First and foremost, this isn't a journal entry about every individual Japanese person. People grow up under different parents and in different circumstances and environments, so there are all kinds of mindsets out there, not just one. Please look at this as a result of my personal observations and experience, having lived in Japan for almost 10 months now, and still being in the excitingly fresh stage of exploring and observing everything around me!

Coming to Japan, the more emotional of us might feel like every stare we are getting is meant in a bad way. There are a lot of gaijin in Tokyo, but there are still just as many Japanese people who will stare at a gaijin, and sometimes in ways that might not seem too comforting. Gaijin don't have the best reputation out here and I can personally understand that to some degree by admitting that I have seen some gaijin act in DISGUSTING ways. While I think it's terrible and unfair that a lot of people seem to view "gaikokujin" as an annoyance ("gaijin" means "outsider" and is the more rude counterpart of the polite form of the word foreigner "gaikokujin", though I constantly refer to myself as a gaijin anyway), there really are cases where it's understandable.

I shouldn't digress too much, but most recently, while at a TBS CDTV Filming for Urata Naoya and Ayumi Hamasaki's new single together, "Dream On", my sister and I encountered a non-Japanese man (another gaikokujin) yelling at Japanese workers in an upper class restaurant and demanding to them in English that they pay him 200,000 Yen (roughly $200) for his umbrella, which he insisted had been stolen in their restaurant.

Anyway, to go back to the topic at hand, even though gaijin generally seem to have a not so good reputation out here, even though it might seem like a lot of people might be glaring at you......that's not always the case. And it's taken more than a few instances for that to happen to me before I could realize it myself.

My favorite example comes from a McDonald's encounter. Two teenage Japanese schoolgirls came into a McDonald's in Shinjuku (yes, I was being a true gaijin! ^_<) and ended up standing right beside my sister and me. When they turned and realized we were gaijin, they didn't look happy. In fact, the looks on their faces would be best described as scowls. 
My sister and I began to feel a bit down. While the workers at the McDonald's had been quite pleasant, it seemed to us that these girls were really unhappy to run into a pair of gaijin, an encounter we weren't entirely unfamiliar with, but one that always breaks the mood.

Well.....all of a sudden, the larger of the two girls turned to her friend, not being very subtle, and still with that nasty-looking scowl on her face, said, "Kawaii! Cho kawaii!" (Cute, so cute!)

Well, you can imagine how we felt. (?_?)

And apparently it happens a lot. Looks that could otherwise be taken as nothing but hostile turn out to be the looks of people who might just be interested or impressed.

And most recently, after having gone to the Immigration Bureau to update our visa statuses, my sis and I ran into a host of somewhat serious-looking workers at the Student Inspection Department. Somewhat intimidated, we'd communicated in our best Japanese with them (which hadn't been great) and gone through the whole process, worried that these poor people felt troubled by having to work double-time for the two of us. And yet then, after the entire process was over, a few came to chat with us, others were happily talking about how we were twins (the head of the department even kept walking by to glance over, the funniest time being when he walked behind a wall, disappeared a moment, and then comically reappeared as just a head and shoulders peering around the wall at us and grinning). Even the worker we had been set up with, though he'd been otherwise distantly polite and quite serious, apparently stared at me for a moment and smiled when I wasn't looking. (Alex, my sis, caught him. XD) Yet when we went to get our visas officially, he had returned to being very serious.

It's hard to imagine that something that looks the entire opposite of what it is is possible, and of course, I have heard some terrible stories that can't possibly be anything other than the mean intentions of people who just don't like foreigners. (The assistant director of the movie I made out here in Japan with Alex and pro-actor Yasuda Akira-san, has a Japanese girlfriend, and was once spit on by an old Japanese woman when she saw them together and got upset--yes, it happens, uinfortunately! ><). But there are always good people, and those are the ones you're going to enjoy Japan with.

It's just a matter of finding out WHO those people are and not assuming that every scowl or unhappy face in the crowd are the hard stares of people who don't like gaijin. It's taken me some time of getting used to, but sometimes it seems that even the most angry looking person might just end up being the person you become closest to while out here! It's funny how that plays out, ne?