A businessman and I shared our thoughts on life and family over a late night off the map hole in the wall type of seafood ramen place. Ran into some people at a bar who happened to work in the same industry as me and we shared stories over beers. When I missed my bus in a remote town, a family reopened their restaurant and cooked a meal for me.
I was there for only a few weeks, and I wish I could move permanently to Japan. If any Japanese company or entrepreneur wants to hire me as a software engineer manager or as a co-founder, hit me up!
A friend left an iPad on a flight. That was shipped back to him as well, albeit with a dick drawn on the screen in sharpie.
Of course I'd return a wallet as-is as well without dipping in the cash (though I would count it and register the amount on the form when submitting it to the authorities to avoid any 'mislaying') but I've never found one with any in it. Most of the 'lost property' I find here is just discarded by the pickpockets.
Also, when there's identifiable information in the wallet I would contact the person on Facebook or LinkedIn if possible.
PS the misguided part is that pickpockets get only a fine for thefts below 400€. Even if it's the 5000th time.
My immediate guess, based upon dealing with people not Japanese specifically: Japanese culture welcomes outsiders who respect the culture. But once you try to get deep into the fabric of the community (buy property, marry a local, etc.) there is a strong invisible wall of which you were not aware.
Most cultures seem to have different ideas of where and how boundaries are created to push away outsiders. The notoriously cold Germans are initially very cold, but once you're on the inside there is complete trust. Meanwhile, the flaky southern California "let's do lunch" thing is an endless series of weak onion-like translucent boundaries and you never can get to the core of things.
The only "you don't belong here" vibe is from the constant "microaggressions" from being a visible minority - people will see your face and assume you don't speak Japanese, can't use chopsticks, etc etc, but those don't come from malice but rather ignorance. Once I open my mouth and speak Japanese all that mostly goes away.
I'm married to a local, have plenty of friends who are married and own property or businesses, no problems of any sort. Get along well with neighbors, business partners, hobby circles.
The biggest barrier will be work and business culture, where Japanese will have strict requirements on cultural integration (can't be rude to a client or make them lose faith in your company) and have higher requirements on dedication to work (over health and family) than westerners and that's where I've seen all the friction.
edit: I want to clarify that this is the experience of a white westerner. I hear things are very different for people from other parts of Asia (SE Asia/China)
But when you live there you learn about the underlying racism.
If you could pass as Japanese, because you are of east Asian descent, you will be fully expected to be completely fluent in the language and culture. If you aren't then you must be extremely dumb, because you are Asian after all. Any insight you might have coming from a western country is disregarded, because why would you know anything the collective society doesn't already know. When I was switching from teaching English to a tech job, I recommended a childhood friend I grew up with in America to take over my position. He was making far less teaching at a much worse eikaiwa school. In Japan, you include a picture with your resume, and when my boss saw that he was Filipino American, he outright said they would prefer someone who looks American and went with a previous coworker I had told him was awful.
If you aren't obviously east Asian you get the opposite treatment. You'll constantly be complimented on your ability to do basic things like pick up food with chopsticks and the ability to say hello. If you can have a conversation, there will be constant "compliments" on it. It gets annoying very quickly.
But when it rears its ugly head the worse is when you try to do anything real in the country a tourists wouldn't normally do. Lots of people in Tokyo bike to various places, but when I studied there we were warned to either buy a bicycle and make sure its registered or just never ride. Borrowing a friends bicycle was outright forbidden. At some point you will be stopped by the police and if you can't prove you own the bike or have permission to ride it, you will be taken in until they figure out the owner. The few students who did get bikes were stopped atleast once every couple weeks.
Depending on perspective the racism can be considered light atleast. Black and brown friends usually would say the annoyances were atleast obvious and evenly applied. The racist landlord will tell you up front that hes going to increase the monthly rent on the apartment you're trying to rent because he "had problems with foreigners" before and you don't have a song and dance with a racist person that really doesn't want to rent to you finding constant issues with your application until you give up. You can quickly scout around to find someone who agrees not to do that or atleast less so. Certain banks will outright deny certain services to foreigners, but if you know the right banks you can get a credit card. The police will bother you, but if you have your gaijin papers they aren't going to beat you or make up charges. For white friends it was usually extremely shocking that such things existed at all and usually were the most vocal about the societal racism they were experiencing for the first time in their lives. But I think it made them more sympathetic generally to people from their home countries.
Despite all of that, I loved my years in Japan. A lot of the smaller annoyances usually go away once you actually get to know people and explain the issues you're having. One girlfriend even took it on herself to explain to new friends how condescending it was to say I can use chopsticks so well after living in the country for multiple years. Often times its ignorance not malice and people understand. But there are definitely issues you will have if you're a foreigner and you move to Japan.
Americans find a lot of things like this incomprehensible and annoying, but if you're British you'll be right at home. Japanese people are just Asian English people.
(This also explains why they're train otakus, the way other countries only like their nerdier TV shows, and the occasional colonization.)
That's hilarious. I don't know many English or Japanese people, but all of my stereotypes of both have way more overlap than I thought.
Maybe it's something in the tea.
I've not before seen this word used to substitute for being checked over for being robbed.
One example are the notoriously expensive bars in Roppongi, at night there will be touts in the streets trying to convince tourists to join them for a night of drinking. They'll then go to the bar that hired those touts where, after a night of drinking, the tourists will be presented with a bill that's the equivalent of getting robbed.
Long and short, don't let someone on the street talk you into going into a bar or tea shop or whatever, and especially don't follow them to a second location.
The line for "acceptable robbery" was "no physical violence" + "someone consensually gives me their money."
Which is still possible (and easily doable if that mark is drunk), but is substantially different from American (and European?) style physical robbery.
Do you have an article or graph (per capita or absolute) of deaths comparing the two countries you could point to for more info?
People love to point at the U.S and its gun crimes as a direct result of the country's gun laws in particular, but overall, when certain very specific factors, population areas and very specific geographic regions are excluded, much of the country where guns of all kinds are easily available is barely more violent than your typical Western European country. The school shootings that people refer to are awful things, but statistically, they don't move any needle so much as an iota. They do however get enormous amounts of media attention. Other countries with very strict gun laws also have mass shootings and mass killings, both with guns and without guns, but again, less media focus because it doesn't fit certain narratives about the U.S being violent as hell because of gun posession.
Tongue in cheek aside, it's incredibly stupid to make sweeping, broad, categorical judgments of certain things because of isolated, exceedingly rare incidents. It's even dumber to make broad, sweeping laws around emotional reactions such as yours to such events.
Every school shooting is a grotesque tragedy, but means of fighting them exist that don't require gun ownership to be banned for the millions of people who not only peacefully use guns but also in some cases need them for an assortment of reasons. "What about the children?" has rarely been a good or honest argument for anything, particularly for badly considered laws pushed forth by bouts of moral indignation and self-righteousness.
Even among rabid USA fans like me, American prestige is currently falling like a brick.
I'm told that in northern Europe you could leave your laptops or whatever in semi-public places (like, cafès I suppose), and if you come back after a few hours it would still be there.
Can northern Europeans confirm or deny this?
Where I'm at when people (like, taxi drivers) do bother to return lost-and-found wallets, it's newsworthy enough to make its way to the newspaper.
That should tell you the status quo here.
Where it is not true is in large cities. Small cities and rural areas are one of the safest places on Earth as long as you don't get nibbled by a moose or overrun by ants.
You can usually ask someone to keep an eye out while you go to the restroom/refill coffee and most people are happy to help, but you need your due diligence