Quote Originally Posted by Bramicus
One important thing to remember when considering this entire subject is that Japan is a country that is almost completely unicultural -- that is, the vast, vast majority of Japanese citizens are ethnic Japanese who share a common culture.

So it really should come as no surprise that their reaction to "gaijin" is going to be very different to those of us who come from Western countries, most of which comprise a number of different cultures living together. In America, or instance, we are really an amalgam of over a hundred different cultures, all mixed together and living with one another. Of course we're going to be more comfortable speaking and dealing with different cultures -- wer'e much more used to it in our daily lives.
Typical American reaction. However, I am not American. I am not used to living in an ethnically diverse country. I come from the European countryside where 99.9% of the people are white and speak the local language as native speakers, where traditions are even more deeply rooted than in Japan, a place where one is new to the region if their family arrived less than 100 years ago.

Compare this with central Tokyo (where 1 to 5% of the people are foreigners, depending on the area) where I have encountered these odd behaviours of the locals. Again, when my wife went to visit my family in this "ethnically pure and traditional" countryside, where many people have probably never talked to a Japanese, nobody made any fuss or treated her as a strange thing, or was less polite or overly polite, or asked her if she ate raw fish or if she could eat snails and rabbit, or whatever of the "special treatment for foreigner" thing so common in Japan. My complaint is quite simple: "Why can't Japanese treat all foreigners just as human beings instead of labelling them as "gaijin" and acting different from their usual behaviour between themselves ?