Only just realized that, though I wrote this up for the Hokkaido Polestar E-newsletter, I never actually posted it here, so here you are:
There is a race of super humans walking among the ordinary
rank and file of Japanese Society.
They are The Gaijin: creatures from a distant world, brought
to Japan by shadowy government organizations so that the Japanese people could
learn from them. In a crowded subway car, they stand apart, high above all
those around them. The Japanese are at once fascinated and terrified by the
other worldly beauty of these fey creatures. By day, these creatures patronize
Japanese schools; instilling wonder in Japanese children with their odd customs
and tales of their distant homelands. By night, the Gaijin congregate with one
another, observing their strange rites and conspiring in their oddest of
languages:
English.
Like the last sons and daughters of krypton, these
individuals who had been unimportant nobodies in their homelands took on
unimaginable abilities in the light of Japan’s red sun. Their blonde hair
turned golden, and their eyes of blue and green shone like sapphire and jade.
They would tower and sway over the Japanese like giants, and their booming
voices would echo across crowded rooms. Men dreamed of being like them, and
women of being with them.
One is hard pressed to find a soul in Japan who has not
heard tales of the Gaijin Smash: the glowing foreigner’s ability to plow
through layers of Japanese bureaucracy or social courtesy with just as much
ease as their giant bodies plow through the wedged-in masses on the Tokyo
subway. There is the Gaijin Force Bubble: an impenetrable field that surrounds
the giants at all times, making it impossible for the Nihonjin to sit beside
them on crowded buses and causing criticism to slide off them in a haze of
misunderstanding. There is the Gaijin Stare: the ability of their wide, rainbow
eyes to surprise and terrify the Japanese with a glance. And, of course, many a
tabe/nomihoudai restaurant has gone out of business in the face of the Gaijin
Hunger: a unbridled gastronomical need for booze and meat that has been known
to drink whole breweries dry while feasting on the livestock of entire
prefectures.
But it will not always be so for the lofty Gaijin. As they
begin to age and acclimatize themselves to the Land of the Rising Sun, they
will start to whither and fade. The novelty that used to glow around them like
a halo will grow dim with normalcy as ever newer and more exotic waves of
strapping young aliens land on these shores, distracting the locals from those
foreigners who have already settled in their midst. Eventually like broken and
forgotten gods, they will pull up to the counters at Gaijin bars, joining in
the litany of tales from their grey and haggard brothers about the golden days,
when the Japanese still believed them capable of leaping tall buildings in a
single bound. From their slumped positions on their high stools, they will cast
baleful glares at their younger, harder, taller, blonder replacements, who now
catch all the stares.
