The Seven Stages of Gaijinhood
A frankly indecent amount of time ago, reader Seb Roberts shared the following anecdote which is sure to ring true with anyone immersed in the politics of being a foreigner in Japan. I’ll let Seb take up the story:
Less than three weeks after I moved to Japan, I was invited to hanami with a bunch of my wife’s co-workers. She was a McEnglish drone, I confess, so that meant we were with a bunch of Brits, Yanks, Canucks, Aussies, and the odd Kiwi. It started to rain after a couple of hours, at which point we shuffled off towards an izakaya. As we hit the edge of the park, a totally pissed Brit passing by shouted…
“OY! That’s right, fuck off, you lot, this is MY Japan!”
This stunning outburst not only manages to be haikuesque in its brevity and Bukowskian in its straightness, it devastates our pretentious little shores like a mega-tsunami of pure foaming angry truth. Who was this stranger in the park and was he not seriously burnt by the white-hot epiphany exploding from his pissed/enlightened mind?
He might have been the last Westerner in Japan without an internet connection and hence the means to express pretty much the same idea, only in less direct ways, in a blog of his own or on blogs belonging to other people. The overwhelming humanitarian urge is to track that fellow down, introduce him to a mouse and keyboard and walk him to the nearest wireless field so he can start to exercise his gaijin rights.
Another school of thought has it that our pissed Brit had gone totally post-blog, or poblo, in the park that day. Yes, maybe he was one of the very first to self-publish his own personal myth of distinction and entitlement in Japan. Way ahead of the game, he employed all the rhetorical devices to fortify that myth in the face of contradictory evidence until the myth finally hardened into an incredibly unstable, super-dense twelve-syllable swear-mantra that rained hate on his rivals not in the usual form of a punctilious comment online but as an actual verbal outburst at a pitiable, rain-soaked cluster of McEnglish drones.
Where the hell would you place such a person on a trajectory of foreignness in Japan? Well, in order to do that you’d have to make one first:
While still very much a work in progress, the Seven Stages of Gaijinhood bears some resemblance to a plough with a plunging handle as our Japanophile sows his infatuation with the land of the rising schoolgirl skirt deeper and deeper into the soil of Amaterasu. The dramatic upswing at the end occurs because this is the optimistic version of the Seven Stages. The pessimistic version cannot be shown here owing to relevant information received about your psychological ability to cope with shock. Speaking of which, where would you place an outburst like “OY! That’s right, fuck off, you lot, this is MY Japan!” on the blade of this fine farming tool?
Notice the absence of a timescale in Fig 1. This is because some foreigners in Japan will ‘plough’ through all the stages in as little as three years while others will remain permanently hung out to dry on one stage or another. In essence, the graph assumes that people become less self-aware (able to regard themselves as individuals distinct from their Japan fixation) and less likeable (to people who knew them before) as their Japan obsession deepens through immersion in Japan and pursuit of related knowledge (also known as gaijin one-upmanship.) Here’s the breakdown:
A wide-eyed wonderer denotes someone newly arrived in Japan with little prior knowledge of the country. Since it’s not in our game to poke fun at newbies, it’s sufficient to say that doing a Scarlett Johansson in Japan is a pretty fine way to have a dizzying, life-changing experience. In fact, people in this stage usually retain a strong sense of self and are impervious to gaijin supremacy games. For the wide-eyed wonderer, a random public sighting of another foreigner is actually a positive sign that something good must be nearby.
The first dip in sanity occurs when people try just too hard to learn. Eager students may sacrifice critical judgment in the race to absorb their new cultural surroundings. They often stop you while you are eating and say: “You know, you’re not supposed to do that with your chopsticks, it means that the souls of the dead children won’t float to heaven properly.” To which the only polite response is “Christ, there are THIRTEEN of us at the table; we’re all DOOMED, I tell you, fucking DOOMED.” Most of these people actually went to university too, which makes it all the more heartbreaking really. However, to their credit, none of them have yet started to believe that they have ownership rights to Japan.
While some, like Western Buddhist converts and Momus, manage fine without it, cynicism begins as a healthy antidote to the pious Orient-worship of the previous stage. Kept in check it can be a solid friend throughout one’s time in Japan. But a witless cynic is someone devoid of insight who claims to be able to mine humour in holding Japan up to Western standards and finding it lacking. This kind of person is a keen online aggregator of stories about sexual inadequacy or amusing spelling errors in Japan. A reasonably sane person should be done with this stage in the first six months.
Once a person has outlasted the working holiday crowd and honed his Japanese skills he is in mortal danger of mutating into an indigenous wannabe. A raging supremacy complex will likely kick in with devastating consequences for this individual’s likeability as a human being. The issue now is how to distinguish himself. Indigenous wannabes are keen to tell anyone who will listen about their love of something slightly arcane - sumo, natto, enka, it doesn’t matter what - in order to stake an indigenous claim. Provincial wannabes may imitate the rustic flavours of their local Japanese dialect. Make what you will of a person so undistinguished as to have to resort to travelling overseas in order to steal a foreign yahoo’s identity.
Men tend to introduce gruff masculine slang to their speech to show that they never really subscribed to those hard-fought identity politics back home and are ready to embrace chauvinism as a way of life. Unsurprisingly, a lot of Western women leave Japan around this time. Copying those around them, Kansai-based gaijin may adopt a dismissive attitude towards all things Tokyo. Bullishness, small-mindedness, borrowed opinions: didn’t you leave your own country partly to escape these kind of things?
It’s impossible to live in Japan for any decent length of time and not become cynical about politics. In the early stages, political views tend to be half-formed ones like knowing the LDP is “full of shit” but only being able to suggest that the Japanese electorate mates with “the other guys, you know, the good guys”. But the event that triggers the onset of becoming an ill-informed activist is either a horrific racist ordeal involving a Japanese pensioner gagging at the sight of your freakishly dishevelled chest pubes in a public bathhouse or, for people who aren’t Debito, buying a copy of Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons, taking it home and reading it fully clothed.
From this it becomes obvious that Japan is a bad tooth in need of some severe canal work. But the Japanese people themselves don’t realise this; the ill-informed activist alone can save them from their political mire. That is, if he can escape from the clutches of arch-nemesis, Black Vans. Such a person always goes into a paranoid flap at the sight of said nationalist sound trucks, even when the announcement is actually saying: “Takeshima belongs to the Japanese! Advance this position strongly at the next Asian summit! And please buy a lottery ticket!”
Now don’t misunderstand me here. Real activism and self-empowerment are noble indeed. This particular activist, however, shuns actual engagement. He tends to rely on the latest op-ed in The Japan Times for information and his protests never go further than the audience of his English-language blog.
After the inevitable failure of his crusade to change Japan, the unscathed gaijin soldier looks for new battles and finds one. All over the world, foreign journalists are depicting Japan in ways which appear to him naive, condescending, generalized and so on. If you hang around the internet long enough, one of these misguided articles will appear and the gratifying ritual of unsheathing your Japanophile sword and cutting it to bits with expert thrusts can begin. Welcome to life as a semantic gatekeeper.
If only they’d give YOU the job of representing Japan to the world, YOU would do it so much better! Except YOU might not, because YOU have no coherent image of Japan to present anymore, only the semantic darts to puncture other people’s. It goes without saying what a huge waste of time this is for everyone involved.
The semantic gatekeeper is a kind of self-appointed regulator of knowledge about Japan in an endless global chitchat which is entirely peer-to-peer, i.e. among fellow Japanophiles. Japan itself doesn’t feature anywhere except as the patient. This kind of person takes on the role of custodian of Japan the country or of a voiceless group within it as a final grasp at power before succumbing to the inevitable: that Japan can and will manage without him.
Benjamin Disraeli’s famous maxim that “the East is a career” was only true when the field of gentleman scholars was somewhat more restricted. These days “the East is a field” might be a better way of framing the dynamic. Japan, a confined space bursting with things to understand, is a place to test oneself in early adulthood. Experience gained here can and must be put to better use elsewhere rather than used to support a feeble entitlement complex like that which leads to spontaneous verbal attacks on strangers in public parks.
An accidental gaijin then, is someone has come to terms with his being in Japan as no more than a minor detail in the complex arrangement of factors which made him who he is. An accidental gaijin can feel equally at home in Japan or away from Japan because an accidental gaijin is no longer OF Japan. To let his friends know this, the accidental gaijin finally gets around to changing his email address from something like me-san-in-japan-yes-JAPAN@domain.jp to plain old me-again@domain.com.
For the first time since he was a wide-eyed wonderer, the accidental gaijin is genuinely happy to encounter other foreigners in Japan. He does not order them off his territory nor even size them up from a safe distance and nod sagely at his perceived superiority. He walks right up to them and extends his hand. They try to run but he is too interested in them. He wants to know everything about their homeland. He wants to hear how they came to be in Japan. He wants to hear whatever concerns they may have about the present unsuitability of their employment situation. Finally, he realises that each and every one of them has a story that is as interesting as the cryptic islands he once laughably thought of as his own. He is, touch wood, recovering.
"Strongly hoping your amuse..."
Your insight makes me closer to some gaijins’ troubled mind. Do you think this kind of westerners’ identity crisis drama develops only in Japan or it might happen in other non-western countries but a bit in a different way? I find similar phenomena in South Korea.
Well well well this seems like a version of the Zen Buddhist Ten Ox-Herding Pictures: http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/mzb/oxherd.htm
Enlightenment gained through the taming of the beast and then releasing it as a concept, to finally exist in the world unimpeded by hangups.
Here’s my “Fuck off, this is my Japan” story: In 1992, I was living in Japan for the first time. I was invited by my landlord’s wife to a Soroptimist dinner dance (whatever that is). My roommate didn’t want to go, so I brought along my then very new boyfriend. At the party, he was quite the hit with all the Japanese ladies of a certain age because he danced with many of them, when their husbands refused to dance.
We were having a lovely time, and noticed a table with two gaijin, young women about our age. We walked over and introduced ourselves and did the small talk, where are you from, thing. But these two English teachers (American women) were frigid and couldn’t have made their displeasure more obvious. On the way back to our table I remember laughing realizing that they were actually angry (and perhaps embarrassed) that we were there.
It’s the inevitability of the process which I find disturbing. There is no way to go up without taking a long trip down, nothing but a long slouch toward Tondabayashi. I think there needs to be some allowance for a relapse, i.e. ill-informed activist hooks up with a nice J-babe, relapses upwards to indigenous wannabe, is then dumped by J-babe (reason - indigenous wannabe) and plummets back to activist or beyond. Maybe some hysteresis in there, too?
Very funny and very well written indeed.
Although I generally agree with your timeline, I don’t quite agree with the terminus, the “accidental gaijin.” It’s just that I don’t think you can seperate Japan from the persona you develop in Japan. When speaking Japanese (I am a translator, my wife is Japanese, my son was born there) I adopt a different persona. This is entirely un-self conscious.
I suppose if you were a feminist or a therapist, you would have to say foreigners who spend a lot of time in Japan and attempt to assimilate also internalize aspects of their host culture.
But in the end I agree with your assessment - while I certainly enjoyed living in Japan I became me again.
I died at the mention of Momus
One should aknowledge the very cunning and established fact that from a general japanese perception the best way to integrate foreigners would be more than less equivalent to a real “disintegration” method. Meaning puryfing the very assholeness and perversion of the we-foreigners, creating official reconversion schools specialized for we-foreigners to finally get the perfect gaijin “well disciplined and proudly behaving like the peace and love japanese”.It seems to me -and to my very narcissistic self- that what you describe here may cruelly reflect this reality as a whole consequence. Endemic reality.Kevin Rudd in not here in the air, sad but true.Desintegration of the foreigner substance looks like the real deal to me.Sitting in a coffee terrace and feeling myself among the others, without having to force this reality is a pure personal nostalgia.
Certainly the time frame can vary but there comes a point in Japan when you have passed through all the phases of gaijinhood just in time to enter your mid life crisis.
At the end of the day you have to be somewhere.
I’ve never been to Japan and I probably won’t ever be there for a time period as long as the one you’ve shown, but I can completely relate to the timeline you’ve set forth. Excelent writing. I wanted to stop because the post was so long, but I just kept being drawn in. I look forward to reading more posts.
Interesting and funny read. However, I am not confident with the naming of the Y axis “Self-awareness and general likeability”. As the newbie doesn’t come from nowhere, the assumption that he or she gets here clad with a high score in self-awareness and general likeability may be possible on a case by case basis, but I don’t see how this could apply as a general characteristic. “Assumption” or “illusion” of self-awareness may be more correct. The “recovery” doesn’t happen - when it does - along the original Y axis, but a renewed one. A 3 dimensional graphic is in demand. Thanks for the article anyway.
[...] That’s right, fuck off, you lot, this is MY Japan!” on the blade of this fine farming tool? The Seven Stages of Gaijinhood « The Westerner’s Fear of the Neonsign « Sadly, it is not this simple for white [...]
Oy you lot, fuck off out of my Japan. All your blogging is ruining my experience here.
That is an amazing essay and I feel like you are speaking a lot of what I have thought from time to time but simply don’t have the words to express. I think an interest in Japan is no different from getting involved in a cult - it’s a fascinating new world at first, it makes you seem different from everyone else, and you feel like you’re learning something unique as well. And perhaps it’s unique among cults since each church has exactly one member and every church is in a bitter rivalry with all the others. For a lot of reasons, it is a natural destination for dorky white guys who are convinced they are geniuses but for some reason other people don’t see it. Using Japan, such an accommodating-yet-alien culture, as a canvas you can paint yourself as an intrepid cultural pioneer without taking any actual risks or making the moral compromises that might be involved with other countries like Thailand.
I’ve never joined an actual cult, but the late stages of a Japan obsession make you start questioning how you have lived your life and what it has turned you into. It is such a huge world and you are living or obsessing over one increasingly irrelevant corner of it. Recently reading a biography of Pol Pot made me almost regret ever studying Japanese because I had no idea how insane and much more interesting than Japan was Democratic Kampuchea. Thankfully since the church of Japanophilia has a membership of one no one will stop you from quitting.
Still, flawed people have to live their flawed lives, and I think there are a lot of Westerners who live here, have gone through the stages, and have made their peace wherever the journey has taken them. I am impressed sometimes at how invested some English teachers are in the mission to improve Japanese people’s English levels (though they are perhaps the minority).
And as someone who works in Roppongi I have to remind that there are the elite expats here who operate completely above this gaijin fray even though they may share some of the prejudices or superiority complexes. A lot of them have all interactions with Japanese people simultaneously interpreted back to them so I wonder if they in fact have a better understanding of what Japanese people actually say.
Yikes, I want to take back that “Democratic Kampuchea is much more interesting than Japan” comment. Leave it to a Japanophile to casually talk of a mass murder as little more than a spectator event.
This is brilliant. I wasn’t there long enough to get even very far into stage 2, but I definitely met enough gaijin (namely the drunk English guy on the Tokyo subway on Christmas eve ranting about how much he hated his wife) to be able to pin at least one face to each stage. : ) Well done.
[...] Read the story behind the graph. [...]
Hey, Mr. Gaijin, have you seen this window display in shibuya? cho kakkoii
http://theworldofm.wordpress.com/2008/01/01/interactive-window-display/
[...] The Seven Stages of Gaijinhood A frankly indecent amount of time ago, reader Seb Roberts shared the following anecdote which is sure to ring true with […] [...]
I’ve never joined an actual cult, but the late stages of a Japan obsession make you start questioning how you have lived your life and what it has turned you into.
I would be walking my dog down the long, narrow road along the canal and passing motorists would do the usual doubletake and I would ask myself: “How in the world did I ever end up in Japan? Why live my life as a foreigner in a strange land?”
I would experience the heebie-jeebies for a bit, and then it would pass.
The key, of course, is decoupling the inner Japan obsession with your outer dealings with folks. Talking on and on about Evangelian is going to turn everyone off. But it’s the same wherever on the planet you are.
The best way to escape the “Seven Stages of Gaijinhood” is through conversation. Asking questions about other people, much like the “accidental gaijin.” Trying to learn more about the people around you is truly pleasurable, both for your newfound friends, and for yourself.
Adamu: It’s all about how you define ‘interesting’. As a J-E translator maybe you were thinking of the nuance of the term in Japanese?
I think it was you who made the astute observation over on Mutant Frog (but in response to a previous post here) that the explosion in blogging about Japan has allowed people to advance several stages through the gaijin experience without even being here. People can now arrive in Japan as card-carrying ill-informed activists, already primed to overreact to the smallest perceived slight from their hosts (”Can you use chopsticks?” etc.) Had I remembered in time, I would have liked to have included this in the article above.
Very, very well played.
How does the pessimistic version end? Do you become a twitcher? I’ve seen em on the train… twitching. It’s scary.
As with past articles on this blog, this is hilariously accurate! But again, where do you the author fit in? Accidental gaijin? Floating above it all? What do you do in Japan?
Like the commenter above I want to read details of the ugly, pessimistic outcome.
The Momus mention was funny, but you really should link to other examples in each stage. Come on you know you want to! Or maybe it goes without saying.
lolzjapan: Not intentionally funny. Momus has to be admired for not trying to ‘cure’ Japan and hence not falling prey to the worst excesses of the Seven Stages. In the archives of this blog, you’ll find plentiful evidence of how I’ve vacillated between most of the stages. I’m far from above it all.
As for the pessimistic version, let’s just say it proceeds to changing your name to phonetic Japanese and then protesting on your website when you visit your country of birth and the good people who raised you refuse to pronounce your name the Japanese way. I’ll leave it to you to figure out who this could be…
Thanks, got it.
Great roundup. I think that one way to stay sane is to skip the Eager Student stage. That shielded me from all the following stages. But I cannot escape the thought that hitotoki.org is a pure product of a late Accidental Gaijins trio.
[...] no point to this story. I was just reminded of it by another blog I’ve just read. I do remember drinking the beer anyway, naturally. As for the ale-whore, he eventually went up [...]
I like the piece a lot, and it has really hit home. As for the graph, I agree with a previous poster that it doesn’t really make that much sense. Very insightful writing, though.
A rather narrow and obviously tainted view of peoples progression in Japan. Of those I have met in Japan perhaps only a quarter (at most) could be pidgeon holed thusly. That said, that quarter makes a far larger impression than the rest combined. Nobody remembers the perfectly sane person living their well adjusted normal life in Japan. But everybody remembers the guy that can’t handle different cultures with grace and ends up with some freakish behavior till he breaks, heals, or runs.
Everybody reading this will say “Yea, I know a guy like that.” But I doubt anybody could honestly say “Yea, everybody I know is like that.”
Or perhaps I’ve just been lucky to have met a lot of exceptions to this theory…
“Nobody remembers the perfectly sane person living their well adjusted normal life in Japan.” I have been here for 23 years. I don’t remember any “perfectly sane” people. I am not even one. And what is “sanity” by the way? How does having difficulties adjusting a show or symptom of lack of “sanity”? The view may be narrow and tainted, but you see John, broad and clean is boring. It’s lacking the graininess of life. Having met “lots of exception” is not a sign of luck. It may have more to do with the Law of series.
This was an excellent read for someone moving to Japan in about a week. With blasé wit and surgical precision you have outlined how not to be seen in the eyes of your would-be seasoned contemporaries. Chief among the reasons I am going is that I just think it would be funny. Kind of a narcissistic indulgence, a way to live a satire of sorts. I hope this defies your characterizations.
The New Yorker in me would reply to that Brit, “Yeah, fucking arrest me, man,” and I’d have gotten a good laugh out of it.
hey calligraphykid, ive been receiving lots of visitors who have come from your site, after seeing the comment above. just like to say thanks. I’ll be doing a “friends of TWOM” soon so I will remember to include you.
I totally disagree with this article. I still don’t understand why to this day we as foreigners in Japan can’t claim any identity here other than that of the “gaijin”. Why can’t we claim an identity as a Japanese? Is that such a bad thing? What if we feel more comfortable here, living as any other Japanese would? Remember, you aren’t defined by where you’re born, or even where you grew up. I wish I could say that you are defined by yourself, but that isn’t true either. You are defined by the people around you, and articles like this only make it harder for foreigners to find their true place in Japan, in my opinion.
Kuro, I think you might find your answer in the fact that Japan is a very, very inward country. You can call it selfish and some will call it protectionism and others patriotic. To the Japanese, there are no middle ground > either Nihonjin or Gaijin, that’s it. This is their history, their economy, their DNA. That is why the Japanese culture is so unique that exporting it would create a massive novelty factor; it’s just so alien. That’s why the best gadgets are reserved for the home market, the best food, the best ranges in cars, even designer clothes. Perhaps this is what some might refer to as Japonica?
Also, unless you were oriental (like me) or Japanese (like me) you;re going to have to accept that you’re going to earn a label, just for being who you are. I have a label here in the UK. I’m forever going to be a banana - yellow on the outside, white on the inside. It’s supposed to be derogatory, but what’s the harm in poking a little fun at myself? Plus, gaijin ain’t that bad. It was a negative term used during war times, but nowadays, it’s so common that the only negativity attached to the term is the one you attach to it. Besides Gaijins rock. It was because of you guys the best parts of Japan (Tokyo) have been built; Roppongi, Midtown, Azabu.
Bravo. Nice post. The comments and reactions seem proof of it’s resonance. If not taken too seriously these seven stages could be applied to other obsessions / endeavors.
If we take a moment to think of what enthusiastic yet malinformed validation-seeking behaviors people engage in to define their (dare I say ‘our’
identities as people / members of a group/society / professionals / teachers / artists / citizens or what have you at one time or another, perhaps (they/we/I) (<<<choose carefully everyone) may begin to see the light.
This reads like an applied version of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’.
*One more thing. I liked your positive optimistic tone. I usually do and would like to share your bright view but a part of me is curious about the grounds of your optimism. Perhaps your other readers would appreciate your thoughts on this.
I would add a category of “tongue-in-cheek-know-it-all”,the rapidly growing demographic group,between “witless synic” and “Ill-informed activist”type…
Being Japanese and reading English Japan stories of various forms is no fun these days.
Sometimes I wonder why I belong to the group that is destined to endure being such an easy prey of criticism and sarcasm from foreigners.
Personally,I want “semantic gate keeper”type as my next door gaijin,though I know I’m asking a bit too much for that in reality since there are as many of them as Sumatran Rhinoceros….
And my take on “One hundered years of solitude of being a gaijin in Japan” tales.
If gaijin can switch their target of cult from Japan to Democratic Kampuchea or whatever so easily,and we can’t stop being Japanese and all tied up to the national identity to the end of our lives,is it too much to ask gaijins that they should be more like us and not the other way around at least in the land of rising sun,since we are here first and will be here longer?
Not that I’m saying “stop complaining!”,which is plain ridiculous,but that the road goes both ways and our opinions about expats and foreign colleagues rarely get public and if we want to get along,we need to go along for certain amount.No?
Allright,never mind.The above comment was too harsh even from me.
I take it back and apologize.
>Being Japanese and reading English Japan stories of various forms is no fun these days.Sometimes I wonder why I belong to the group that is destined to endure being such an easy prey of criticism and sarcasm from foreigners.
I agree with you, Aceface, although you’ve already apologized. Reading English Japan stories is often boring because what some foreigners say has never changed since 19 century and they speak only to their mirror, not to us. Listening to endless mantra is not fun at all. I think Japan is needed for some people only to enforce their identities and it’s none of our business. We should go our own way, ignoring their ill informed criticism and tasteless sarcasm against their imagined Japan and Japanese. It’s no time to wallow in self-pity. We have many things to do.
I add that I don’t apply this “they” to all the foreigners, off course, and the limit and content of “we” should be always open and flexible.