Oddbean

When I went to Japan for nostrasia last year it was a horribly lonely place; luckily the conference was full of friendly people, but outside it I felt extremely isolated. I had meaningful interactions with only 2 Japanese people while I was there. There felt like a deep isolation due to language barrier, culture, and race. I'm curious about your take on this. I'm from rural America where you can talk to almost anyone and it's not weird.

I don’t have any Japanese friends so I don’t know. I’ve heard from other people’s experiences that this is what they’ve felt too. As an outsider you are never treated the same. But even as a Japanese person you have the public you and the real you. Most of the time you are interacting with people’s public persona and never get to know the real them. Or so they say …

Do you speak Japanese? If not, how did you expect to have a meaningful interaction with Japanese people? The people you're talking about in rural America speak the same language as you. I've gone many places in Japan and had meaningful interactions. There's definitely more of a divide between strangers and acquaintances than western countries, but I find rural Japan to be far more welcoming. I met a guy that's about 70 the other day while he was out working in his garden and we've chatted a few times over the past week because we're both out early in the morning. He gave me some eggplant and said he'd help me plant some strawberries if I want. We talked about his former job and we talked about our families. I get what you're talking about - Japan can definitely feel lonely. The big cities are probably quite bad in that regard. But it can be a warm and welcoming country as well.

I was hoping to meet some English speakers. There were much less English speakers there than I thought there would be. But one person and I shared a very nice conversation via Google translate over coffee. That was pretty cool