Westside
by Claudio Soto

A few months ago Sakaba-chan came up to me after class. She was vehemently gesturing at the spelling test she had been given back. Despite my broken Japanese, she heroically explained that she had been marked too high - she had been given a perfect when in fact she had made one mistake.

If you can believe it, she was asking me to mark her down - from a perfect! A ninety-eight is well and good, but it doesn't have the ring to it that perfect does. Incredulously I obliged.

If she had been the only student to ask to be marked down, I could have dismissed her as an aberration. Strangely, however, in the coming weeks she was not the last. I have come to think of such behaviour and other similar behaviours as "typically Japanese," if I may be allowed such a blanket statement. After all, I consider Canadians to be in general quite honest, but I can assure you with mixed emotions that in Canada Sakaba-chan would in fact be an aberration.

This in turn gave me pause to think, a dangerous habit I know, but as a JET we all have far too much time to let our minds turn inward. How do we JETs or even further all of us foreigners come across to our Japanese neighbours, coworkers, etc.? I stumble over the word foreigner because it is a word that has negative connotations and that had, up until coming to Japan, not found much currency with me, better that I use "???" - gaikokujin.

My variety of ESID has so far led me to conclude that gaikokujin means one of two things. On the one hand it has been used almost synonymously with American. On the other hand, it has been used to mean something as innocuous as "not Japanese" to something along the line of "all foreigners hold hands and conspire while the Japanese aren't looking." Either way it seems to imply a homogeneity amongst gaikokujin that I find excessive.

After all there are still some very strong nationalistic ties that have created real rivalries, sometimes not so friendly rivalries, amongst our nations. And not to pick on my American neighbours (some of my best friends are American!) there is a reason why Americans travel with Canadian flags on their bags. Besides that there are a great many countries that have very little in common with the countries that most English teachers in Japan come from.

Still the tendency to lump us all together is not completely unwarranted. I think the connotation that fairly represents what is meant most times by gaikokujin is "Westerner." And it is here that I think it is fair to call us a group. But the exact nature of this tie eludes me; historical, political, and economic definitions notwithstanding, they have very little to do with how individual people choose to think of themselves or make specific choices.