Some people joke that if you come to Japan and teach English in the countryside, you will be treated like a celebrity. In many ways that's true. What other vocation, besides celebrity, elicits requests for autographs. Well, not requests, but chants really--you haven't experienced horror until you've had a whole class of third graders say "sign, sign, sign, sign, sign..." in eerie unison with that distinctive katakana intonation. It's such weirdness that seems to get left out of the jokes about becoming a local celebrity.
For instance, there are the people that hunt you down. Celebrity stalkers who, getting the faintest whiff of a native English speaker, will track you to your home and force their friendship upon you. All for the sake of being able to practice English. It may make sense if they needed English vitally for their jobs, but the majority of these people seem to just have an unnatural obsession with the tongue though it seems to elude them even as they focus on it. Some of them try to bribe you by giving you food. Tupperware-enshrined traps, I tell you!
Slightly less creepy are the spies. Everyone in your town will watch your every move, and you will never even know it until they tell you, a week later, where you were last Monday at 8 pm, and what you were wearing. Then they ask you why you were there doing those things. Maybe this is an attempt at conversation? Not even jogging late at night escapes the view of the inaka-collective eye.
I've been out of the small-town teaching business and back to relative normalcy for a while now, but recently I encountered a new type of foreigner-in-Japan celebrity, and it hit me in the city: that of D list celebrity vlogger. You see, though my videos are only followed by a few thousand people (and only about 10% that group ever really watches), the relatively small population of foreigners in Japan has made me stand out for other foreigners. I'm only a YouTube stumble away. But much like the small-town spies I've encountered in the countryside, the foreigners are content to spy me from afar and then send me emails later about when, where, and what I was doing. The people and the circumstances may change, but being a celebrity, and an undeserving one at that, will always feel a little odd.
For instance, there are the people that hunt you down. Celebrity stalkers who, getting the faintest whiff of a native English speaker, will track you to your home and force their friendship upon you. All for the sake of being able to practice English. It may make sense if they needed English vitally for their jobs, but the majority of these people seem to just have an unnatural obsession with the tongue though it seems to elude them even as they focus on it. Some of them try to bribe you by giving you food. Tupperware-enshrined traps, I tell you!
Slightly less creepy are the spies. Everyone in your town will watch your every move, and you will never even know it until they tell you, a week later, where you were last Monday at 8 pm, and what you were wearing. Then they ask you why you were there doing those things. Maybe this is an attempt at conversation? Not even jogging late at night escapes the view of the inaka-collective eye.
I've been out of the small-town teaching business and back to relative normalcy for a while now, but recently I encountered a new type of foreigner-in-Japan celebrity, and it hit me in the city: that of D list celebrity vlogger. You see, though my videos are only followed by a few thousand people (and only about 10% that group ever really watches), the relatively small population of foreigners in Japan has made me stand out for other foreigners. I'm only a YouTube stumble away. But much like the small-town spies I've encountered in the countryside, the foreigners are content to spy me from afar and then send me emails later about when, where, and what I was doing. The people and the circumstances may change, but being a celebrity, and an undeserving one at that, will always feel a little odd.
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