Things I'm NOT going to miss about Japan

2. Noise pollution

Dudes with megaphones, cars or planes circling the neighbourhood with loud speakers, three stereos playing different loud and clashing jingles all in the one store. Musical garbage collection. Sirens. Yapping dogs and screaming children. Roaring freeways and slow revving motorcycles. Drunkards shouting in thick Kansai-ben, business men roaring on their cellphones, gaggles of schoolgirls bothering dogs with their high pitched yammering. Honking subway trains, automated announcements, alarms that appear to tell you that there's nothing to be alarmed about. Even nature is noisy with cicadas and frogs!

But don't talk at all on the commuter trains or you'll annoy someone.

Sheish.

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, it wouldn't make any difference because no one could hear the sound of a tree falling for the rest of the din.

Things I'm NOT going to miss about Japan

1. Being stared at.

I eat my breakfast at the local ticket restaurant, and I feel these eyes boring into the side of my head. I look up and there's a little old man, staring at me. When I look at him, he doesn't politely divert his eyes, as I would tend to do if someone caught me having a good old stare at them. Nup. He just keeps on staring and slurping curry (I'm not the freak dude! You're the one eating curry for breakfast! I'm eating eggs and sausage! That's normal breakfast food!) and staring and staring and staring. I can barely eat because I'm feeling so self conscious.

After my meal I check my make up in the bathroom just to make sure I haven't grown a second head or accidentally written "stare at me, please" on my forehead in eyeliner, but no, I'm not looking particularly weird. Just average. Showered. Dressed in work clothes. Dirty blonde hair and ruddy celto-gaulic complexion. Definitely don't require staring at.

I get on the train, and there's two people staring straight at me for the entirety of my hour long train journey. I try to keep myself busy in my book, but I can feel their eyes. I glance up occasionally, just to see if they're still putting in the massive amounts of psychic energy required to stare continuously at another human being, but they seem to be feeling no strain at all. Just staring away like crazy.

I get off the train, and a kid stares at me and follows me around the convenience store when I'm buying my lunch. Eyes like saucers. "Gaijin da...!"

And then I go to teach my classes and I can't get one of these ADD afflicted kids to pay attention to me when I'm talking. Not one.

Back to the gaijin's koen: If a gaijin is not there to witness gaijinised behaviour, do Nihonjin behave any differently at all?

Foreigner's Koens

1. If a gaijin sits down on a subway, is it any different to anyone else sitting down on a subway?

2. If a gaijin is not present to observe gaijin-ized Japanese behaviour, does anyone behave any differently?

3. Is it me you hate, or the world?

Meditate on that.