When first I came to live in Japan almost 14 years ago, I was quickly informed that I was an exile from Paradise. California, where I had been living, was a counter-Japan and therefore, in the logic that governs imaginations everywhere, represented much of what many Japanese people longed for—open spaces, long horizons, freedom, mobility and the chance to make new lives. It was also movie stars, surfboard fantasies and the golden hunks and beaches admired around the world on Baywatch. I was told, too, that the England where I had been born (albeit a highly edited England) was the center of culture and civilization: Burberry coats and New & Lingwood's ties were on sale even in Kyoto's largest bookstore, Laura Ashley cafEs were in the offing and the Etonian drama Another Country was all the rage. Hugh Grant, recall, was the subject of four books in Japanese before the rest of the world knew very much about him.

The only problem with me, I was silently reminded in many ways, was that my parents came from India. India is part of Asia—a distinct continent from Japan, it often seems—and so almost every time I flew back to Osaka, to "return home" as I saw it, I was cross-questioned, searched, even strip-searched. Someone who looked like me was almost exactly what Japan didn't want to see coming into its shores.

Every foreigner who lives in Japan experiences some variation on these mixed responses, often getting flattered so much that he feels he's being patronized. "Konnichi wa," he stammers, and is instantly congratulated on his excellent Japanese as if he were Dr. Johnson's dog walking on its hind legs: it doesn't do it very well, but it's amazing it can do it at all. Soon after I arrived, I decided the Japanese probably looked on foreigners much as I might look on heavy metal rock stars: they seem uncouth, unworthy of real respect and even a little menacing, and yet I can't deny their glamour. The more the Japanese seem to devour the trappings of the world, the more it can seem that they're distrustful or at least neglectful of what lies underneath them (much as we, elsewhere, consume "ethnic" fashions without caring very much what they signify).

If Japan is in dire need of better p.r. around the world and is still often treated like a rich and credulous businessman whom everyone wants to court but no one wishes to befriend, the world is not in need of the same kind of p.r. in Japan. Most Japanese people I know are enthralled with things foreign—up to a point. Even a generation ago, soft-focus ads here routinely came perfumed with random French words that sounded vaguely romantic (douce, tendresse), and the Japanese word for part-time work came, no less fittingly, from the German (arubeito). The fascination takes a visible form in the blond hair and tanned skins of the kids who stand outside my local convenience store, showing off their skateboards and hip-hop styles. A culture based on constraint, especially if it is an island culture, will never be without an interest in everything that lies outside it.

The problem is that the fondness and the knowledge have never seemed to run very deep: the Japanese speak the language of the world, literally and metaphorically, less well than any of their Asian neighbors, with the exception of the North Koreans. And though "internationalization" has been a buzzword in Japan ever since I arrived, it flies in the face of many of the country's strongest traditions. As with several of the cultures of East Asia, Japan draws very strict lines between those who are part of its community and those who are not, and this acute sense of the Other makes for correspondingly extreme emotions. "Some Japanese want to get too close to foreigners," a Japanese friend recently told me. "Some want to stay too far away. They can't find a natural balance."

In recent years, more and more Japanese have been traveling the world, learning its languages, even gradually embracing the Internet and the globalism it brings willy-nilly into the living room. A woman at my local health club likes nothing more than to go to remote villages in Africa and India and make friends with people with whom she has no words in common; in a set of Osaka high-school essays I just read, all of the brightest students wrote about their country's discrimination against foreigners. Yet change can come only slowly in a country whose scientists, notoriously, have argued that the Japanese brain is different from that of other humans and whose newspaper editors to this day disallow mention of, for example, the Japanese massacre of Nanjing.

As a Japan-loving outsider, I know that much of what makes the culture so distinctive and successful arises from its tradition of self-enclosure (which allows everyone to know where he or she stands in relation to everyone else). Yet the coming century, I think, is not going to be tolerant of such divisions. Insofar as zany Tamil movies from south India are mass-consumed as a national cure for Japan's prolonged economic depression and Japanese baseball players are finally beginning to conquer the U.S., small steps are being taken in the right direction. Japan may never see all foreign cultures as equal, but at least it's beginning to see foreignness as a universal fact of life, however bewildering. In that respect, perhaps, it's less and less different from the rest of the world, which devours animE and PokEmon and sushi and Miyake and Sony, but doesn't really know what to do with the culture that produces them.

Back to top | More stories | TIME Asia Home