II sometime see people from outside Japan mention Japanese people scared of them and they don't want to be scared. I hear mostly from American (white) who are eager to learn the language and culture seriously. Those who just come Japan pass and by never care such thing.
There are several reasons ppl here scare them.It's something to do with shy personality but also link to socio-cultural reasons.
One is we are geologically living on the isolated peace island that is very privileged in terms of security protect from invaders. In fact, we never lost war till 20th century, so have we kept rather peaceful land and mild people that is on the other hands dislike revolutional thinking and drastic change. Our history shows that change is happened from relations to out side world like black iron ship pushed Meiji Restoration and loss of World War 2 pushed economic development and so force. Thus scare change Japanese people scared of people from different back ground might influence their life. As long as they are relate to superficial way that their life is not affected then, they are welcomed but once try to get into the community there are huge wall. That's one reason.
The second reason is that Japanese are really bad at English especially conversational one. This is result of bad education policy of the Ministry but i think this crappy English education started from GHQ (general head quarter) of US invasion policy to let Japanese incompetent to language education so they wouldn't go out to do own business instead under colony of the US. Any reasons, our school English education is horrible and many even those English teacher can't really speak. Anyway this caused us short panic all of sudden somebody speak to us in English. We know we learned it plenty of years however still can't speak is make feel bad. As a result, we sit like mute at international conference and can't take initiative or leadership in the world. That lame.
And the other reason is also something to do with GHQ policy. As many invaders, GHQ started change everything from previous regime such like Constitution to education policy. They started to negate whatever was written and taught on before the war and implement 180 degree opposite thing. Patriotism and nationalism are major issues before and clean those things and put installed annoy left tilted liberal thoughts and They did well to put make themselves inferior. So GHQ made Japanese to feel their own culture is inferior and negative. Losing war is easy to make feel defeated and think like totally ruthless and useless. Although it's true that something is weak and inferior so lost it. But we didn't have to totally defeated in terms of culture. GHQ was successful in terms of install to put us inferior complex. It's been over 60 years we have reinstalled by many things but GHQ's ghost still wonder around and affects our feeling toward foreigners?
Despite of national or personal trauma, we have to live with out side world so we need to over come these.
I think my suggestion is recognize above and do total opposite.
1, Love change; we have to flexible enough to get ready anything.
2, Even you think your English is crappy don't hesitate to speak at the conference or business call.
3, Forget about GHQ, we beat Americans at bubble era though we are losing the game again. But it's not war time, we need to study our history and culture of Japan but not it's better or worse than the other. Rather we should focus how our culture is shaped among relationships with other cultures.
