One Japanese woman, whom I've written about previously, who came to the United States more than 40 years ago to get away from her life in Japan, still hates that country with an undiminished bitterness. I was talking with her about all the terrible mass murders recently in the news and she dismissed them saying that Japan was even worse and reeled off several knife and bludgeoning murders that have taken place in Japan recently, as well as robberies, home invasions, extortions, child rapes and on and on. For her, those crimes in Japan loom far larger than anything that happens in America, however much the crimes in America dwarf in enormity those in Japan. They validate her decision to get out of Japan. Anything that might suggest she was wrong to do so she refuses to acknowledge.
She has a "Chinese" friend living in Monterey Park who also hates Japan -- and China -- although she, my Japanese friend, despises Chinese, considering them loud, selfish, crude money-graspers with foul personal habits, etc. I put Chinese in quotation marks because this so-called Chinese woman was actually born and raised in Tokyo, as were her parents. But to the Japanese she is and will always be Chinese, an alien outsider. She owns a Chinese restaurant in Ginza yon-chome (a pretty ritzy part of town) as well as a Lion Beer Hall, I forget where in Tokyo. She also owns property in Harajuku, a very expensive neighborhood, worth well over $10 million. She could live a life of luxury in Japan, but she chooses to live in a modest apartment in LA. She cannot stand the Japanese and doesn't think much of the Chinese, although she lives among them in an upscale overseas Chinese community. She lives about five minutes away from where the recent dance club mass shooting occurred, but, unlike we Americans and our mass media, doesn't think of it as an American crime
I know a German man who loathes Germany and Germans. He's lived in America for about 15 or 20 years but really doesn't know much about it. The other day when he had ordered something and it got delayed and he contacted the shipper to find out where it was and was told it was in Jamaica he was baffled and outraged -- how could those morons have sent it to the island of Jamaica? What idiots! When I told him Jamaica is also a neighborhood in Queens, New York, where JFK airport is, he paused in his rant and said, "Oh." Had I a sign handy, I would have handed it to him. Anyway, from what he has told me, his life in Germany was miserable. His father was an alcoholic who died at home and he discovered his body in the bathroom. His mother was a shrill scold who beat him as a child and slapped and punched him as an adult. He didn't do well in school, being unable to study at home and his teachers were, he says, incompetent, indifferent and cruel. He liked a girl and tried to be her boyfriend but she scorned him. German life in general was conformist and confining. He noticed that Germans were always looking down on Americans and criticizing them, rather the way they criticized him, so he thought maybe at heart he was one of those Americans. So he came to the USA on a student visa, earned a BS.Min.E. from West Virginia University, got a good job, a jolly country girlfriend who became his wife, a passel of rambunctious kids and friends who like to go hunting and snowmobiling and water-skiing and call him Dutch. He's a happy guy now and can laugh at his life in Germany, but still thinks that country sucks big hairy donkey balls, as he says, glorying in the colloquial bawdiness of American expressions.
