A phobia is an irrational fear. They come in many different types, and they
all cause problems. For example,
acrophobia is a fear of heights. Someone
who suffers from it may not be able to climb a tower or walk across a narrow
bridge. Claustrophobia is an irrational
fear of small spaces. Someone who
suffers from it may not be able to enter a lift. I would like to propose a new type of phobia:
gaijinphobia.
“Gaijin” is the Japanese word for
foreigner. So gaijinphobia means a fear
of foreigners. There is already a
similar word – xenophobia. But
xenophobia is usually used to mean dislike of or prejudice towards people from another
country, like racism is a dislike of or prejudice against people of a different
race. I imagine gaijinphobia to be a
little different, and less nasty. It
should mean a fear of talking to foreigners, especially for someone brought up
in an island nation like Japan, which is a little cut off from the rest of the
world.
I’ll give you an example. Before I became blind I often used to go into
coffee shops in Japan to relax and read a newspaper. I would go up to the counter to order. As I approached the counter I would sometimes
see a look of panic in the staff member who was getting ready to take my
order. I could almost see them thinking,
“Oh no – a gaijin! Please don’t speak to
me in English! Please don’t cause me any
embarrassment!”
It should not be hard to order a drink in a
coffee shop. Most of the vocabulary
needed is basically the same in English as in Japanese – hot coffee/ hotto
kohii and iced tea/ aisu tii, for example.
But when I tried to order the staff member would often be so nervous
that they couldn’t understand whether I was saying hot or iced, or coffee or
tea. Their gaijinphobia was paralysing
them with fear. I don’t think it is a
reason to get angry. I find it kind of
funny.
So I had to laugh when I read about an even
more serious instance of gaijinphobia this week. A staff member at Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden
was caught letting foreigners in for free.
Everyone was supposed to pay 200 yen to enter. An investigation revealed that he had been
doing this for years. He had let
thousands of foreigners into the garden for free, resulting in lost revenue of
25 million yen, or nearly 200,000 pounds.
When he was asked to explain his actions,
he said that he had once been shouted at by a foreigner. He had developed a deep fear of talking to
foreigners, and so got around the problem by just waving them all into the
gardens for free.
So you see that gaijinphobia is a less
nasty word than xenophobia or racism. It
sometimes works out quite well for the gaijin.
Vocabulary:
irrational – not logical or reasonable
to propose something – to suggest something
prejudice – unfair opinion, not based on
evidence; having a pre-conceived idea about something
nasty – very unpleasant or bad
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