John W. wrote:
> necoandjeff wrote:
>
>> People in Nagoya have a bad tendency
>> to stare down foreigners (and otherwise treat them like complete
>> freaks) in a way that people in Tokyo do not.
>
> In my experience people in Tokyo tend to look down on everyone who
> isn't from Tokyo. Or at least they ignore them.
>
>> And half the time they don't even have
>> the decency to look away when you look back at them. They just
>> continue staring like they're at the zoo looking into the gorilla
>> cage.
>
> The shame! I hate it when I'm ogling some Japanese dude and he doesn't
> have the manners to not look me in the eye.
>
>> When I go to
>> someplace like Itoigawa, I exect that kind of behavior, and it
>> doesn't bother me. When I go to the fourth largest city in the
>> country, with a not so insignificant population of foreigners, I
>> don't. What makes a hick in my mind has a lot to do with his or her
>> bility to accept someone different than they are and treat them with
>> respect, whether that person lives in the most remote corner of
>> Louisiana or the middle of New York City.
>>
> So it's respectful to not look someone in the eye. Right?

I think you're missing my point. Usually when someone stares, they know that
what they're doing is rude, so when the person they are staring at looks
back at them, they quickly avert their eyes. Of course these are just
anecdotes, but on several occasions in Nagoya I have glanced back at someone
staring me down, on the train for example, and they don't even flinch. They
just continue staring at me (with perhaps the added excitement that one
feels at the zoo when the gorilla looks back at you...) Isn't that an
indication that the person not only has bad manners, but they don't even
realize that they have bad manners? Again this is just anecdotal, but I
don't recall ever having this kind of experience outside of Nagoya or some
very small remote town, except for small children of course (who
understandably don't know any better.) And I've heard a number of other such
anecdotes from Nagoya as well, like a friend who took his shirts to the dry
cleaners and got them all back with "gaijin" written on the inside collar.
Based merely on the stories I've traded with others over the years, Nagoya
seems to be a somewhat unique town.

And for all the "Tokyoites are all stuck up" comments in this thread (which
I don't think is entirely untrue), it is interesting to note that the one
thing Nagoyans are most widely known for among the Japanese is being
mieppari, or ostentatious. And for this I have even heard statistical
evidence, such as the fact (although this is old data) that the average
wedding is more expensive in Nagoya than anywhere else in Japan.

Jeff