Tokyo Tidbits

It was great to catch up to you again honey!

MJx

Ha ha silly grammar after too many drinks...that should be "with you"...

BTW your "remember function" for the comments doesn't work for some reason - if your darling tech-guru doesn't have time to sort it out drop me a line :-)

Thanks for making it Mie, sorry we didn't get a chance to chat this time. Next time ;)

MJ,
I'm lookin' forward to frolickin' around Tokyo on a gals' night out. I think we can cause some ruckas, don't you?
I'll see what me darling says. Thanks though!

Ian,
Yeah, this time around we barely chatted, huh? I'll track you done next time. I wanna hear how things are going (other than from your blog!)

I love your blogs, but is tokyo just full of japanese and white people? where are the indians, the blacks, the spanish, etc. from most tokyo blogs I get the feeling that other than native japanese, the only other foreigners there are white. am I wrong?

Mie,
It was nice seeing you again! It seems like the ASIJ gang is all over the world. Crazy and wild group! he he ;)

Kateland,
I'm not caucasion .. Nikkei Yon-Sei (Forth generation Japanese American). And then there's Joi Ito .. and Mie (She's Hapa Haole: Haole-Japanese). Well, if you goto Roppongi, there are alot of Middle-Eastern, and African people. Shinjuku has alot of Korean and Chinese folks. What am I missing?

Me neither. Not white. More of an olive hue, really.

Mie, it was nice meeting you, however briefly. I still adore your blog! (That red bathroom gave me a headache because I'm old and intolerant.)

Kateland, it is true that the wall of Japanese racism is real. You will rarely see a brown or black face here, except in an andvertisement.

Ｍｉｅ　
ｓｅｅ　ｙｏｕ　ｓｏｏｎ　！！
　　＜Bad Master＞

Gomichild,

Thanks for the heads up on Remember Info being broken. I had thought it was just something wrong with my browser all this time :)

Fixed now. Problem was that the comments were working off of danger-island.com and not tokyotidbits.com (both virtual hosts on the same physical server) so the cookie was not being passed properly.

No worries sweetie (^^)

Hey! You speak French? Cool... :)
Although, it should be "je crois que ca va bien marcher" with R at the end ;)
nihongo, English, et Français... Très impressionnant. ;)
Ciao!

He he. I can pretend to speak French, but writing, ah, the fact that I didn't study my grammar very much becomes clear ; )

And about different races here...wow. That's a big question that I won't go into too much here...but I will keep an eye out for ways to show what it's like here. In general though, Japan is very divided and some Japanese make racist comments without any awareness. The idea of "Japanese" is still very blood/family lineage based, and because of that, foreigner rights and integration into normal society is hard.

Many Japanese seem quite open and interested in "Western" foreigners, but any other nationalities will have a very different experience. When I rented my apartment, I was asked what "kind" of a foreigner I was. Western is OK, but many apartment owners will shamelessly refuse to rent to non-Western foreigners.

I could go on an on, but racial awareness is very different here from, say, the U.S.

And we could also talk about "Japanese" too if we begin discussing race/identity/ethnicity. Japanese are mixed and there are quite a few minority groups. Their history and struggle are a stark antithesis to the notion that Japan is a monoethnic society...and thus how nitwits like Nakosone could come up with his famous idea that America's problems stemmed from immigrants...Well, that was during Japan's bubble. Now what would he say, eh?

All the complicated issues, however, get swept under the rug.

But right on for noticing Kateland! I'll try and address this more...