"Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe."

- Murakami Haruki - Kafka on the shore.


Recently I'm getting slightly sick of these dreamers with narrow minds who think they can waltz into Japan and change it in someway. They are invariably the hapless idealists, a loose mashing of the wapanese and those nonsense do-gooders who like scratching around the floor on their backside, sticking their failed sociology degree nose up the rectum of other people's business. Japan seems to be suffering from a tremendous bout of illness which has manifested itself as 'Ignorance of Japan' - which for today's analysis I am labelling 'Japgornace' for nothing more but stylistic effect.

You see Japgornace is a disease, borne out of the remnants of nihonjinron which has worked its way across the continent and mutated alongside a distorted ideology of self-hate, loathing and anger towards ones own culture and way of life which itself is borne out of our own British colonial values and opinions.

We (and by we I mean British, sorry Americans, Australians and whoever) have longed for centuries to escape our rainy grey and sodden island and seek pleasurable avenues elsewhere. It surprises me somewhat why people would choose Japan as the vehicle for self-fulfilment and discovery. Out of all the wonderful little micro-nations and despotic tin-pot states across the globe; Mautirius, Suriname, Hong Kong - they sound unbelievably decadent, warm, exotic and so distant from this little place we call home in the UK. Japan has become the new 'popstar destination' for many travellers and academics purely for its low crime levels and isolated history and culture.

The sad fact is those who choose to leave the UK and undertake their cathartic lovespan to Japan, do so without ever realising the harsh realities of what this undertakes. Those who have undertaken the academic path to Japan travel on the err of cynicism, but do so with some level grounding in culture. Those that go on the blind romantic whim can always be turned loose but can fall on solid ground. But these are not my enemies, these are not the persona non gratis that are boiling my stomach bile. These are my friends, these are my pals, my buddies, my classmates, my nakama. My vehicle of hate is driven by the passengers of 'Japgornace'.

Recently, it is something I take with relish to abash these shamelessly wild of the mark proclamations about Japan and the Japanese. Its a nauseating whirl of sickness from people who are genetically engineered from the bones of otaku who seem to believe every Japanese girl looks like an anime character and wrapped around the meaty fleshy statements that the Japanese are the most wackiest and sexual obfuscated people in the world because they once stumbled upon a youtube link of a man inserting a probe shaped like a daikon upon a Labrador's anus. Its the same crass banality spouted from people with the intelligence of a grape and who think "Mock the Week" is the funniest thing on TV. Its not even nauseating. Nausea makes you sick. But my stomach is full of a sticky translucent glop of hate and anger that all I can do is perpetually choke on for hours on end.

Its not as if, I truly despise these people to the point of recruiting a lynch-mob, after all they can be contained, studied and frequently laughed at by a snobbish elite made up of myself and my imaginary Japanese friend called Takao. They are not the 'enemie totale' as they pose no risk or disturbance to Japan from a security level point of view. It is the new breed of nipponfilia, the so called "Shindokuo （新独男）" who actually intend to come to Japan, settle here, learn Japanese yet all the while believe and propogate these nonsense ideas about Japan to be true that is the biggest worry for the security of Japan's future.

I now seem to spend my darkest nights roaming the Internet, like a one-man crusade promoting the tyranny of the 'real' world to these people. Defending my corner against theories that believe Japan is one giant melting pot of fortune and wealth, where a foreigner can earn a shit load of money by teaching English, live in a three storey condominium in central Tokyo and have every piece of J-girl dousing themselves on their knees just to suck your fat juicy western cock.

If you have read up this point with no register of humour in your frontal lobe or shred of irony coursing its way through your veins, let me kill a few million illusions for you in a para second.

1. Thousands of soulless folks go to Japan every year and teach (read: 'speak' English.) You are not new, you are not different, you are not 'significant'. You are a stamp, you are a gaijin card, you are nothing but a katakana name with many individual hopes and desires but absolutely no outside reality. You are not different, you are not special. Everyone does not have a right to love you.

2. Tatemae and honne are essential in Japan to explaining why everyone can hate you. Japanese politeness is far firmer than British sensibilities but it still doesn't absolve a Japanese person for hating you, especially because you are either a 'shindokuo', 'gaijin' or simply 'an absolute wanker'. Just because the Japanese act polite doesn't mean they do so because they like you and are naturally attracted to you in someway.

3. Japan is hitting a recession. Japan is not in 1982. You cannot come to Japan with no qualifications, speak English and expect a fat pay-check. You are not a member of the Japanese Diet with an expense account.

4. Japanese is a hard language. I don't care if you've done JLPT level 4 and know 50 kanji and the kana and then think its easy. Congratulations, you are now at the level of a Japanese toddler. And the toddler probably has better bladder function than you do.

5. You don't need to speak Japanese to live/work in Japan. Maybe, maybe not. It all boils down to laziness, and if you are a shindokuo, you probably too critical to think of Japan as being a foreign country where they speak an entirely different language. You have probably never ventured to any country besides your own and have absolutely no understanding of the wider world. Japan is not an English speaking country believe it or not.

6. You don't need a degree to work in Japan. Well neither does a Filipino prostitute or a Korean labourer. And if you have this attitude, I really hope you spend the rest of your nights in Japan, sucking up salaryman cum in Kabukicho and working on a farm fertilising sheep in the middle of pile of a cow-shit on a Toyama farm in the summer heat.

It doesn't surprise me in many ways that shindokuo are mostly stereotypical obese wapanese/otaku who work in a petrol station convenience store spending their dreary nights reading some nondescript lolicon manga and opining for the dream day when all that hard-earned cash they have saved up, they can go to Japan and find a Japanese wife to translate their latest Shonen-Jump for them. They mostly don't have a degree, have no understanding of Japanese culture, history, society or more saliently; the language and ultimately they have no desire to climb the social moblity ladder, except in Japan - which offers that free of charge to every foreigner who comes through Narita immigration. In short, they know as much about Japan and the outside world as I do about the history of the Vanuatu's economic policies before the second world war. They wish to change Japan for the better, somehow believe that Japan is in need of a rigorous overhaul that they have the ultimate answer to and to which can only be resolved by the industrious economic input of someone who has spent their natural lives taking stock of the Mars bar collection.

Get a life, get a degree, and grow the fuck up. Japan owes you nothing, and you owe it diddly squat.

To shamelessly use the words of a famous art-exhibition in Scotland;

Kill your timid notion.