The post asks, “Is it true about the ‘gaijin seat’?

The ‘gaijin seat’ is the empty seat next to a foreigner on trains and buses that Japanese do not like to sit in. If they do sit there, they choose it last.

I found the responses interesting so I’ll post some here. Most are machine translated from Japanese. I’ve mainly selected the ones with upvotes so as to avoid the Lizardman Constant. The > sign indicates a reply to the above.

Part I

I rose early to take the bus down to Astana, from where Turkish Airlines flew me to Tokyo via Istanbul. This is now my most expensive post at over $3,500.

Please buy my book.

From my Tokyo base in a Kabukicho love hotel, I considered the logistics of the trip north to Kawaguchi and Warabi. Should I leave behind my valuables in a storage locker and only take the cash I would need for the day, as one does in sketchy countries? I decided that would be a good idea.

On the train the next morning, I realized I’d completely forgotten about that and had all my worldly goods about my person. Oh well.

Please watch the following one-minute clip:

It’s one of those Rorschach videos that people interpret differently. My reader, presumably free of context in this case, will just see Japanese police arresting a man of foreign appearance for unknown reasons.

Japanese nationalists see righteous Japanese officers of the law heroically cracking down on Gaijin crime, a desperate rearguard action in the face of reckless immigration policies.

The local equivalent of woke Japanese see brutal fascists choking and abusing the human rights of an innocent man purely for the crime of driving while foreign.

With those preliminaries out of the way, here is context as partially provided by the Kurdish Cultural Association of Japan (quote taken from YouTube comments):

Japan was largely closed to the outside world during the Edo period. Foreigners were not allowed to enter and Japanese were not allowed to leave.

The cultural echoes of this policy remain.

Education

Most of you had to study a language at school. If it was Spanish, there were textbook chapters about paella, the Mexican Day of the Dead and so on. If it was Chinese, you had to learn about Nian the New Year’s monster. Textbooks on French will feature a multicultural cast of cool French teenagers living in Paris.

Therefore English textbooks in Japan will no doubt feature a white, black, Hispanic and Japanese-American hanging out in LA, celebrating Halloween and going to the ball game, right?

No.