Quote Originally Posted by Gaijin 06
Don't take what you read in this thread about Japan as a representative sample of most foreigners experiences. Japan can be a hard place to integrate into, but if you make enough effort and are open minded enough then it is possible to live a happy life here.
What do you know after your 3 months or so in Japan ? The problem was not that I was not enough integrated or not open-minded enough. It was rather the contrary. I tried to integrate so much that I became more natives than the natives (for some things at least) and did not tolerate that people behaved with me like if I was just a tourist that didn't know how to use chopsticks or what "ikebana" was. So you could say that if you are open-minded and like open-minded people, Japan can be a quite irritating place, as people are very narrow-minded, ethnocentric and ignorant of the rest of the world.