Have you encountered discrimination or prejudices in Japan ?

[zeroyon]

It seems to me that the Osaka keisatsu might be more kind and accepting to foreigners than the Tokyo keisatsu are?

I had an interesting encounter with the police in Osaka with regards to my bicycle. I went to a Tsutaya with my friend and all of the paid bike parking stalls were taken, so we decided to park our bicycles out front of the store, with about 100 other bicycles. We knew that it was illegal to park there though, regardless of the amount of bicycles out front of the store, because there was a sign that said (only printed in Japanese though) that bicycle parking was not permitted there. My friend and I can read Japanese to a degree, and we knew exactly what it said, but we decided to park and go in the store anyways.

After about 30 minutes, we came out of Tsutaya with our DVD rentals, to find that the keisatsu were ticketing all the bicycles and were probably preparing to lock them all up. My friend and I thought "oh ****", and we got out our wallets and bicycle registration in preparation to pay the fine. When we approached our bicycles to read the ticket though, the keisatsukan ticketing the rest of the bicycles ran over to us and said "AAAh! Daijoubu desu!! Douzo! Douzo!", took the tickets off our bicycles, and let us free. We didn't even say a word. We just stood there with our wallets in our hands, looking dumbfounded. He probably assumed we couldn't read the no parking sign, but he assumed wrong. Booyah

About the comments on racism though, I just learned to go with the flow. It really irritated me early on when I was in Japan, and the more I became upset with the racism towards me, the more miserable I became. I found that if I didn't take it personally, and didn't make a gigantic deal out of it if it wasn't a big deal, then life was much better. Racism does suck though, but it sucks a lot less if you don't let the all the small incidents with racism bother you. Of course, the ideal situation would be for the racism in Japan to be eradicated, or at least suppressed from what it currently is. I was only in Japan for a short stint compared to other people though, and I didn't see the need to fight that long, uphill, difficult battle. I might have a different opinion if I was living in Japan for the rest of my life, but my opinion on not letting the little things bother you would probably be the same.