JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:I've been approached by "foreign" people in Japan, and often they lead with: "Excuse me. Do you speak English?"
That seems like a very sensible way to approach a stranger. Unfortunately, I've never had a Japanese person start a conversation like that.
Yeah, that would be something. It's not like anybody would expect you to not even know すみません, but I often get "sorry" from people on the street/elevator/train.
When I turned up in 2011 after spending a year of heavy immersion training that capped years of uni study, I was really in "Japanese mode" mentally. I listened to it all the time on my iPod (radio podcasts), I read it all the time, I watched it all the time, and my friends had for the last year all been mostly Japanese. For me it was just a "language". It was almost like air. You do things in it all the time, and it just starts to disappear from view. I had experienced frustration at cultural barriers back when I was an exchange student in 2005, but had largely interpreted that as a language barrier. This time, I thought, it would be different. I quickly had to realize two things...
1. The overwhelming majority foreign students at my university couldn't speak Japanese at all, with the Chinese students being the only noticeable exception. The foreign students could, however, all speak English.
2. None of the Japanese students actually expected us to speak their language, or be "people".
I had to accept that Japanese was not the language of communication among NJ. I initiated conversation in Japanese for the first few weeks as I was still in that "mode", but eventually I realized that from their perspective I was just being weird and/or trying to lord my language skills over them. It didn't work.
I also had to accept that for most Japanese students, foreigners like myself were a special type of person. The "ryugakusei". Mostly, you don't chat with ryugakusei, you have 文化交流 or 国際交流. I managed to make some Japanese friends by being proactive and participating in some events and club activities, and also by living in a regular dorm. But the starting point for any first-time meeting was often the assumption of absolute ignorance of everything. Even when speaking in Japanese I had a guy once try and explain to me where Osaka was (we were in Kyoto).
So, fast forward a few years later, and the main language of my life was English, the bulk of my good friends were people from Eastern Europe, China, or South America. Knowing Japanese meant being much less isolated and feeling like I was in a "bubble" than when I was an exchange student years earlier, but the reality was that people's expectations of who I was functioned as though to label me with "handle with care" or "treat with caution". The language itself was not the key to making all difficulty go away. Rather it let me handle the necessities of day to day life, and make friends with a few of the more oddball 空気読めない types or occasional people with an international perspective/experience. I did get to experience it as a bit of a lingua-franca when it came to speaking with half Japanese half foreign exchange students who were raised speaking it, but basically any NJ I met preferred English, and the Japanese students were mostly conditioned to want a "foreign experience" from me that got in the way of genuine friendship or communication. I would have had a better blast being the English speaking "gaijin" ryugakusei getting drunk by the kamogawa. It's only if you attempt to integrate that you get bitter I guess.
Edited: 2014-06-13, 4:30 am
