Travers Naran totally sneezed all over fj.life.in-japan with a withering cloud
of snot:

>But I meant compared to the Japanese.  If you are a fluent Japanese-speaking
>gaijin, how much worse are you treated compared to the native Japanese?

I've found that you are never treated in an outright *hostile* manner by anyone,
but it is quite often you get a condescending and/or "trying to communicate with
the alien cyborg via hand signals" attitude from strangers no matter how well
you speak the language. After 15 years I've learned to just deal with it,
because no amount of whining and foot-stamping is going to make it go away. Many
people are simply idiots, and your efforts to correct their behavior are only
going to fall upon deaf ears.

It takes a while to get "in" to a workplace or a group of friends because most
people in this country hold outsiders at arm's length, foreign or not. Once you
have established yourself as the member of a group by speaking directly to them
in their own language (dialect helps too!) long enough, more often than not
they'll get over your non-Japaneseness and treat you according to your
character.

It's impossible to compare how well or how bad I am treated "compared to native
Japanese", because I don't have that frame of reference to work with. But I can
give you plenty of cases where native Japanese have been treated by their peers
in a quite shitty manner indeed.

In my last place of employment the boss, the undisputed Dragon King of Power
Harrassment, cussed out my other native Japanese coworkers in the same manner as
he did me. Half-foreign children are regularly singled out for abuse in school,
but full-blooded native kids can get the same treatment in certain environments
for wearing the wrong socks. It's all relative.

I am given leniency in some situations because of my foreignitude, violently
ignored in others, and talked down to in yet others. More often than not it can
be tracked to the ignorance of the individual rather than the Debito-inspired
Institutional Anti-Foreigner Conspiracy.

But yes, fluency in the language can mean all the difference.


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