alt Hacker News> if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out. > And anyway, you will never be a japanese.
I think you answered yourself that if you _can_ speak Japanese, things are different. The reality is that if you can speak Japanese, it's quite easy to be well integrated with the people. In your example, I don't know if the Romanian learned Spanish or everyone is speaking English but there is likely a common language. Making the reason "traditional culture and habits" and just not a lack of a shared language seems wrong to me, at least I feel quite integrated. Please stop telling people "they will never be Japanese" since it's blatantly wrong.
Replies
I am not saying your experience must be the same.
According to the three japanese people in my group here and some other feedback from people living there before, same as you I guess, and they speak japanese quite ok, our conclusion is that being one more is not as easy as in other countries.
I say this from the strictest respect to japanese. I like them, I like their culture.
If you live there you must know perfectly that just bc they act politely does not mean they are thinking you do not bother them. A japanese would rarely tell you that. And if someone did, it is likely to do it in an indirect way, as most asians do. Japanese are in the extreme of that polite behavior.
> Please stop telling people "they will never be Japanese" since it's blatantly wrong.
You are wrong here. You will indeed never be Japanese if you haven't both 2 ethnic Japanese parents and raised in Japanese (second-generation raised abroad, for instance in South American are out). You can't rewrite all your DNA and go back in time to have a Japanese education in Japan.
The real issue is why caring so much about "becoming" Japanese? You can integrate in Japanese society as a foreigner, and being treated as an outsider also has its perks. Typically you are not expected to follow some of the rules, and thus has less bullshit to deal with. Just be careful of not becoming too good in Japanese (or at least pretend not to be), so you can maximize the benefits of speaking Japanese while minimizing the expectations.
I think the OP is correct, though probably not in the way they mean.
I love living in Japan, but I’ll never be able to adopt that mindset, or be able to eat all those disgusting fishes they love.
That’s fine. A lot of Japanese people think it’s valuable to have different perspectives too, even if they could never convince themselves that it’s ok to just walk up to someone and ask them what their problem is.
If you speak Japanese you will have a waaaaaay better time in Japan. But no they will not ever accept you in the same way you could be accepted in a European country. If you're Korean or Chinese you might get away with it with the younger generation. But ethnicity is still a big barrier there. Source - I speak Japanese.