"Don't Come To Tokyo ..." (Black in Japan) | MFiles

don't come to Tokyo hi welcome to the black experience Japan to militated files the purpose of this series is to highlight the black people living in Japan who are they my name is Jason Gatewood I was born in st. Louis Missouri kind of grew up all over the United States New York City Los Angeles Atlanta most recently Atlanta is where I will call home what drew me to japan was well when i was in junior high school my family made a move to los angeles Inglewood California and there is a city to the south of there called Torrance it was one of those places where there was a lot of Japanese American people living and I had to go there once a week for a school workshop and I started getting involved with like other kids my age who were who just happened to be Japanese and I picked up a little bit of the culture and I was like wow this is cool you know it's like 1990 something and you know the big thing with like Pokemon and like anime and stuff really hadn't caught on yet so I was kind of like it was very new to me no one had known about this stuff so 12 year old 13 year old me was like wow these games are better than ours while these cartoons are better than ours while these comic books are better than ours I want to learn this language so I can figure out what's going on so fast-forward to me being in college and it was the first time I could take Japanese as a language and I found that for some reason I had a propensity more than Spanish in any other language I tried to just speak it and then I just made it go we're trying to come over here I was working for a big media company at the time and they needed somebody to come over here and do production work for them here in the Tokyo office and so in 2000 I came over here and I've been over here on and off ever since right now I work as a kind of a project coordinator and a media studies teacher at a big University here in town and I also work as a freelance journalist for a couple of top worldwide media companies as well 18 years but not continuously I first arrived here in 2000 and then I worked my contract and I left and I left for about almost a year and I came back in 2001 as a student and I was a exchange student in Osaka for a period of time and then after that program was up I graduated from my University in st. Louis lived in Atlanta for about 3 or 4 years almost but I was still coming back here because I have many friends here almost every year I was coming back and visiting and then decided in 2008 nope I moved back to Japan and I've been here ever since first and foremost I like the freedom that Japan allows me I think I can't really say whether or not that I would experience the same amount of freedom going into another like if I had gone to Korea or if I had gone to like Germany or someplace like that maybe the same thing because when you get out of your the culture that you grew up in and go to a different place you know it's a little bit difficult and it's a little bit taxing on the mind but you also experience a little bit of freedom because you get to erase the slate and kind of build your own your own future your your writing on a new board at that point so when I came here in 2000 that was probably the first thing I noticed the other thing that I like about Japan is the fact that there is no prejudice in the traditional American sense of the word of course I'm African American so and moreover I'm from the part of America that is kind of used to that being from the south but here if there is a prejudice towards me it's me as an outsider first not necessarily anything that I can control of course but it's not the same it's it's kind of a weird way of putting it but I would rather be if I'm going to be prejudged by anybody which is still bad I'd rather be prejudiced on the fact that I'm totally 100% different from the culture and everybody that lives within it rather than being a part of something as I am as an American and the only difference is that I happen to have like a higher melanin content if that means anything so again that's one of the freedoms though and then the other fact is I would say 99.9% of Japanese people don't give me any kind of you know prejudice feelings they're genuinely curious about you know where I come from and what I do and why I can speak Japanese and the same the same questions that you're asking me I think that's what I like about it the most and then of course the other thing too is I'm always learning here there's always something to learn you know every day I go someplace and I learned something new I have students that teach me I have I could turn on the news and there's always just something new my mind is constantly working there's no chance to be lazy here so I think from that standpoint you know they say that in order to remain young your mind must constantly be active and I know from living here over the past like eighteen years like yeah my mind is always active here so okay so the thing that I like the least about Japan or some of the things that I kind of took for granted in America kind of the common sensical things that as an American I would feel that yeah everybody does this right for example it's about to be winter time here in Japan and we're in you know the peak of us weather right some we destiny means oh it's cold isn't it Japanese houses don't have insulation it and so even Tokyo which gets down to like you know freezing temperatures in the wintertime you'll still only have like walls this thin and you know as an American anywhere I lived in America like you know when you enter the house you can take off your coat you can take off your jacket you know you can get comfortable in your own house there's central heating there isn't that sort of thing in most places in Japan so I said you know when I go to sleep at night for example I take off my street clothes and I put on like a track suit so it looks like I'm just to go work out other things I don't like that the conveniences I kind of miss like in America I'm used to going to one grocery store for everything here if I want to cook a meal unless I'm making a very Japanese meal I have to go to maybe three or four grocery stores although that's kind of changing now because just like everywhere else in in the world we have delivery services now so that's a little bit better than it was before when I first got here finally I think the big thing that I don't like about Japan kind of leads me back to being african-american it's just foreign in general here I don't like being lumped in with other foreigners when like on a macro scale case in point like I've been discriminated against in terms of trying to find a place to live three times where my first choice for an apartment that I wanted to live in was turned down simply because I was a foreigner and when I asked for a reason in one case it was because the landlord had a foreign tenant once upon a time and he said that that guy constantly had problems sorting his garbage recyclables and so that was the reason why he was refusing me but I would also say that the whole discrimination part about being a foreigner here in Japan especially in places like Tokyo and Osaka and even now we are now all three places which I've lived it's kind of it's not totally 100% going away but it's a lot less than it used to be because just like everywhere else you know Japan is kind of like got this influx of people coming from other countries living here now so that's a good thing being black in Japan my first experience was of course I had just moved to Osaka and maybe my second or third day in Osaka I went down to the central part number at medica Moda and I'm walking down the street and I didn't know anybody and I could barely speak any Japanese at the time and I look over and see another black man with very long dreadlocks and he's surrounded by like all these Japanese people and he seems to be the center of attention and everyone's having a grand old time it's like an outdoor cafe and I kind of like looked over in his direction a little bit like oh wow there's another black guy oh that's cool because this is again this is like 2001 I think and there weren't even that many black people leaving in Osaka and so I was like oh ok another black guy that's pretty awesome all right and he stopped his whole conversation he stopped everything stood up came across the street just to greet me and say hey man you know where you from he acts he acts a little bit about myself he happened to be from New York City and he was like hey man won't you come and join us you know welcome to Japan and so ever since then it's just like I found out like wow you know being black over here there's a sense of community because we all have the same experience we have a base set of experiences especially as african-americans but even just like the greater African Diaspora I was able to become friends with Nigerians and ghanaians and people from Botswana and even South Africa and Jamaica and you know England you know where I know I wouldn't have been able to have the same experience even within America so it's kind of a small community here because we still have we still have the skin that we're in and we still have no matter and we're in the world we go a base set of experiences to draw from so living over here together there's a sense of camaraderie and we can talk to each other as brothers and sisters you know equally because we're experiencing the same thing over here so that's that's kind of it and then it's in terms of relating to Japanese people it's been I would say 99.9% positive there's our culture that uh you know everybody knows and of course I didn't figure that part out until I got over here to hip hop culture is a big thing over here and it's it bridges things I find that as a teacher my students readily want to talk to me you know they want to come up and talk to me about music and pop culture because hey guess what you know they were looking at YouTube and there was a guy that looked like me on there and I can go into any part of Japan and talk to the young people because that's what they're into so it made my job maybe a little bit easier when I was younger it kind of made it easier in the dating scene I'm pretty sure you've heard these stories before about how it's I would say kind of easy for black guys to go to any bar and start talking to the ladies that part I would say is mostly true that's the icebreaker you know you don't have to work so much to start talking to you know people of the opposite sex here and maybe you're the same sex I don't know that part but maybe so if you're trying to date them but you still have to have a little bit of panache and possess you still need to wow them one of the tricks that a friend of mine told me once upon a time for example is don't use so much Japanese and because it keeps that era of mystery going I think just like anywhere else females are attracted to mysterious people so they want that Aramis that mysticism maybe I don't know I'm the total opposite like I tend to be an open book when I started talking to people so but I will say this that once you do get into a relationship things will change rather drastically you will be expected sometimes to be more Japanese there will be the little nuances that you'll have like for example once I was dating a girl and she got very furious with me because every time I would eat I would leave little specks of rice in my bowl and she was expecting me you know she cooked the meal because she would come over to my apartment sometimes and cook for me to her that was like this spec fool because I was leaving little specs of rice and I wasn't finishing the whole thing and that's again that's maybe a little bit of a culture shock so I would say if you do get into any kind of a cross-cultural relationship it's important to be open and to be upfront so you have to you have to figure out if you're dating over here how to shift gears how to go from being that mysterious who that guy's foreign you know who I want to learn more about them to okay I need you to tell me more about your culture so I can have these expectations so the funniest thing that happens to me not so much in these urban areas but if I go into the rural areas I'll just be minding my own business and especially when I had longer hair some old people or some young people will come up and just like out of nowhere just start touching my hair like this like no words which is very weird because this is Japan and there's all you know everyone is very polite here you know one time I was like kind of minding my own business in the countryside in Aichi Prefecture on the train and all of a sudden I see this hand just come out like this I'm like what's going on and then just on my hair and I turned around and there was some grandma and she's just like ah like that chitty-chitty means kind of like wooly or nappy so that took some getting used to but you know again it's it's to me it's funny it's your mileage may vary oh man I have a lot of favorite Japanese foods first and foremost we're probably ramen ramen roughly translates to you know people think ramen here in Japan Japanese people think ramen is a Chinese thing sometimes but it's actually a wholly Japanese invention you know the Japanese are really good at taking something that's already there and re mixing it and ramen is one of those things that they took from China and remixed it and made it their own and I like it because it's a very regional dish that you can find all over it's the American equivalent of barbecue I think in that respect you know there's Texas barbecue and Carolina barbecue and you know Missouri barbecue there is yokohama ramen Hokkaido ramen Kyushu ramen so that's kind of my favorite thing and it's an easy conversation opener to deafen ease people and then of course I think my second favorite would be okonomiyaki because I love Osaka it's where I kind of got my legs here in Japan and okonomiyaki it's a communal dish the best life advice that I ever received was from my grandfather who sadly passed away not too long ago a couple of years ago he told me to learn a foreign language and I remember the conversation I was maybe in sixth grade or seventh grade in junior high school and I was visiting st. Louis for the summer from Los Angeles and he asked me like what's LA like you know and I said oh there's so many different people there's so many different kinds of people and at my school you know there's so many people speaking to all these different languages and he said well you know you should learn you should learn one of them and I said yeah but learning that different language is so hard like I'm learning Spanish now and it's a little bit difficult and he said well you know what if you learn a different language and you get good in it you can go to that country and you can make money so if you learn learn another language it opens up doors so I kind of had that kind of mindset when I jumped into Japanese and look where I am now so I think that was the best life advice that I've ever received so the worst the kind of life advice that I've received was if I want to stay in Japan I should marry somebody and I didn't do that obviously because I'm not married now but I have seen people take that advice to stay here and you know they only get married just solely so that they can they can stay here in Japan maybe there's a little bit of love involved I don't know but I've seen that go horribly wrong and nine times out of ten there might be children involved so I'm not I'm not doing that there should be no reason why you should you know unless it's a matter of life and death you should know under no circumstances marry out of convenience if the world was listening to me right now I want you to listen to advice that comes from a man by the name of Mark Twain who was also a fellow Missouri I can't remember his exact quote but I will paraphrase he said in order to get the most out of life you should basically in no certain terms get the hell out of where you were born basically you need to leave your comfort zone for a minute and go see the world okay and no one has ever come back from you know a little bit of travel true travel and I don't mean like you know glamping or taking guided tours with a group of your countrymen I mean getting out and living amongst the people and then go if you when you go back to your town when you go back to your hometown you're a changed person because you've seen something you used you've seen how big this world is and you you know that there are other versions of humanity nobody having undertaken that has ever come back racist nobody after truly undertaking that has come back prejudiced nobody after after going and seeing all those things have has come back close-minded so I urge you you know there's so much divide in the world there's so much strife happening and you know I'm a journalist and it's kind of my job to write about these things and to take pictures that show the world there's people like me being killed because we're showing these things so if I can't do it you can do it you know I want to inspire you to get off of your couch get off from in front of your your phone or your computer where you're watching this video and get that ticket and come and see something that will take you out of your comfort zone for at least a couple of days and then when you come back refreshed I hope you're inspired so if you're looking to come to Japan number one learn Japanese i'ma say that right up front don't come here and expect that you can wing it speaking 100% English because that's not going to happen the more Japanese that you already know when you get off the plane the better for you the second thing is don't come to Tokyo if you truly want to have an extruder Japanese experience and be able to become more proficient in Japanese and become more efficient more importantly in the culture and things that are of Japan find a more rural area or at least like a mid-tier City go to someplace again I would say also go someplace where there aren't any black people I know that's gonna sound kind of the opposite of what maybe this video was supposed to be about but when I I lived in Osaka first and there were enough of us there at the time to kind of have our own community then I went to Nagoya and I think maybe when I first got there in 2008 they were like maybe six black folks that I knew and then that's out of like the 25 foreign people that I knew there aren't there weren't very many foreigners even there and I think I did the most growing here in Japan in that three years time period than I ever would have been able to do especially in a place like here in Tokyo because I don't know if you've been paying attention to the people walking behind me but I'm pretty sure there were a lot of foreign people go someplace where there's mostly Japanese people okay and then finally I think my last piece of advice is figure out what part of you you can give to society here for example if you are a if you're musically inclined if you're artistically inclined share that with Japan because we need it over here Japan is a very insular Society we're surrounded by water 99% of everybody here is Japanese so be willing to show what you can give to Japan while you're coming over here to experience Japan and you will have a better experience knowing Japanese kind unlike a lot of doors for me that in the beginning I guess I you know you're it's kind of like filling your way in the dark and then slowly a light comes on somewhere that gets brighter and brighter and you can see more and more of the room when I first arrived here like I had a rudimentary knowledge of hearing God I cut the content maybe like maybe fifty to a hundred is so kanji now that's like you know I have like a high school level knowledge maybe a little bit more so I can go into a bank and I can conduct transactions I can go to a doctor I don't have to go and search for the english-speaking doctor or dentist or hairstylist or whatever because I can explain in Japanese you know what ills me or how I would like my hair to look or whatever it's more convenient because then you're not restricted to having to just float around the english-speaking community you can get up and go anywhere like one of my pastimes here is going off into the rural areas and doing a bit of photography I'm also a real fan er I love trains and I like taking these long train rides into the countryside and if I become lost or I want to learn a little bit about an area I've never been before you know I just go to the older people that live in that area and I sit down and I talk to them and it opens up a lot of doors and especially here as a journalist where I'm assigned to kind of cult cover that part of Japan I've been able to get jobs because of it you know the companies that I work for know that they can send me to any part of this country and I'll come back with something as a teacher I have to talk to students who have very low levels of English speaking ability if they have any English speaking ability at all and in some cases I have to talk to their parents and it makes me one it helps me keep my job because I have to have this level of Japanese in order to have that job whereas if I didn't speak any Japanese at all you're kind of there's a there's a serious glass ceiling here so the more Japanese you learn the mo and know and use on a daily base the more socially mobile you become so yeah you're you can you can float back and forth between two communities now as well you know you can have that 100% you know you're the only foreign person in that group of friends Japanese group of friends and then you can also float back to the foreign community and then in a lot of cases you end up becoming that bridge and the center of attention so if you're a gregarious like that there you go the way that I learn Japanese was I had a few classes in high school of course and in university level but I think my biggest advice would be if you're really serious about learning the language it really takes some time and carve out a day where you're doing everything in Japanese when I was living back home in Atlanta kind of in between living in Osaka and living in nagua for that three-year period I actually had Japanese roommates I had this huge apartment and I had a had two friends of mine in Atlanta who were Japanese and we decided to like kind of like room together and so of course if I'm dealing with them you know I got Japanese at home then I went off further and made sure that one day a week I'm doing everything in Japanese which means I'm reading Japanese books I'm watching Japanese television I'm looking at the Internet in Japanese and so on I even had Japanese like recorded like J wave radio programs so that I can listen to in my car while I'm driving to work so there was a guy once upon a time that used to do a he was like a J a TT on Twitter all Japanese all the time and he was living in America and basically you know surrounded himself by everything Japanese in his home so that when he walked in it was just like being in anywhere in Japan until he left again and over the course of a year it became almost a hundred percent fluent in Japanese and I was blown away so I was trying to like that guy and another black guy by the way so if you're if you're looking at this Thank You dog I appreciate it because you really inspire me which leads me to maybe my second my second point of advice use the internet go out on the limb and taken shift your phone's operating system to Japanese you know instead of doing that Google search in English do it in Japanese start now you know put those those apps on your phone and use them okay but you know the biggest thing I guess would be just take that time and be strict about it instead a reminder have a get a study buddy do whatever you have to do but it's just like working out if you want to be slim you go to a gym if you want to learn Japanese this is the same thing you got to do you got to make that jump for your mind in cyberspace I'm at Star Wolf I'm on Instagram I'm on Twitter on Facebook I'm everywhere reach out I'm a friendly person I don't bite if you have any questions about Japan I'm also on reddit too username is Star Wolf if you want some advice about living here and want to ask detailed questions go to the Tokyo and Japan and Japan life subreddit as well and me and a bunch of other guys will answer your questions thank you so much for watching if you'd like to see weekly videos about the black experience in Japan feel free to subscribe to this channel if you know someone that would like to be featured or if you yourself would like to be featured send us a message on our Facebook page at the black experience Japan or send us a tweet on Twitter at the black pegs JP thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Black Experience Japan

Views: 2,054,054

Rating: 4.7167478 out of 5

Keywords: don't come to tokyo, black in japan, melanated files, jason gatewood, mfiles, black experience japan, the black experience japan, life in japan, being black in japan, black in japan interview, black in asia interview, starrwulfe, what's it like being black in japan, black people in japan, black people in asia, black men in japan

Id: srXYLdW15sM

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 23 2018