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Gosh no...I lived there as a military dependent from around age 8-11, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Funny. I loved living in Japan. Loved it.

It was a complete mind-bender for an eight year old kid, the smell (a combination of fish, sewage, and diesel exhaust) the sights (Pachinko ball parlors, windows with very strange plastic food in them, school kids all dressed exactly alike, but all wearing the respiratory face masks!) and the customs. IIRC, they didn’t give dependent ID cards until you were 10 or 12 years old, so I didn’t have one, to get off base, I used to go down to where the Mikasa was (A Japanese dreadnaught from the Russo-Japanese war that Yamamoto served on and lost his fingers on, later saved from the scrapheap by Admiral Nimitz after the war, and since turned into a museum, a battleship encased in concrete!) and sneak under the fence. I was an eight year old kid wandering all through Yokohama by myself, my parents had no idea where I was! But I was perfectly safe. Don’t know what crime is like now, but back then...I don’t remember any at all.

I found the country fascinating, and the people were wonderful to me very friendly and polite.

But, when I moved to the Philippines, they had a very different take on the Japanese, and as I learned more (and saw the memorials along the road about the Bataan Death march) I realized that the Japanese had done horrible things to many countries they had invaded in WWII, and the Philippines was one of them. There was dislike, distrust, and hatred of the Japanese.

I found it difficult to reconcile the difference in these polite, civilized people who had (even to a kid) what seemed like an almost dainty and delicate appreciation for ceremony, art, and beauty, with the savage, nearly animal or insect like brutality of the Japanese military in WWII. As an adult, I think I understand it a little better...war does that to people no matter your nationality, but...they seemed to take it to a completely different level with respect to savagery. I think the war in the Pacific is extremely difficult for many people to grasp, when on the other side of the world, we could at least envision the Germans across the field from our men in the Battle of The Bulge singing “Silent Night”, and our men understanding something of it. In the Pacific, in retrospect, it seems other-worldly. A brutal, no-holds-barred savagery that those of us who weren’t there (never mind not experiencing combat) just cannot comprehend.

Make no mistake-the Japanese are an extremely homogeneous culture, and they have a degree of contempt for non-Japanese, but the good thing is, once you get to know them personally they are wonderfully kind and generous, and if you don’t know them personally, well, they will be as nice and kind to your face as could possibly be...which I still feel is pretty impressive. Interesting anecdote: my former boss lived there as an adult for many years and spoke Japanese fluently. He felt much the same as I did. And he was a very big guy, with bright blue eyes...a stereotypical gaijin to them. (Gaijin is a generally pejorative term to describe a non-Japanese) Anyway, he was at a baseball game, and there were two guys sitting behind him who assumed he didn’t know the language, and were muttering some pretty awful stuff about this big, smelly, ugly gaijin sitting in front of them. After a while, he turned, and in his most polite voice, said (in fluent Japanese) something like “I very much apologize that my presence here has offended you. I am perfectly willing to find another seat if that is what you wish.” They were so embarrassed he thought they were going die. They didn’t think he knew Japanese, and he recognized that if they had known, they would have NEVER said the things they did. Not because they were afraid of him or anything like that, but...it would have been an unspeakably rude thing for them to have done. (This is how he described it to me, and it made sense to me)

Sorry I got off on a tangent there, but...I loved Japan, and the Japanese people. I know some phrases to this day such as “Tomete kudasai” (stop please!) that we would use when chasing the bus we narrowly missed, or “Toire wa dokodesu ka?” (Where is the toilet?) and such. (I can say them, but have no idea how they were spelled, these are from Google translate...:) I would go back to Japan and at least visit, but my wife couldn’t. If you have the chance...do it!