“Who’s at the door?”...”The Invisible Man”…”.Tell him, I can’t see him!”

Sorry about the bad joke! I think it’s one of the ones my Dad might have told a lot in my childhood, and now it’s engrained in my mind forever! But it’s pretty apt for this post, so I thought I’d give it a renewed moment of glory! It struck me the other day, how in Japan I have days where I feel very visible and others when I feel completely invisible. Sometimes, when I am in the staffroom at my base school, and have no classes, I sit at my desk all day, and by around noon, I feel like no-one actually knows that I’m there! I have tried to make ickle teeny weeny conversations with teachers here…but it’s almost like they are afraid of me, apprehensive is maybe a better word! The minute I speak I little Japanese to them, for example, ohayo gozaimasu (good morning), some teachers look even more perturbed! So some days at that school, I only speak to 1 or 2 teachers (English teachers!), for a small amount of time, and the rest of the day I am invisible! Largely avoided and ignored by the other teachers, because I am the scary evil English speaking ALT, who will kill them instantly if they even smile at me! Jesus, if I do get a smile of a non-English teacher, I’ve had a fairly good day! Sometimes, in town, when I’m walking around, shopping, whatever, other people also don’t seem to see me! The number of times people (normally old Japanese women!) have just walked into me, like I’m invisible, is huge! Maybe it’s just the Japanese way…maybe they are taught to always walk in a straight line whilst shopping (or something!), and if there happens to be a lovely young foreign teacher (me!) in the way, then …who cares! Walk straight through them! Drivers are the same, they just don’t seem to look for objects…for example…PEOPLE…that might be in their way! A car once reversed into me in the car-park of a Seven Eleven convenience store…like it actually moved me along a couple of paces! They just don’t look!
And then there are the days, that I am SO visible! This was mainly when I first moved to Japan, and my little town, but it does still happen now. The stares! My god, if you have any kind of paranoia, Japan is not the place for you!...well, not the little places that hardly ever see foreigners anyway! I actually find it a lot easier to deal with than I thought. I suppose I’ve just grown used to being one of only a handful of foreigners in town. I expect little kids in the supermarkets to point….one even cried once! I expect the post-office man to look a bit worried when I walk in, because he thinks I don’t know the Japanese for ‘stamp’. I expect the taxi driver to look concerned when I get in his cab, because they never know where I live, and even with my address in Japanese, they are still often none the wiser! I also know that when I go to a new class for the first time, there will be a ripple of oohs and ahs as I walk in, as if some exotic old parrot has just flown into their class! That particular ‘visible’ time, I enjoy myself, because I am given full reign to talk about my country, myself, and generally have the classroom ‘stage’ for 50 minutes!...Times like those are great for the self-esteem of a foreigner! However, now and again, the stares, and the knowledge of just how visible and obvious I am, living in Japan, can be annoying, and you just wish to be sat in your invisible bubble in the staffroom!