Word: gaijin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sharpest worry is that national homogeneity continues to be Japan's modern religion. There are no degrees of citizenship here: if you are not "a Japanese" your gaijin status is hammered home at every encounter with officialdom, every gape from rural school kids and every well-meant compliment on your chopstick skills. This is not an "Expat-as-Victim" article: I know that in the immigration authority's hierarchy of gaijinhood, Caucasians have a far easier time than, say, Filipino "Japayukis," Russian exotic dancers or South American laborers. My point is that foreignness is like a magical garment from...
...spring was a city mired in its ninth consecutive year of economic stagnation. Even Lucie had heard tales of Japan's fiscal woes - the depressed real estate market, the companies slashing expense accounts - but the city she saw was an entirely different spectacle. As she settled down in a "gaijin house" in central Tokyo and looked for work in some of Roppongi district's hostess clubs, Lucie, 21, saw a city that was almost carnal in its appetites and bacchanalian in its spirit. She would never have guessed this was a city in decline, capital of an empire that...
...Lucie and Louise Phillips, a friend who came with her to Tokyo from England, shared a room in the Yoyogi gaijin house. By the start of her second month in Tokyo, Lucie hadn't managed to save any money, but she was beginning to make peace with her Tokyo environs. Continuing to e-mail her sister nearly every day, she told her she was earning the equivalent of $1,450 a week. And she expected her earnings to increase as customers more frequently requested her. She was enjoying the Roppongi nightlife and had gone on a few actual dates...
...number purporting to be made up of menacing messages from a nutcase fan, working in counterpoint with Elton John, a benevolent marshmallow in a clown suit, still exhaling faux poetics in the "Candle in the Wind" mode. Watching Eminem's body English, I thought of the Japanese expression henna gaijin, which means something like "crazy foreigner," and is used to refer to a Westerner who speaks the difficult Japanese language disconcertingly well. The white boy Eminem must seem henna gaijin to American blacks. He's nearly mastered rap's coiling, low-to-the-ground, ungainly finger-stabbing, a dance...