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The empty seat on a crowded Japanese train
- paggle 7y agoSure, Japan is a ~monoracial country and there isn't the level of racial awareness there that you have in the US. I feel like you have to accept some of this if you choose to live in Japan as a person of color. I experienced this myself when I wanted to do the "teach English abroad for a year" thing in Japan after college. I have Top 1% English skills and have won literary prizes for my writing in college, and speak in a normal American accent that you might find in a news anchor. But everyone wanted a white person.
- eirini1 7y agoJapan is also definitely not a monoracial country - people are ignoring for example the Ainu people.
- paggle 7y agoAdded a character to clarify.
- laurieg 7y agoWhen people talk about a mono-racial Japan it's worth mentioning that the census data for Japan doesn't record ethnicity. Depending on where the statistics come from data may have been calculated by assuming that everyone with Japanese nationality is ethnically Japanese too.
- laurieg 7y agoAs a visible minority in Japan, experiences like this are extremely commonplace. In fact, I think the frequency is the most troublesome part. Every time you step out of the house there is someone there to remind you you are foreign. Just moments ago I bought some donuts and the woman in the shop awkwardly gestured at me instead of speaking to me. Obviously, this is not the end of the world and it's nothing to lose sleep over but I would advise people thinking of coming to live in Japan that attitudes and norms around race are quite different.
- reustle 7y ago> Every time you step out of the house there is someone there to remind you you are foreign. In my 2+ years here, I think I can count these cases on one hand. I think you may be picking out things that aren't actually unique to you being a foreigner, or your body language is just making it look like you're completely oblivious to what is going on in the interaction so they feel the need to make the communication extra clear.
- laurieg 7y agoI'm not doubting you, but I find it genuinely puzzling how our experiences can be so different. For me, being treated differently to Japanese looking people is just the norm. At first I assumed it was my Japanese level or some other feature, but I think you can't ignore the obvious difference. The other thing that sealed the deal in my mind is how I get spoken to very differently on the telephone compared to face-to-face.
- zamfi 7y agoThis was truly lovely to read. A peek into how cultures change.
- BlackLotus89 7y agoHe explicity said that nothing changed and that the episode on the train was the rarest of exceptions...
- zamfi 7y agoYeah, that's kind of the point -- cultures change one kid's unsavory attitudes altered at a time.
- barry-cotter 7y agoMy god, it must be so unpleasant to be the kind of person who thinks about that for the hours necessary to write an essay like the one he wrote ten years ago, and to continue stewing on it for ten years. I’ve lived in China for more than seven years and I definitely have an empty seat beside me on the metro more often than Chinese people and children and tourists say 老外(foreigner) regularly enough. So what? Life is good. I’m never going to be Chineses, same as he’s never going to be Japanese. If that bugs him why not go home? No one’s making him stay in Japan. Change the things you can, accept the ones you can’t and if you can’t deal with that get out.
- asp_hornet 7y ago> I’m never going to be Chineses, same as he’s never going to be Japanese. If that bugs him why not go home? No one’s making him stay in Japan. I’m so happy to read this comment. I lived in Japan for 4 years and had the same feeling. People are always upset they’re not seen as Japanese despite the fact they are indeed not Japanese. I could see an argument if you were a child of a western parent, born and raised in Japan with Japanese values constantly having to remind people that you are a Japanese national but these are just foreigners living in Japan with a chip on their shoulder because they weren’t born Japanese.
- new_realist 7y agoSeparate but equal? Or not even equal?
- josephg 7y agoI hear you, but I also notice how different the expectations and standards are around race in the west. If we transplant some of the things said above into America, I notice I have a very different reaction. Eg, “[Because he’s not white] he’s never going to be American. If that bugs him, why not go home? Nobody is making him stay in America.” “[Immigrants] are just foreigners living in America with a chip on their shoulder because they weren’t born American” (Edit to be really clear I’m not condoning or condemning. Just noticing.)
- rdl 7y agoI'd never sit in the last or even last 10% or so of seats on a subway train, as a healthy middle-aged man who isn't escorting a child or something. I'd also be highly suspect of a man who did that, and would be reluctant to sit next to him if I were disabled/woman/with-child/etc. Much more so in Japan. The illustration also shows him seated in a 'priority seat' where I'd never sit even if the train were empty. (This might just have been the illustrator, however.)
- ctack 7y agoI did wonder about his needing to sit in a crowded train at all. Maybe he’s passed middle age?
- hervature 7y agoNo/low priority doesn’t mean forbidden. Also, how is a healthy man different than a healthy woman? Both genders have the same ability to stand?
- rdl 7y agoI don't want to sit in a priority seat because some disabled/etc. people (including someone who appears healthy but has some hidden health problem, etc.) has to actually ask you to get up, etc. Male vs. female is a societal thing. I don't really think younger women should have particular priority in seating, but I'd probably say a middle-aged woman would have reasonable priority over a middle-aged man, all things being equal. There are enough cultures where women > men for this particular issue that I tend to go with it, though.
- jxramos 7y agoThis guy should cash in on the empty seat by having a staged Japanese friend break the ice and sit very conspicuously during his approach and settling in to claim that empty seat. Maybe even with verbal announcements along the way, walking through a crowd from an adjacent car to meander next to the expected to be empty seat. If they could stage cameras about to capture reactions from the crowd that could be slightly entertaining, possibly more.
- A2017U1 7y ago> verbal announcements At this point the foreigner is more Japanese than the local friend.
- tjpnz 7y agoI've lived here for 5 years and it's something that doesn't really bother me a lot. At the very least I'm not getting racial epithets shouted at me which I saw happen to a lot of foreigners (riding public transport) growing up in New Zealand.
- legohead 7y agoI experience this empty seat phenomenon in America, as a regular white man. I noticed it in college. Nobody would sit by me unless they had to, but they were never obvious about it either as far as I could tell. It just seemed like I had some social forcefield around me that pushed people away. I told me wife about it, and we had a laugh. But over the years it continues to manifest itself. I send me wife pictures of me at a full conference with empty seats only around me. I set up experiments to test my theory. At the airport, or even at work, I will deliberately sit in a middle section that would force people to sit next to me. Yet time after time, the seats next to me are the very last to be taken, if at all. I've tried being extra approachable (smile a lot), dull, aloof, be on or off my phone, etc. I am a good looking skinny guy who has excellent hygiene. But I have some negative social forcefield I can't explain.
- ryandrake 7y agoI don't think this has anything to do with you personally. It's just human nature. Go to a food court in a mall and observe. People will occupy the empty tables first, and only when all empty tables have at least one person sitting, will people start joining strangers at "their" table.
- bytefactory 7y agoI've read that in body-language terms, sitting in the middle seat of a small row of seats communicates "I would like to be alone here", whereas sitting in the edges communicates "feel free to sit here". This might have confounded your experiment :)
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- shatobi 7y agoI think there is a lot of over-interpretation of his. It never seems to happen to me. When you want to be the victim, you might seem to notice it happening. And certainly, there might be some people who don't like foreigners. But as far as I can tell I don't notice it. Perhaps the author has some other features that might make one want to sit beside someone else. The discriminative feature might not him being a foreigner. Furthermore, as a kid I did not like to sit beside foreigners (anyone I did not know) either. I was scared of anyone.
- xelxebar 7y agoPerhaps, but the discrimination one feels living in Japan is more about the sum total of a bunch of separately innocent actions that, taken together, feel kind of crappy. I've lived in Japan for about ten years now and certainly sympathize with the author. It's a great place to live, but there are still things that just plain suck about it, too. It's kind of like this. Imagine, if every time you started a conversation with someone they, just once, wrinkled their nose. If it happened a single time, you might not even notice it, and even if you did it's not really a big deal. However, after it happens day in and day out with pretty much every person you interact with, it's easy to start doubting yourself, "Am I making a weird face, too? Do I stink? Am I the one causing this for some reason? What's going on?" The same sort of thing happens with the empty seat. It's relatively harmless as an individual instance. However, after it happens a thousand times, after having anything you share get interpreted, for the thousandth time, as a This Country vs Your Country Compare and Contrast session, after getting ignored in favor of people trying out their English on you for the thousandth time, then it just gets a litte exhausting. Any of those things is fine in isolation, but the straw that broke the camel's back is the same as the million that didn't.
- flippinburgers 7y agoI just do not understand this mentality. We live in a primarily homogeneous society. There will be friction there. It comes across as overly sensitive.
- executesorder66 7y agoThis just seems like pure racism to me. I spent 2 weeks in Japan recently, and I took all kinds of trains, from the Shinkansen, to Tokyo metro to random local trains. In various cities and towns. I am, and I look white af. Not even remotely Japanese or even Asian. Not once on my trip did Japanese people "avoid" me or leave an empty seat between us. In fact some of them even slept on my shoulder! The only time there were empty seats was when only a few people were on the train and everyone naturally spreads out. The only difference I can tell between myself and this guy, is that he's black and I'm white. But we are both distinctly non-Japanese. So again, it just seems like racism to me. I'd be glad to hear why that is not the case though. Let me know what you think.
- Grue3 7y agoNah, it's racism, there's no other explanation. I'm also white and people were not only sitting next to me, but even offering me snacks on intercity trains. Interestingly in my own country people rarely sit next to me unless there's no other seats.
- ananosy 7y agoI've been living in Tokyo for quite a bit, I'm married to a Japanese woman. I'm Caucasian, born in Estern Europe. I just asked my wife about this and she told me that even though it's a stereotype, some westerners have either strong perfume smells or due to their size are very hard to sit next to. So instead of trying to play the lottery when sitting next to a foreigner, they'd rather sit next to a Japanese. This, obviously, doesn't apply to what they consider attractive foreigners.
- flippinburgers 7y agoI've been living in Japan longer than this guy and I can say that these sorts of things happen, but I find it totally ridiculous to get upset about them. If you are angered about the way your are treated, you really should return to your home country. I say this because the level of self-absorption in this mentality is astounding. People are naturally going tend to feel a range of emotions around a foreigner that they wouldn't feel around someone who looks like them. Rather than being upset or lambasting the Japanese culture for "racism" it is much more productive, I feel, to treat people kindly and let them discover that there really is nothing to fear. While he did do that with the little girl in the article, he also went ahead and wrote an entire newspaper article that effectively condemns Japan. The overt cultural aggressiveness that I see dominating the airwaves thanks to websites like twitter more often than not leaves me feeling sick to my stomach: I have no respect for people who feel they have to right to forcefully make someone else do or act a particular way regardless of how "correct" they feel their way is. It is a seat on a train for gods sake.
- episteme 7y agoIf you don't like racism, go back to where you came from..? Are the Japanese also against freedom of speech? Writing an article about racism is not "forcefully" doing anything.
- NalNezumi 7y agoThis was a heartwarming story. I might add my own experience as a half Japanese/north European that recently moved to Japa. I've experienced the empty seat thing too, but it's not as bothersome as the people that stand up and move to other seats seconds after you sit next to them in a crowded train, now that makes me nervous. Being a foreigner does come with some perks I sometime envy though. Because I speak the language fluently, and one of my parent being Japanese, I'm sometime just labeled as "a rude person" when I act like a foreigner (where I'm born and raised), while a foreigner would just get a pass as people think "he just don't know how things work around here". I do feel that too many foreigners (including me) jumps to the "racism" explanation too quickly though. It's not unreasonable because some things, such as finding a apartment as a foreigner are a experience filled with racism. Japan sure don't mind writing racism down on their list of preference. But most Japanese people simply runs on auto-pilot most of the day, and if they see something out of the ordinary (foreigner in the train) they just get really confused and stay away. Giving them a smile and a friendly nod usually lower their alertness pretty well.