why i suspect i might hate living in japan

disclaimer: i currently am horribly lacking in knowledge about japan, so my feelings are by nature not as well informed as they ought to be. but since i am not actually making an informed decision, that's ok for now. i am just noodling, as i tend to do when i start to get really fascinated by a culture. and usually when i do that, i spin vague notions of moving because full immersion does so much better at letting me feed the fascination, and at allowing me to learn things first hand instead of solely through other people's impressions.

many years ago, if there hadn't been a cold war on at the time, i would have probably moved to romania and russia for a while; i was seriously tempted by romania anyway because i loved it when i visited, and i had some sympathy for communism yet. other than that, i did move to every country whose language(s) i studied with any degree of seriousness. hm. ok, minus the senegal, but that was mostly because i didn't pick up wolof out of my own motivation, but because i got a job programming for the african languages department at the U of I. and i never did learn it particularly well, i was distracted by other things. ok, so i didn't move to great britain either, but that's only because i missed the ferry at oostende that wintery day, and a few weeks later i went to the US, and that counts for english after all.

japanese is the first new language i am seriously studying in a long time, and so the vague notions of moving there for a while have raised their head and -- initially surprising -- found a fairly strong resistance. my feelings about japan are that we would make a spectacularly bad match for living together, for the following reasons:

• the degree of conformity japanese society seems to expect from its members rubs me entirely the wrong way; i already chafe on what society in canada expects of me in that regard, and that feeling has gotten worse over the years. realistically the only kind of place i could move to from here and be reasonably content is a society where individuality is as much or more valued than in canada.
  
• japan seems to pay much more attention to gender and to conformity with gender roles in specific. this seems woven more or less subtly through everything i read, and it's glaringly obvious in yaoi -- the degree to which uke are identified with women reminds me of stereotypes over here in the 50s and 60s, where the mainstream thought of gay couples in terms of a butch and a femme. i know yaoi isn't really about gays, it's an artificial creation of idealized, romanticized homosexuality written by hetero women for hetero women, but i think it still expresses attitudes about gays, as well as attitudes about the place of women in society and relationships that are widely present in those hetero women's thoughts. i know next to nothing about transgendered people in japan, but i can't imagine their lot to be an easy one.
  
• i've got a solid heaping of guilt from my calvinist upbringing, which is bad enough, but the idea of a society which generally greatly approves of peer pressure and shame gives me the screaming willies.
  
• i've never stood out as a foreigner anywhere i've lived; i blend in very easily. in japan i would stand out, at first glance, even before i ever opened my mouth. combine that with the still present xenophobia, and i think it would be harder than normal for me to actually connect with the culture the way i am used to connecting. i would stand out instead of blending in casually with the scenery, able to observe, able to learn partly through mimicry, able to slowly mesh.
  

maybe if i find out i am all wrong, i'll be eager to move, but for now, that's something that can safely sit on the backburner. visiting though, that'll definitely be on the list once i know the language well enough.