As a gaijin (foreigner) in Japan, I am the bane of everyone's existence. The vast majority of Japanese people have never spoken with a foreigner, and in fact they go out of their way to avoid doing so. Some, however, aren't so lucky. If you have a menial job in a big city like Tokyo, you're going to have to talk to one of us eventually. Though this is not a guide to getting over gaijin anxiety, as I call it, hopefully this will be useful to some people as a little "know thyself" tidbit. Of course if I really wanted to be helpful I'd write this in Japanese, but we all know that this is really more for me than you.
There are several stages to a gaijin encounter. To simplify things, I will use the characters "John" and "Hanako" to represent the typical gaijin and Japanese person, respectively.
- Oblivion: When Hanako first sees John, her optic nerve will carry a signal containing information about John's appearance to her brain. Upon receiving this signal, Hanako's brain will process the information and immediately determine that, due to the fact that he is a gaijin, John is none of her concern. Completely unrelated. Business as usual. No action or repsonse necessary. This is true even if John is approaching and/or has made eye contact with her. Hanako will require several orders of magnitude more time to process John's existence than if he were Japanese.
- Paralysis: While still determining whether or not she needs to acknowledge John's existence, Hanako will be paralyzed. She will be unable to respond to stimulus of any kind, and thus will not recognize for quite a while that John is speaking to her.
- Fear: Immediately coming out of paralysis, Hanako will be stricken by fear. "Who is this person and why is he talking to me?" will be her first thoughts. This fear will keep her brain from processing John's speech, and so she will be unable to understand the first several sentences he utters, no matter what language he uses.
- Resignation: The fear stage does not actually end; it gradually tapers off over the course of several years. In the meantime, however, Hanako will become resigned to the fact that she must communicate with John. Her brain will slowly start to decypher John's words, and if they are Japanese, she will understand them.
- Reluctant Communication: Though she will understand John's words, she will remain unaware of the fact that John is speaking Japanese. While responding to him in Japanese, she will rack her brain for English vocabulary words to help him understand her speech, whether or not he actually needs such assistance. When she has recalled an English word, she will insert it into a Japanese grammatical structure that itself is far more complex than the word she struggled to remember.
- Awe: (If the encounter is an especially brief one, this stage may be skipped.) Once Hanako realizes that John does not need help with basic Japanese vocabulary, she will be amazed by his language skills, no matter how meager they might actually be. She will compliment him endlessly on his Japanese, using phrases like nihongo ga ojōzu desu ne (Your Japanese is very good) and sugoi! (Amazing!). If John is lucky, the conversation will proceed to inane small talk, such as where he is from, if he has studied Japanese in the past (even though he obviously has), and what he thinks of Japan and Japanese food. If these topics are not brought up, the conversation will almost certainly die. If it does not die prematurely, Hanako will, in all likelyhood, invite John to hang out with her again sometime (mata asobi ni ikimashō).
- Relief: Once the conversation has ended, Hanako will feel relief and, if she is accompanied by friends, she will tell them how nervous she was (dokidoki shita!) and they will comment on how kokusaiteki (international) she is. Even if the encounter made it through the Awe stage without dying prematurely, she will never contact John again, as her invitation to socialize was strictly tatemae (a facade). If John attempts to talk to her in the future, their conversation will begin from the Reluctant Communication stage.
This is what us gaijin have to go through every day, if we're lucky. The alternative is to be completely isolated from human contact, as any and all encounters must be initiated by the gaijin. Sometimes it's enough to make me wonder why nerds like me like Japan so much. We're all a bunch of masochists, I tell ya.