It was as though I were a strange animal in the zoo. Foreigners are less rare today, but not very much. Japan remains a remarkably insular nation, where people still view themselves as both a unique ethnic group and nation state.
Statistics tell the story.
This constitutes a mere 0.6 percent of total population. Comparable data for the United States show that the net number of resident foreigners rose by almost one million every year in the 1990s, and the total share of foreign-born individuals in the population was 10 percent by the end of the decade. Still others come as refugees escaping persecution and political oppression at home. In total, the United States accepted over 100,000 new refugees per year throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These foreigners continue to be important to the success of the nation.