ARTICLE SUMMARY: I'm a vegetarian non-smoker living in a country where nearly everybody smokes and all the native cusine has meat. I also don't like all the w

ARTICLE SUMMARY: I'm a vegetarian non-smoker living in a country where nearly everybody smokes and all the native cusine has meat. I also don't like all the word-dancing involved in office-level Japanese, not to mention the office politics, and I especially can't stand the sheer pile of pointless (to me) social protocol. Because I don't participate in most of what the natives do, I've had a hard time making friends with said natives, and I'm lonely. There's nothing wrong with me, of course. This is Japan's fault, and they should fix themselves to be more like California. END ARTICLE SUMMARY Begin my take: I'm a native Californian, currently living in Tokyo. Admittedly, I'm not a vegetarian, but I don't smoke, and I agree that a lot of the stuff here can be maddeningly irritating... if you try and apply your own value systems. But you can't. It's a different country, they do things differently. If you try and fight that, for the most part, you're just going to end up bitter and frustrated. If you're going to live somewhere where the value systems are different, you need to figure out what you need to compromise on in order to keep both yourself and the natives happy. The one nice thing about being a foreigner, is that because you're a foreigner, you can get away with flaunting a lot of social protocol already. If you even make a solid attempt at observing social niceties, you can totally cock them up, and the Japanese will still be pretty happy that you bothered in the first place. Patio11-aka-Patrick, please feel to correct me where I'm wrong here. :)