GomiGirl wrote:8 Things I don't miss about living in Japan
By Evangeline Kuma
Mostly standard stuff but quite well well written.
My faves:Evangeline Kuma wrote:The stares.
I don’t mind the curious gaze of adorable little peachy-cheeked kids, or the kindly, interested glances of wrinkly Japanese grannies. I’m talking about the sullen schoolgirl trying to kill you with her eyes. The old fart salarymen who glare at you with brazen contempt. The manicured, plucked and Louis Vuitton-bedecked young woman whose mouth drops open with utter disgust when she claps eyes on your unwashed foreign self. If you simply must STARE at the foreigner, please to rearrange your face first so it doesn’t look like quite so much like someone is trying to force feed you poop. Because that is never a good look.
snip
The fact that, having lived in Japan, you can never go home again.
You will never be the same. For the rest of your life, you will sweat miso soup and cry warm sake. Well, not really. But, yeah, kinda. Japan has a singular ability to GET to you like no other country you will ever visit. You’ll be dreaming of cherry blossoms, all-you-can-drink karaoke, and naked communal bathing for the rest of your days. Of course, you could always go back… TC mark
Sorry, Evangelina Kuma is a deluded semi-newbi-forever regardless of how long she lives or lived in Japan. I've never seen or met a sullen schoolgirl directing that sulleness towards me in the total amount of yrs I lived in Japan which are more than many gaijin although maybe not more than some gaijin on this website. Unless that kid was a lazy student I was trying to motivate.
I think when she talked about the younger ladies she is confusing that with Korea as that does indeed happen and the younger Koreans can be the rudest people there with their superficiality and arrogance towards non Koreans. In a fairly long time in Japan I noticed the overwhelming majority of younger women including those 'bedecked' in Louis Vuitton were nice and busy going about their own business to care about foreign women.
And just how do you bedeck yourself in Louis Vuitton anyway?
That word implies dressing in Louis Vuitton and unless you are a megarich hiphop star like Kanye West who has access to exclusive, limited edition clothes items for the uber rich, you don't wear Louis Vuitton - you accessorise in handbags etc. I do have a 'Louis Vuitton rainjacket' that I bought at a 2nd hand clothes seller in Korea's 2nd most important city for less than 12 bucks Oz but I suspect it is not real. It looks cool and is well designed but I have never seen anybody anywhere in real life wear an original of it. As for the 'old fart salarymen', again it seems Evangelina's delusions have taken hold as nearly every salaryman I have encountered, sober or drunk, are too busy sleeping, talking and laughing with other salarymen, or simply absorbed in their own world. Especially as gaijin, few though their numbers are relatively speaking in Japan, are far more common in Japan and have been for at least the last decade or so. Dry up Evangelina.
