Job Discussion Forums

[Like a Rolling Stone]

Have you met any weird people in Japan? sometimes I think people come to Japan because they are strange in their home counrty and come to Japan to escape. When nobody speaks your language then you don't mind them saying things about you

The strangest person I met was Bob (Names have been changed to protect the ....... strange. Bob came to Japan after universtiy and went to a village to live. He liked it because there was no nightlife so he could study kanji. That's okay but after two years he knew more kanji than most Japanese. There were not many foreigners in this place so sometimes we invited him to come with us to the pub. Usually he said no, but then oneday he said "Ok" and we went to the pub. But he didn't talk about much for the whole time. We were trying to talk to some girs but he didn't want to. Then one of them talked to him and we said "Go on talk to her". Then he said "Which kanji can you write? I can write (a really difficult kanji)" then got out a pencil and paper and wrote it. "Can you write that?" She said "No" and walked away.

The other person was the man who interviewed me at ZIAC.

[Khyron]

[abufletcher]

[Brooks]

you are just justifying your own laziness.
There is nothing wrong with learning kanji.
Being a geek is a different issue, however.

[guitarcries]

There's someone here in town who is somewhat similar. When I first arrived I tried pretty hard to get him to come out, but he just won't. He works pretty hard, and then studies like crazy. He knows more kanji than the nihonjin English teacher at my school. Just makes you wonder what the motivation is for learning all that!

[cafebleu]

You can interpret "Henna gaijin" in different ways. Not necessarily the anti social or those who seem to have little going for them in their home country so they go to Japan - although I have always thought it's fine if people are dissatisfied with life in their own country and have the gumption to go and seek out a new one with all its challenges and disadvantages elsewhere.

I don't know how many posters live in Kyushu/Fu kuoka but during my time there I lived in the countryside and had little do with any foreigners, sadly. That changed when I met the wonderful Chinese man who eventually became my husband but I did encounter foreigners a few times in the city - Tenjin.

Since then I have heard that Fu kuoka has a deserved reputation for being cliquey. I can't say it so much from my own point of view as I was fairly isolated out in the countryside and after meeting my future husband didn't see any need to do the pub/club thing in Tenjin.

But what did strike me on the few jaunts I made there and was reinforced by other foreigners who weren't part of the 'inner circle' was that life there tends to be about foreign men who have lived there for about 10 years plus, who tell each other about the real job opportunities (Fukuoka is relatively bad for work and the cliquey aspect where most jobs are not advertised unlike in the big cities on Honshu makes it very difficult for those who don't cultivate others) and have a sense of self importance. Foreign women count for about zilch. It's a tough lady who stays there for over 2 years.

Trying to socialise there as a woman according to any no. of nice foreign women with great social skills who have experienced life in Fukuoka is akin to going to the kinds of male bastion pubs in their home countries where women are completely ignored or perceived as intruding on the male social scene. These men are usually hets by the way!

Anyway, the strangest foreigner I met once was a shaven headed man (probably in his 30s). He was from New Zealand and I met him in one of the foreigner places in Tenjin not known as a pick-up bar but as a social place. What the place should have had in the fine print of its advertising was "This is foreign men's space".

This man was called Wayne something and he had lived in Japan for some time. He spent a great deal of time wrapping up himself and telling me and my female friend about how he runs in an annual festival in Fukuoka called the Yamakasa. Clearly he was fascinated with himself, talking about the skimpy costume the men wear (like a g string), telling us to come and take photos of him, going on and on about how he is part of some special group.

We found him a henna gaijin because he seemed so immature for somebody who had lived so long in Japan. A right boaster. And clearly not even thinking that maybe while this was fine for some impressionable Japanese woman (the gaijin running the Yamakasa - eeeeeeeeeeeeeh!) we were foreign ladies in our 30s. Our chat did nothing to mark us as impressionable or anything else that might have warranted his holding the floor about how wonderful he, Wayne, was.

Some time later my friend who had moved to Tokyo to get out of the suffocatingly small foreigner scene in Fukuoka (and to get a fantastic job that she was qualified for but would never have got in Fukuoka with its lack of advertising and jobs for the boys network) sent me an email telling me to look at another esl website and look at a particular post.

It was our old friend Wayne telling all and sundry to check out his website. His website had some glaring English mistakes - grammar that anybody teaching English abroad should know in their primary school days. To make it even stranger this man had conned his way into teaching English at one of Japan's most famous companies. I am sure the businesspeople there had to bit their tongue at his grammatical mistakes!

[nomadder]

Brooks was that a joke or have you been in Jland too long?

There's nothing long with learning kanji?

Much like 70 plus drivers maybe long term English teachers need to take spelling tests.

[Brooks]

my bad.
Learning kanji takes a long time. Not sure when I will ever be able to read a Japanese newspaper.

I have been too busy lately. I have had to sub for a teacher who went to Australia.
If I had more sleep, I probably wouldn`t make spelling mistakes.

[gaijinalways]

weird foreigners

After living in Japan, what constitutes weird?

One of the 'funniest' people I met was a S. African I worked with at a eikaiwa. He lived in Roppongi for a a while. He said he couldn't go to bed early, too much temptation! He always showed up to work hungover. One time he fell asleep when teaching and the student went to get the staff to wake him up !

Another woman used to tell me about being deathly afraid of earthquakes. Of course living in Japan, why did she come ?

Another guy who still visits from time to time dated a Japanese woman for almost ten years before marrying. He finally married her as she was going to give up if he didn't (who lucked out, I wonder? ). He still writes letters to the editor, sometimes talking through his hat about US-Japan politics.

[David W]

Cafebleu. Wasn't this bloke was it? second from the right at the back.

[cafebleu]

I still think that guy is obnoxious, slimey and big-headed! Yes, that's him! It's from his website - had a look back at it recently and all the bad grammar has been corrected!

Good luck to Wayne doing that activity each year. My point was he is the strangest foreigner I met in Japan because I and my friend hardly knew him but there he was, self-obsessed and going on about how wonderful he was.

I recall his slagging off of other foreigners in Fukuoka - 'losers' he called them, reflecting the territorial syndrome that seemed to afflict those foreign men who lived in Fukuoka for some time. Nobody else was allowed a look-in!

Looking through Wayne's photo albums I just loved the one titled "Beer" where it consists of one dorky photo of Wayne and a friend sitting in front of a plastic table with beer. Of course Wayne's baseball cap is backwards and of course we can buy the photo if we wish.

So sorry David W if he's your friend. But I don't like him, I didn't appreciate his arrogant and dismissive 'guchi' of other foreigners and I didn't want to listen ad nauseum about how he runs around with no jocks in the streets of Tenjin prior to getting dressed in his g string for the Yamakasa each year!

[David W]

[Keith_Alan_W]

Strangest guy I've met is Lars in Matsusaka. He'd been at GES for about three months when I arrived and had to sleep on the floor at his place. All this guy did was study Kanji and talk about how good he was at reading , writing, and speaking it. In short, he was a bit of a bore. I went out to a party night with a bunch of English teachers from Nova. He was there too. Even at thhe bar he only talked about Kanji. I saw a few cute girls hanging about and decided to ask him who they were. he told me he had never talked to them before, and then went to talk to some guys about Kanji most likely. The worst thing about Lars was that he was highly suspicious of outsiders and liked to brown nose to the boss. A week and a half ago I went to Fukouka to try aout a great little school there. Before I went I asked the boss to phone my ex-boss at GES to find out the real reason she had fired me. They told my boss not to tell me, but he did anyway

Aparantly the Kanji man Lars told the boss I was smoking weed (and everyone thought it was the story I told about being falsly arrested in Northern Ontario that made the boss nervous ) while staying at his house! The boss in Fukuoka thought that it was pretty funny that someone could believe I had smuggled drugs into Japan, especially since they searched all my bags.

Anyway, not only are some Ganjin stupid Kanji addicts, they are also lying, backstabbing, brown nosers.


PS cafebleu, I heard about that Wayne guy too. Aparently he's pretty infamous in the Fukuoka region.

[seanmcginty]

True story - This guy is actually one of my best friends from Japan and a really cool guy but I love telling this one.

Just after he gets to Japan to work with a big Eikaiwa (same branch as me) he goes to the video store to take out a membership. Being new he can't remember his address when he is filling out the forms, but he has a card on him that has the school's address so he puts that in the form instead.

Time goes by, he rents videos regularly and nothing out of the ordinary happens. But a few months later he comes into work one day and the Japanese staff, once they lay eyes on him, just break out into uncontrollable laughter. They were practically on the floor, barely able to breathe because they were laughing so hard.

"Uh....whats up?" He asks.

"You got a letter." One of them answers, handing him a postcard from the video store.

The postcard is all written in Japanese so he doesn't understand what it means. "Whats this?" He asks.

(more laughter) "You are late with returning your videos!" One of them replies, tears streaming down her face.

The card was one of those late delivery notices. It had the title of the movie written in bold letters on the front:

おしり丸出し４


Which, in English roughly translates to "Exposed Asses 4"

So, a word of advice to all you henna gaijins out there. If you are going to rent porn from a video store that has your work address, make sure you return those videos on time!

[sennen]

I met this guy once who had a serious problem. He was married to a Japanese woman, but hates being here in Japan, and doesn't like to make friends at all. The people he meets he treats in 2 ways- intimidation and arrogance, or he wants to get in their pants if they are good looking enough. He would really enjoy meeting people new to Japan so he could put them in embarrassing situations and looked down upon them if they didn't know the language, but also thought anyone proficient in the language were full of themselves. He also had a habit of making up his on versions of situations so he could constantly be the victim in everything. Not a person whom I really want to meet again! One very odd, insecure not so "gentle"man......