Okay, here's a more complete rant about my problems with Japan.
With sexism, I'm not talking about sex. Plenty of people here have what I would consider very prudish attitudes to sex. I'm talking about feeling like I'm living in the world of Mad Men, about a society where ideas about gender roles are several decades behind the west, where women almost never return to work after giving birth, where women my age (25) are looked at askance if they don't have a boyfriend, where men are expected to work 70-hour weeks to provide for families they never see, where I can't find a single bra that isn't covered with lace and sparkles and flowers, where I'm told I'm not 'woman-like' if I do anything remotely assertive or aggressive, and where it's hot for women to be meek and submissive and look like they're in pain and embarrassed and say 'no' during sex.
That's not to say that Japan hasn't improved vastly since the time when my mother lived here, or that it isn't still improving now. But sexist gender roles are still very much more ingrained here than in western countries.
The xenophobia usually isn't anything malicious - I'm not sure it can always be called 'xenophobia' to be honest. But the simple fact is that if you don't look Japanese you will never be considered Japanese. I know a guy who's been living in Japan for forty years, has raised two kids here, and when the big bushfires hit Australia recently, had Japanese friends asking him if his house was okay. He hasn't owned a house in Australia for decades. Caucasians will always be seen as foreigners; even if you have close friends who accept that Japan is your permanent home, and allow you into their circle, you'll forever have people in shops and on trains assuming you're an American tourist, and people responding in broken English even when you ask them questions in perfect Japanese. This might not seem like a big deal, but it wears you down. I could never live permanently in a country where I wasn't accepted as belonging there - and a person with my hair and eye colour will never be accepted by Japanese society as one of their own.
The issue of individuality or lateral thinking is a result of the massive emphasis Japanese culture places on social harmony. Here, it's perfectly respectable to be a street sweeper or a train conductor or a check-out chick, because anyone who does their part as a cog in society is helping the greater good. Which is all well and good, but the obverse is that anything you do to try to swim against the tide is severely frowned upon. Rules are upheld for rules' sake, even when the letter of the law contradicts its intended purpose. To even question the Way Things Are is taboo most of the time - I've had my fair share of conversations that go around and around in circles, from "Why must I do this?" to "That's what the rule is," to "Why is that the rule?" to "That's what the rule is." You should have seen my coworkers' faces at our last conference, when I suggested we try to check in to our hotel ten minutes before official check-in time to beat the queues.
I think my favourite example, though, happened a few months ago. I was heading home on my lunch break, waiting to cross the one major road between my apartment and my lab. I cross this road several times a day, six days a week, and have the exact timing of the lights memorised. I was in the middle of unwrapping a lolly when they changed, but knew I had plenty of time to finish and then cross, so I didn't immediately start cycling when they went green. This threw the girl next to me into all sorts of confusion. She started forward, then stopped, looked at me, looked at the obviously green light, started moving forward again, looked back at me again, looked at the people already crossing from the other direction, and finally, almost reluctantly, continued across the road. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. THE LIGHT IS GREEN, WOMAN. STOP STRESSING ABOUT WHETHER YOU SHOULD BE DOING WHAT I'M DOING - USE YOUR POWERS OF OBSERVATION AND MAKE A BLOODY DECISION.
And then there's the work ethic, where all the emphasis is on appearance rather than substance. When my mother worked at the Japanese consulate in Melbourne, she said that nobody would ever go home before the boss did - they would literally all sit at their desks doing nothing so that the boss would be impressed by their long hours. I have a friend who worked as an aerospace engineer in Nagoya for a while and told me similar stories. Her company generally works for foreign contractors, but occasionally some of her coworkers will be assigned to a Japanese defense force project - and it's always obvious when someone has been, because they're constantly exhausted. On seeing one of her coworkers walking around looking like death warmed up, she asked a friend if anything was wrong. Her friend explained that when working on defense force projects, the hours one puts in are what's important, much more so than the actual outcome. So despite the obviously negative effects of trying to deign aircraft with a sleep-deprived brain, this poor guy was spending over twenty hours a day at work trying to show how committed he was.
My lab isn't generally as bad; people stay late at night because they actually do work that hard. But then, working until after midnight every weeknight, as well as all day Saturday, comes with problems of its own.
When I did English teaching I worked with Gaba, and their system was very flexible - I'd literally mark out the hours I was available to work, and students could book a lesson with me during those hours. I used to work 5pm to midnight, because I'm a late sleeper anyway, and that gave me time to explore Tokyo during the afternoons. If you work at a school you'll probably keep school hours, which are maybe slightly longer than they are in NZ but not that bad.
