There is a time in every man's life when he has to make a confession, the truth is I was not always the paragon of manliness and confidence that you see (or more likely don't see) before you. Indeed when I was but a spotty teenager I was not what you would call a consummate ladies man. An unfortunate early un-requited infatuation meant much of my experience of women as a schoolboy was centred on the early halcyon days of the internet; when one had to rely of the scraps and titbits from pay-for-porn sites in order for one to get their pubescent jollies. It was in university that I had my first long-term girlfriend, which I found out mostly consists of apologising for transgressions you may or may not have made. Now, as a single man once again, I’m starting to enjoy single life a little; I can choose any facebook profile picture I want without feeling a pang of guilt and I have more money to spend on things like extension cords and floor pillows.
"Now why are you telling me about your love life?" you ask. "It's just like the budget deficit; it's totally boring, I don't want to hear about it and the only people that would are probably slightly creepy old men." Well, I tell you this, so that I can put in context just how easy it is for a young white male to meet girls in Japan. Now, the lot of the gaijin in Japan is not an easy one, we have to sit at the front of the bullet train, we have to go to segregated pornographic manga stores and the Japanese KKK is made entirely out of samurai, ninjas and battle robots. On the other hand, if you have an X chromosome and are foreign looking, at least Japanese women (and men, as I found out) will think you're sexy. You see, as a foreigner you embody the exotic other; wild, outgoing and a heavy drinker. In short, you are seen as a Conan the barbarian figure only weaving a shirt and tie and your +69 staff of penetration is entirely metaphorical. The same goes for women too, foreign women are seen as sassy, sexy and outspoken – the Xenu warrior princess archetype if you want to continue this tortured metaphor. The point I am trying to make is that foreigners find themselves foisted with a whole new sexualised identity when they come to Japan, even if they were the world’s biggest shut-in in their own country.
Allow me to demonstrate. Last weekend I went out with a friend to visit a women's university’s cultural festival. It seemed that the entire reason I was him that day was to make him seem more attractive to women through a process of osmosis in which he would acquire (what he considered) my natural gaijin masculinity. So for a day, I was his tool, hanging around and drawing women in with my long eyelashes and flabby gut. It didn’t really work, he was too...herbivorous...to ask them for their phone numbers and left the girls with vague assurances that they would email him. The largest problem with his method of ‘catching girls’ was presuming that they would instantly fall for a foreigner, let alone a man who happened to be friends with one, as opposed to actually spending time talking to women and getting to know them on a personal level. Ultimately it was because I was a foreigner that he considered me to be God’s gift to women. That said, the women here probably pay more attention to my inane prattle than they did back in the UK...
