A real eye opener (-_-)

[solarplexis]

*start rant*

As if getting a working Visa didn't end up stressing me out enough, I took some time to re-visit an old site I first came upon a few years ago:

http://www.debito.org/

but most importantly, this section of his site:

http://www.debito.org/activistspage.html

I've spent the last three days spending hours reading the articles on that page and

Comments

[koutetsuhime]

I've heard about that stuff before, nice to finally see a source for it. I'll have to read it later when I'm more awake.

It really blows, but besides a few problems that weren't too bad, my friend who is living over there is doing just fine. You'll run into racism, for sure, so you'll just have to prepare yourself for it. If you're really worried about being turned away or refused entrance to places or refused jobs etc, stick in Tokyo and Osaka. I haven't heard of either of the people I know there having those problems, and one is even working band staff (not paid work, but still, it shows that the racism isn't necessarily everywhere).

And I really don't know if it's true but I've heard that African Americans are typically actually treated better than Caucasians. I know I've heard multiple times that they tend to be kinda... like amazed by them? I dunno, since I don't personally have any friends that are African American that've been over there, so just sharing tidbits I've heard over the years from other people.

tl;dr: There's some shit that sucks, but there's shit that sucks about every country. Don't give up on it completely yet. I say check it out as a tourist for a decent amount of time, then weigh your pros and cons and go from there. <3 It's easy to get discouraged when looking at the cons of the country, but Ganbatte!

[solarplexis]

Thank you (^ ^) Hearing that makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing. I'm glad that the people you know there haven't really had trouble with the racism. If I still go, Tokyo would definitely be be the only place I'd consider.
I'm now switching plans to move there to visiting for maybe a month to test waters.

[koutetsuhime]

Yeah, I think the only racism-type problems I've heard about are simply bad attitudes from certain people and sometimes other band-girls. But eh, you run into that even over here, so screw them lol

Good luck!

(And a sidenote: I'm glad to see someone going into the whole 'i wanna move to Japan' rationally, instead of running over there and getting the shock of their life that it's not happy happy kawaii land desu. That's probably where some portion of the horror stories come from lol Just don't be a loud/roudy dumbass and I think you'll be perfectly fine ^^ )

[solarplexis]

Yeah, that's probably exactly what I needed so I wouldn't be taken by surprise there.
Good thing I'm a pretty quite person already (except at concerts).