Gaijin pt 9189893918 (ad nauseum)

hi andy, just thought i would use my team member status to muscle in here and post some stuff that may be of interest to yr situation.
there's a thread here about "racism in japan" that is quite interesting. The main protagonist is Momus, a (sort of) pop er....musician, who has lived in Japan. he has written an article on the subject here (comments appended)

this site documents cases of "discrimination" in japan against foreigners.

Momus is a devils advocate who delights in bucking the party line, bu he writes in an interesting and provocative, albeit possibly misguidedly. I personally dont reacct to what he says with such scorn as others, but that i mainly because i have never even been to japan, and have no experience as such.

i guess my own experience of living abroad in russia, (whilst i would never claim to have exprienced discrimination in a offical, signs-in-windows sort of way), at the time, i found the paranoia and xenophobia of russians enourmously frustrating, especially given the warmth they displayed towards me when they wanted to. the idea of trying assimilate was uppermost in ones mind in the first few months, the desire to stop being stared at, to be treated the same, but i quickly realsied that such an ideal of integration, of passing as a russain, was completely out of reach. but others continued to find it irritating. so in part i undertsand momus' desire to celebrate the otherness of being a foreigner. on the otherhand, this divorement and seperation of foreigners from "natives" leads to the highly polarised world of moneyed Moscow, where rich western businessmen cavort with New Russians (de facto foreigners in theri own country, prob. of their own volition) in a world seperated by millions of dollars, if not by 100s of metres, from the Real Moscow around them, and this scene can be pretty ugly.

obviously the gap (im assuming) between gaijin and japanese is different, seperated by (perceived?) race, nationality, language etc, whwereas in Russia it is the money that creates the gulf (foreigners are equated with wealth to an almost absurd degree)

i wondered if you have been barred entry to any places andy?

anyway, a few things to mull on over the weekend.