Pretentious Expatriates

While looking through my blog's tracking records, I came upon a expatriate forum for foreigners living in Japan. One of the members posted a link to my blog and he and several others posted a series of comments ridiculing me and my impressions of Japan. According to them I am ignorant, lazy, stupid, classless and mundane. The posters made these judgments by ridiculing posts I'd written before I was in Japan, by taking text out of context and by completely twisting the meanings of my words.

One poster claimed I was proud that my brother had a confirmed kill in Iraq, even though I say in the entry that I am sickened by the death tolls there and sympathetic to the grief of the man's family. The majority of the attacks, however, were based on the following quote, a sentence I wrote before I left the United States: "Apparently, the Japanese use three different syllabaries or system of characters: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Kanji is the one with thousands of characters that foreigners like me have virtually no hope of learning, so naturally it is the one used most often." Various posters use it as evidence of my ignorance of the Japanese language, an apparently pathetic and unforgivable sin, but don't seem to realize (or care) that I hadn't even been to Japan yet! Various other pretentious posters claim the comment proves I am too lazy and stupid to learn the language, but just prior to that sentence I had mentioned that I was trying to learn Hiragana. That information, of course, was conveniently not included on the forum. The members did nothing more than selectively quote bits and pieces of my newbie blog to ridicule, all the while congratulating themselves on their superior knowledge of Japan and the Japanese language. Why such intelligent and enlightened individuals spent so much time reading and discussing "the most pedestrian gaijin in Japan story EVER" is beyond me.

Or not. I'm sure there are expatriates like this in every country, but when I was in Japan I occasionally came across foreigners who had to obnoxiously prove their superior knowledge of the language and culture. One co-worker memorized Japanese songs and sang them at karaoke sessions primarily attended by foreigners so he could show off his Japanese language skills. One other occasion, my husband and I sat next to a guy at the bar who would only speak Japanese to the bartender even though they were both foreign, native English speakers. While I don't know the posters in the forum, I got the impression that they too have the need to feel superior and if there's one thing I can't stand it's pretentiousness. The posters presumably have been in Japan for several years (or at least longer than me) and have studied the language for at least that long, yet took great delight in ridiculing my newbie comments. They seem to forget that they too were once new to Japan and the language and undoubtedly had similar feelings and impressions. Plus, if you're going to mock some one's posts at least take the time to read the entire entry instead of taking sentences out of context or misreading the meaning altogether. Get over yourselves.

Rant over.