[bitwize]

Spend enough time in Japan, and you realize that young to middle-aged Japanese people really do understand that competence in English will give them an edge -- but they don't know where or how to go about learning so they will try damn near anything, especially if they think it's easy or a "shortcut". There's potentially a big market for apps like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo over there, I don't know how things like that are actually doing among Japanese though.

When I was hanging out in bars there, young women would approach me and beg: "Teach me Englishu!" They saw that I was white and foreign and figured I could just pour English fluency into their heads.

As for the personal questions -- yeah, I've undergone enough foreign-language instruction to understand that these are things people resort to just to have something to talk about. One question that kept coming up was "Who is your favorite singer?" Just about everyone who asked me this also provided their own answer to the question and it was always the same -- Lady Gaga. (The album Born This Way had just dropped in Japan at the time and Lady Gaga was all the rage -- bigger than One Piece, even.)

[svilen_dobrev]

> so they will try damn near anything

2012.. i am not a native english-speaker but white, in Tokyo for 2 weeks, staying in friend's apartment, not knowing a word except "Arigato". One day, In some very big shop, i was looking for some locally made hand cream, and after walking the shelves with hundreds of things only labelled in japanese hieroglyphs, i asked the lady on the cash-desk "Where are hand-creams?" and she showed me to one shelf full of Avon stuff (which i saw but avoided), and eventually at its end there were some others japanese. So i looked at there and picked one or two, choosing by colorfulness of the bottle :) All that time, a student-age-girl was staying at next row, keeping and looking at some pocket device in her hands, and when i finally picked something, she approached me and asked, in not-that-bad-english : "Excuse me, did you ask for a "hand cream"?

You know, this picking of any opportunity to train your hearing/speaking is.. amazingly diligent. And their curiosity also amazed me.

Ever since i'd like to try move and live there, but.. too bad it's very difficult to go to work or live there. Expensiveness is only one little part of it..

[bitwize]

Yeah, I went to a frozen yogurt place and scraped together enough Japanese to ask if there was an English speaker. They brought before me the store manager, a 22-year-old girl fresh out of college who'd spent a year in California as an exchange student and was super over the moon to be speaking to a real American once again. It was super cute, and we just stood there and talked about random stuff for several minutes before I realized I still wanted frozen yogurt and didn't know how to operate the machines or pay for my order.

I did the same thing and seized any opportunity to practice. I spent a lot of evenings that vacation in bars, just speaking to locals so I could git gud enough in Japanese to... function at a basic level there. I think I gained more Japanese language levels during those two weeks than I did my three semesters of collegiate study of the language.

It's lovely to visit, but unless Rakuten or Nintendo or somebody offered me a too-good-to-pass-up career opportunity, I couldn't foresee myself living in Japan. It's pricey, and as a white dude I would always be seen as an outsider (the literal translation of gaijin) with attendant social disadvantages: I couldn't live or work in certain places, more paperwork and bureaucratic hoops I'd need to jump through, the funny looks and people hiding from me (not so much a problem in Osaka but I hear it happens in Tokyo a lot).

Oh, you know those radio DJ booths in Splatoon where you can look through the plate glass and see the hostesses making their broadcast? Those are actual things in Japan. I passed by one in Doutonbori and the radio hosts started making remarks about the funny foreigner. Yay.