My class is doing a research assignment on the positives and negatives of tourism in Japan and I have somehow ended up with the topic of negatives concerning foreigners and Japanese culture.   

So, I was wondering if any of you knew stories about this kind of thing? For example, although not necessarily Japan specific, foreigners not taking shoes off or taking pictures in Buddhist temples which can be seen as a sign of disrespect.

Alternatively, it can go the other way. Such as Japanese people assuming all foreigners come from America and speak English. (Not sure how true this is though)

Thanks for the help

I kind of have one on the Japanese side, though I don't think they really meant any disrespect.
I have black hair and pale skin, but I'm not Asian. Every time I went somewhere in Japan, people would let out a slight scream (or a big scream occasionally) when I turned towards them, since people often mistook me for Japanese from the back. Sometimes people would just stare at me in shock when I was walking on the street, or say things like "That foreigner has black hair!", thinking I couldn't understand. I've also had Japanese people I've met online outright refuse to believe I have black hair, until I started pointing out black-haired movie actors as examples.^-^;
Also, Japanese people I meet offline tend to comment about my hair color being "so rare", and ask me about my ancestry after a while. I've never been as conscious of my hair color as I have been around Japanese people..

Most Japanese movies seem to like showing blonde American characters, so I guess they might think that Americans are mostly blonde.

How about some foreigners' inability to read signs even when written in English or just lacking common sense in Japan?

I remember being at a shrine (Fushimi Inari-taisha I think?) and there were a lot of foreigners. There was a medium-sized building that a few people were standing in front of. I'm fairly sure there was a sign posted on the side with the entrance to the building saying "do not enter", because I remember being completely dumbfounded when I saw the guy just waltz right in with his camera.

Also at the arcade I visited a lot (a-cho in Kyoto), the top floor is dedicated to music games. There was a game Dance Evolution that was front and center when you turned the corner after climbing the stairs. It's a game where you use your full body to dance, so it's understandable that it can be embarrassing to have a video of yourself taken. There's a sign that clearly says "no taking pictures or videos without permission". Some random foreigner strolls into the place with his camera in hand, takes a lap around the place, and then stand off to the side directly in front of the sign filming some people playing the Dance Evolution game. He didn't say a single word to them either.

It's kinda frustrating. Not entering a place at a shrine where NO ONE ELSE IS despite there being a crowd, should be a no brainer that you should not go in. The game one annoys me because it just feels disrespectful even if the sign wasn't there (most likely not intentionally, but still disrespectful in my opinion. Kind of like those people who take random pictures of people to post on the internet).

I was listening to a podcast the other day about "Back from my trip to Japan" and it mentionned how Chinese tourists can be a handful and would be obnoxious, loud, sit on the floor, eat, spit, smoke -- all at the same time in the middle of a mall where you aren't supposed to do any of those things.

The podcaster's wife also remarked how mini-skirts are super normal and widespread there (when it's not for us) but on the opposite low cut tops are avoided (when it's not for us). (The podcasters went there during summer).

[Zgarbas]

I work at a Shinto shrine which attracts many foreigners due to it being, erm, somewhat unorthodox. Last year a couple started smoking right in front of our booth, even though there was a big no smoking allowed sign, and, you know, sacred ground and all. I pointed this out to the other mikos and they said that it's rude but it can't be helped (I find that this is the case with most breaches of etiquette in japan), but it really irked me. I made an announcement 'Please don't smoke on the premises' on the speaker, but they didn't seem to care. After a minute I decided to walk up to them and ask them to not smoke in the shrine; they're reaction was to throw away the cigarette butts there and then.
'Could you please not litter in a shrine?'
And I left. I may have literally huffed and puffed. They were really confused. That's pretty much it, in my exp people don't really care about the rules that much (I've see many Japanese people smoking in no smoking areas, even in shrines).

I do find that foreigners tend to use louder voices when they talk though.

Bokusenou: Many Japanese people ask me if my hair is my natural colour (it's blue, with visible roots). I find that hilarious.

(2016-02-08, 4:47 am)Bokusenou Wrote: I kind of have one on the Japanese side, though I don't think they really meant any disrespect.
I have black hair and pale skin, but I'm not Asian. Every time I went somewhere in Japan, people would let out a slight scream (or a big scream occasionally) when I turned towards them, since people often mistook me for Japanese from the back. Sometimes people would just stare at me in shock when I was walking on the street, or say things like "That foreigner has black hair!", thinking I couldn't understand. I've also had Japanese people I've met online outright refuse to believe I have black hair, until I started pointing out black-haired movie actors as examples.^-^;
Also, Japanese people I meet offline tend to comment about my hair color being "so rare", and ask me about my ancestry after a while. I've never been as conscious of my hair color as I have been around Japanese people..

Most Japanese movies seem to like showing blonde American characters, so I guess they might think that Americans are mostly blonde.

hahahahah
that is so funny

and ridiculous XD

Nice! These are all super interesting! And kinda unbelievable :O
That seems so frustrating though; despite the rude behaviour of the tourists, Japanese people can't really do anything about it. I know that Japanese culture is more reserved and all about 'reading the air' but still. How do they stop that kind of behaviour from spreading?

Also Japanese people talking about black hair being rare xD When literally every single one of them has natural black hair wow

(2016-02-09, 4:55 am)Marmalade Wrote: Nice! These are all super interesting! And kinda unbelievable :O
That seems so frustrating though; despite the rude behaviour of the tourists, Japanese people can't really do anything about it. I know that Japanese culture is more reserved and all about 'reading the air' but still. How do they stop that kind of behaviour from spreading?

Also Japanese people talking about black hair being rare xD When literally every single one of them has natural black hair wow

I think they meant rare for non-Asian foreigners, but yeah... I'm guessing it might be part of the nihonjinron view that everything in Japan is "unique". The funny thing was that at the time, one of the Harry Potter movies was in theaters, and you could see pictures of black-haired Harry everywhere.

A friend of mine who used to teach in a Japanese school was given a charming picture of herself drawn by a fellow teacher. It was a kind of anime portrait of her, only she has black hair (is in fact of Lebanese descent) while the picture showed her with yellow blonde hair. I think Japanese people may often "re-write" foreigners in their minds as blonde.

A lot of people assume that I will speak English (I never do in Japan). I don't think that they necessarily think I am American. I have been in tourist centers where Italians and Russians talk to Japanese staff in English. Nearly always in most parts of the world, whenever two people from different non-English-speaking countries converse it is in English. However little English each knows it is usually the only language they both know a bit of. So the assumption that one speaks English is not that unreasonable.

However I also meet older Japanese people who really can't believe that Japanese spoken slowly and clearly cannot be understood by any human being. I like those people!

When I first went to Japan, my fiancee and I went to Kawagoe, and I made some comment about the Japanese women who were wearing kimonos. My fiancee shook her head. "Those are Chinese people," she said. She could tell by the colors of the kimonos and the cut of the sleeves that they were something a Japanese woman wouldn't be caught dead in. Apparently, it's a thing for young Chinese women to come to Japan and pretend to be Japanese for a day. It's a tolerated, but not especially well liked, behavior.

I've seen tourists (mainly Chinese) eating on the walkways of 明治神宮前, despite the numerous signs in multiple languages - with pictures - telling people not to do it. (IMO, that's probably what you get for having a holy site in walking distance from Harajuku.)

The rise in popularity of AirBnB seems to be stirring controversy (http://www.asahi.com/articles/ASHC752KKHC7ULFA004.html). In some cases, the mere site of foreigners coming and going out of a building seems to be what disturbs people. In more serious cases, it's an issue with Southeast Asian and Chinese tourists creating a lot of noise, leaving a lot of clutter, or not understanding how the metro Tokyo trash collection system works. In the most extreme incident, a 4-year-old girl died when she pitched off of a balcony after her mom went to a nearby コンビニ to buy Disneyland tickets.

(2016-02-09, 10:31 am)CureDolly Wrote: A friend of mine who used to teach in a Japanese school was given a charming picture of herself drawn by a fellow teacher. It was a kind of anime portrait of her, only she has black hair (is in fact of Lebanese descent) while the picture showed her with yellow blonde hair. I think Japanese people may often "re-write" foreigners in their minds as blonde.

A lot of people assume that I will speak English (I never do in Japan). I don't think that they necessarily think I am American. I have been in tourist centers where Italians and Russians talk to Japanese staff in English. Nearly always in most parts of the world, whenever two people from different non-English-speaking countries converse it is in English. However little English each knows it is usually the only language they both know a bit of. So the assumption that one speaks English is not that unreasonable.

However I also meet older Japanese people who really can't believe that Japanese spoken slowly and clearly cannot be understood by any human being. I like those people!

That's interesting about the blonde hair thing! I wonder how Japan got the idea that blonde hair was the hair color for foreigners anyway...

(2016-02-09, 5:52 am)Bokusenou Wrote: I think they meant rare for non-Asian foreigners, but yeah... I'm guessing it might be part of the nihonjinron view that everything in Japan is "unique". The funny thing was that at the time, one of the Harry Potter movies was in theaters, and you could see pictures of black-haired Harry everywhere.

What.... ? Daniel Radcliffe doesn't have black hair, he has  very medium brown hair. That's something that annoyed me during the first movie, it's not like it would have been hard to dye his hair and in the books he does have black hair.
(After the first movie, due in no small part to Daniel's excellent acting, I was resigned to the hair color. And also the remarkable neatness of his hair despite how it was remarkably -messy- hair in the books.)

If there were posters that were not photographic, then, well, I'm not surprised that people didn't take them literally. The range of hair colors in Japanese artwork is ridiculous. (Not exclusively anime hair colors although it's certainly the limited cel paint palette in anime production that started the trend of oddball hair colors).

The posters I remember however were like this,
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm270966272/tt...f_=tt_ov_i
(I'm not sure if that's a painted work or a heavily airbrushed photo collage to be honest, but anyway, you can see Harry/Daniel's hair isn't black.)

[Zgarbas]

Huh, that's interesting. is see this as black hair. That poster is clearly oversaturated, but I always thought of Daniel Radcliffe's hair as black (I was really bothered by him having blue eyes, tho ). We don't really seethis as blonde, but as brunette, on the other hand.

I've heard before that the general hair colour in your area affects perception, and I've noticed that since moving to Japan I've become very sensitive to hair colour variation. As in, even if someone bleaches their hair by 1-2 nuances, I will notice it, though in Romania it would hardly count as 'dyeing your hair'.

On a similar note about colour perception, I've had a lot of people refer to my eyes as green here in Asia. Especially Chinese people. Some went as far as to ask other people 'do you think this person's eyes are blue or green?', since they just couldn't take my word for it, even after taking out my passport to show them how it states clearly that my eyes are blue. On the other hand, my hazel-eyed friend is constantly praised for their blue eyes. Colour perception is *weird*.

Mostly, I misread your response. Sigh.

I still wouldn't think his hair was black in that photograph...

To my mind, black hair is the natural color of hair among Africans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asians and appears very, very rarely among most of those of European descent, although quite a bit more frequently in Mediterranean countries.

Regardless of how dark hair is, if it reflects with golden or orangey highlights, to my mind it's dark brown. If it reflects with bluish or purplish highlights, it's black. (Dyed hair notwithstanding, where it can actually be blue or purple. I don't think there's any natural hair color that reflects bluish or purplish that isn't really deeply and unmistakably black.)

Even so, Daniel's hair is -substantially- paler than many (including my own father, which is dark, -dark- brown and maybe is part of why I'm sensitive to the difference between black and brown).

I'm also mildly colorblind (the mildest of the red-green colorblind types. They used to call it 'red-green earthtone colorblind' back in the day but now I guess it has a number). In order to make up for that color deficiency also I'm particularly sensitive to tiny color differences as a result as constantly striving to discern right up to the very limits of my physical ability to do so. (Of course it's futile when you get into certain color ranges, but in hair colors those colors I have trouble with only appear in the range people call 'auburn'. The brighter reds and the truer browns are no problem, and other hair colors are completely unrelated to my color deficiency. Again, excepting hair dye...)


But regarding color perception, I wonder if the Japanese perceive a whole range of paler browns as being 'blonde' hair... there isn't, after all, any real difference between pale blonde and chestnut brown other than depth of shade (though there are various amounts of redness that can also be mixed in). That would help account for the 'all foreigners are blonde' perception.

(2016-02-09, 11:37 pm)SomeCallMeChris Wrote:

(2016-02-09, 5:52 am)Bokusenou Wrote: I think they meant rare for non-Asian foreigners, but yeah... I'm guessing it might be part of the nihonjinron view that everything in Japan is "unique". The funny thing was that at the time, one of the Harry Potter movies was in theaters, and you could see pictures of black-haired Harry everywhere.

What.... ? Daniel Radcliffe doesn't have black hair, he has  very medium brown hair. That's something that annoyed me during the first movie, it's not like it would have been hard to dye his hair and in the books he does have black hair.
(After the first movie, due in no small part to Daniel's excellent acting, I was resigned to the hair color. And also the remarkable neatness of his hair despite how it was remarkably -messy- hair in the books.)

If there were posters that were not photographic, then, well, I'm not surprised that people didn't take them literally. The range of hair colors in Japanese artwork is ridiculous. (Not exclusively anime hair colors although it's certainly the limited cel paint palette in anime production that started the trend of oddball hair colors).

The posters I remember however were like this,
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm270966272/tt...f_=tt_ov_i
(I'm not sure if that's a painted work or a heavily airbrushed photo collage to be honest, but anyway, you can see Harry/Daniel's hair isn't black.)

Yeah, I know, but in some of the promotional photos it's black: http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/3...0-1500.jpg
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BNz...SY720_.jpg
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/3...27-468.jpg

Also, interesting idea about Japanese people perceiving browns as blonde! I never thought about it that way...

Hmm, dunno. I'm an American and I've lived in Japan for 7+ years, but I've never noticed much difference between how Japanese and Americans interpret hair color.

The thread "Japanese 'politeness levels'" on this forum contains a glorious amount of misunderstandings about Japanese culture

[Zgarbas]

Update in my culture clash anecdote
Same festival, the following year. We had 3 people who started smoking in the shrine premises, one more than once. All Japanese. They didn't seem as sorry as the foreigners last year... Partly because I didn't get as mad. 
Sometimes our harshest judges are other foreigners ^^'