If you consider living in Japan, you might wonder whether Japanese people accept non-Japanese people.
Also if you lived in Japan you could have experienced being disliked by Japanese people and you could wonder why this could happen.
In this article, I’d like to introduce why Japanese people don’t possibly like foreigners and you could understand how Japanese are thinking.
Let me introduce myself.
I am Hiro from Tokyo, Japan, and I was born and raised here, and I well understand Japanese people’s way of thinking.
If you’d like to see video version, please refer to below link.
Why Japanese don’t like foreigners
To be honest, many Japanese don’t dislike foreigners, but most Japanese don’t have experience communicating with foreigners, so most of them make strange unfriendly reactions to seeing foreigners.
Most Japanese don’t have the experience to be with foreigners
In Japan, 97.8% of people living are pure Japanese, and also 99% of people living there speak Japanese as their mother tongue language.
Furthermore, most of the foreighners living in Japan are from China, Korea or Taiwan having similar ethnicity, so the majority of Japanese don’t have a chance to see other ethnic foreigners.
Moreover, in the Edo period (1600-1868) in Japan, the government (Tokugawa Shogunate) had a policy of national isolation for the whole period of the Edo period (268 years), and Japanese historically didn’t have much experience contacting with foreigners.
The island country is surrounded by sea could be the cause of non-contacting foreigners as well.
Japanese are not good at foreign language
The majority of Japanese are not keen to study foreign languages and are also not good at it and this could cause unfriendly attitude to foreigners.
Let me pick the example of English.
Japanese average score of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) is one of the lowest in all Asian countries.
Japanese average score is 71/120, whereas all Asian countries’ average is 81/120.
https://www.ets.org/content/dam/ets-org/pdfs/toefl/toefl-ibt-test-score-data-summary–2017.pdf
Japanese people are not much keen to study foreign languages.
Thus if Japanese people find foreigners outside, they try not to interact with foreigners as much as possible.
Japanese don’t show interest in foreign countries and people
Many Japanese people don’t much show interest in foreign countries and people.
Most of them are comfortable living in Japan because Japan has enough infrastructure, social welfare and lucrative jobs and they are not necessarily eager to study a foreign language to get out of Japan.
For example, my two years younger brother doesn’t like any foreign countries and of course, never visited any of the countries and he doesn’t eat foreign-based food, even chocolate, or snacks. (too picky)
However, the circumstance is gradually changing. Japan currently has the third-largest economy but due to an aged society, 30 years of the stagnant economy, etc and I consider that the presence of Japan is gradually weakened.
Maybe, more and more people have an interest in studying or working abroad in the future.
If you have experience being insulted by Japanese
If you have experienced being insulted by Japanese, you can just ignore them, because the Japanese who insult foreigners usually don’t have confidence (don’t have outstanding skills or occupations) in themselves and to cover up their lack of confidence, they try to have a sense of superiority by criticizing a minority of people.
Those people often have low self-esteem and you can ignore them.
Conclusion
In this article, I introduced “Why Japanese don’t like foreigners”. In fact, they don’t hate foreigners but they don’t have much experience communicating with foreigners and this causes their unfriendly reactions.
Also if you have met a person who insults you foreigners, you can just imagine that those who look down on you have less self-respect in their daily life and just ignore them.
Thank you for reading this article till the end.
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